The Small Business Life Cycle

00Hours00Minutes00Seconds

Small (and micro) businesses have common growth stages and, to be successful in business, you have to focus on the right things at the right time.

Download my book in any format you'd like here!

Get My Book

The Small Business Life Cycle is like What to Expect When You're Expecting for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Small businesses stimulate economic growth, provide employment, invite community growth and innovation, and help creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries realize their dreams. And yet, they fail.

But why?

The answer to that question reveals a cacophony of reasons:

Expansion without sufficient capital
Unwillingness to delegate
Dysfunctional management
No plan B
Underestimating the competition
Lack of strategic marketing

And the list goes on. But none of the causes listed above get to the heart of why many small businesses fail or why they are so hard to grow. The heartbeat behind small business failure can be distilled into the following:

Making the wrong decisions at the right time
Not knowing when and how to move forward
Not understanding the small business life cycle
Not knowing where to focus your resources
Feeling overloaded with information

Turns out, small businesses are made of stages that complete a life cycle. If you don't know what those stages are or what stage your business is in, floundering, stagnation, and collapse almost always happen. Perhaps more importantly, a small business' life cycle differs greatly from a large corporation's. Seeking insight or guidance from one of them rarely works, instead leaving you overwhelmed, confused, and stuck.

Good news: you can get unstuck. Whether you're starting a business or already running one, you can use The Small Business Life Cycle to get a bird's-eye view of your business and gain a strategic advantage that allows you to seize opportunities as they arise. The Small Business Life Cycle does this with solid, reliable methods that teach you:

What questions to ask before you start a small business
How to get a superior foothold in the market
Why you should market fewer things to fewer audiences
What four items to have in place in order to grow
How not to break a scalable small business once you've got one

Unlike some entrepreneurship books, The Small Business Life Cycle is a no-fluff, easy-to-read, easy-to-apply guide. You won't pour over pages of boring analytics or dozens of case studies to discover how to grow your business, because Charlie Gilkey--successful entrepreneur and founder/CEO of Productive Flourishing--has condensed his knowledge and experience into this slim volume for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Read it and learn wise, effective ways to evaluate where you are now so that you can plan what to do next and experience long-term, sustainable growth and profit.

Working...