Stop closing sales. Start opening relationships. It's time to design your business for profit. Management practices from last century are no longer enough to grow your business. This book spells out a formula you can use to take a deliberate approach to building a profitable customer portfolio.
The Business of Design debunks the myth that business sense and creative talent are mutually exclusive, showing design professionals that they can pursue their passion and turn a profit. For nearly thirty years, consultant Keith Granet has helped designers create successful businesses, from branding to billing and everything in between. Unlike other business books, The Business of Design is written and illustrated to speak to a visually thinking audience. The book covers all aspects of running a successful design business, including human resources, client management, product development, marketing, and licensing. This timely update on the tenth anniversary of the first edition includes new content on social media, working from home, and understanding and working with different generations, essential tools in today's ultracompetitive marketplace.
This book is meant to be read as a handbook or manual to assist engineers in creating innovative, cost effective, high quality products. The author and editors of the book have developed these methods at Munro & Associates, Inc. over the past 26 years, based on successful products in all industries.
The book that answers the most fundamental question in business: Where Will I Make a Profit Tomorrow? Why do some companies create sustained, superior profits year after year? Why are they always far ahead of their competitors in discovering the ever-changing profit zones of their industry? Why do others languish as their traditional way of doing business turns into a no-profit zone? The Profit Zone provides the answers. It is a brilliant, original, and practical explanation of how and why high profit happens.
With roughly 95,000 blogs launched worldwide every 24 hours (BlogPulse), making a fledgling site stand out isn't easy. This authoritative handbook gives creative hopefuls a leg up. Joy Cho, of the award-winning Oh Joy!, offers expert advice on starting and growing a blog, from design and finance to overcoming blogger's block, attracting readers, and more. With a foreword from Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge plus expert interviews, this book will fine-tune what the next generation of bloggers shares with the world. Learn how to: - Design your site - Choose the right platform - Attract a fan base - Finance your blog - Maintain work/life balance - Manage comments - Find content inspiration - Overcome blogger's block - Choose the right ads - Develop a voice - Protect your work - Create a media kit - Leverage your social network - Take better photographs - Set up an affiliate program - Partner with sponsors - Build community - Go full-time with your blog - And more!
Author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability. Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows. Using Michalowicz's Profit First system, readers will learn that: · Following 4 simple principles can simplify accounting and make it easier to manage a profitable business by looking at bank account balances. · A small, profitable business can be worth much more than a large business surviving on its top line. · Businesses that attain early and sustained profitability have a better shot at achieving long-term growth. With dozens of case studies, practical, step-by-step advice, and his signature sense of humor, Michalowicz has the game-changing roadmap for any entrepreneur to make money they always dreamed of.
You want increased customer satisfaction, faster development cycles, and less wasted work. Domain-driven design (DDD) combined with functional programming is the innovative combo that will get you there. In this pragmatic, down-to-earth guide, you'll see how applying the core principles of functional programming can result in software designs that model real-world requirements both elegantly and concisely - often more so than an object-oriented approach. Practical examples in the open-source F# functional language, and examples from familiar business domains, show you how to apply these techniques to build software that is business-focused, flexible, and high quality. Domain-driven design is a well-established approach to designing software that ensures that domain experts and developers work together effectively to create high-quality software. This book is the first to combine DDD with techniques from statically typed functional programming. This book is perfect for newcomers to DDD or functional programming - all the techniques you need will be introduced and explained. Model a complex domain accurately using the F# type system, creating compilable code that is also readable documentation---ensuring that the code and design never get out of sync. Encode business rules in the design so that you have "compile-time unit tests," and eliminate many potential bugs by making illegal states unrepresentable. Assemble a series of small, testable functions into a complete use case, and compose these individual scenarios into a large-scale design. Discover why the combination of functional programming and DDD leads naturally to service-oriented and hexagonal architectures. Finally, create a functional domain model that works with traditional databases, NoSQL, and event stores, and safely expose your domain via a website or API. Solve real problems by focusing on real-world requirements for your software. What You Need: The code in this book is designed to be run interactively on Windows, Mac and Linux.You will need a recent version of F# (4.0 or greater), and the appropriate .NET runtime for your platform.Full installation instructions for all platforms at fsharp.org.
Like a successful coach, Slywotzky uses ingenious diagrams and brief explanations to show readers how to make sense of profit patterns that are changing the way companies do business and make money. 100 illustrations.
You don’t need to be a financial wizard to ensure the future success of your design firm! An accessible guide to financial management, Financial Management for Design Professionals is written for design firm principals who are responsible for their firm’s finances but have little or no financial management education or experience. For mid-career design professionals looking to advance their careers, the book is an indispensable reference and training guide. Using a simple, step-by-step format, this book shows design professionals how to: Develop an annual budget and profit plan Calculate the overhead rate for a firm Calculate the break-even rate and hourly billing rate for each employee Establish project fees Use readily available financial information in successful negotiation Design and interpret financial reports Plus: clear explanations of the fundamentals of financial management!