$0.00$0.00
- Click above to get a preview of our newest plan - unlimited listening to select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
- You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
- $7.95$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel online anytime.
-12% $19.00$19.00
The Facts of Business Life: What Every Successful Business Owner Knows That You Don't Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Being a successful business owner means more than knowing one's industry and understanding the basic concepts of leadership, management, or motivation. It means being able to master many areas of business, and knowing how each of these areas relate to and build on each other. It also means understanding how those areas change as a business goes through its inevitable life cycle, and how the owner must be prepared to change with them. The Facts of Business Life is the first book designed to provide listeners with the means of achieving the kind of long-term understanding that is the key to true and lasting success.
Toward that end, the book covers the seven facts of business life that every successful business owner knows, including: "If You Don't Lead, No One Will Follow", "If You Don't Control It, You Don't Own It", "Protecting Your Company's Assets Should Be Your First Priority", "Planning Is About Preparing for the Future, Not Predicting It", "If You Don't Market Your Business, You Won't Have One", "The Marketplace Is a War Zone", and "You Don't Just Have to Know the Business You're In, You Have to Know Business". Devoting one chapter to each fact, the book explains what it is, what it means, and, most important, how it can help entrepreneurs achieve success and stay away from potentially harmful mistakes.
Equally important, each chapter enables readers to not only understand the facts on their own, but also in terms of how they impact on a business as it passes through each of the five levels of every successful company's existence: "Ownership and Opportunity", "Creating Your Company's DNA", "From Survival to Success", "Maintaining Success", and "Moving On When It's Time to Go".
Written by a successful businessman with four decades of ownership experience, and packed with valuable advice, The Facts of Business Life presents every business owner - whether he or she is starting, building, maintaining, or exiting a business - with the key facts that, applied together, can ensure a strong and lasting enterprise.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
- Listening Length12 hours and 19 minutes
- Audible release dateJuly 10, 2020
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB08BZWHLSC
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
Read & Listen
Get the Audible audiobook for the reduced price of $7.49 after you buy the Kindle book.
People who bought this also bought
- Build a Business: Discover the True Earning Potential of Self Employment by Building a Business the Profitable WayAudible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- If You're Not First, You're Last: Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your CompetitionAudible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Related to this topic
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Product details
Listening Length | 12 hours and 19 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Bill McBean |
Narrator | Brett Barry |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com Release Date | July 10, 2020 |
Publisher | Gildan Media |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B08BZWHLSC |
Best Sellers Rank | #497,677 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #11,250 in Career Success #35,673 in Personal Finance (Books) |
Important information
To report an issue with this product or seller, click here.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
I don't post many reviews but I do buy a lot of books.
Instead, the author, Bill McBean, respects his reader’s intelligence and the book publishing world by offering facts.
He offers 7 of them. 7 Facts of Business Life.
He devotes a chapter to each fact, offering twenty to thirty pages of intelligent discussion from a business owner’s perspective with that fact, that perspective and how it relates to the others. And how those facts help you be successful.
The subtitle is a bit of a thrown down gauntlet, but given the statistics on business failures it's likely to be accurate in a random sampling of potential readers. The title definitely matches the content, and that bucks a recent trend in book titles.
Now, I want to caution readers that this isn't something along the lines of an instant MBA. As an MBA myself, I can tell you there is no such thing as a book that gives you anything even remotely resembling the equivalent of the knowledge required to earn an MBA. If you don't have an MBA, ask someone who does about the reading load or go look at the syllabi at various universities. Much to his credit, McBean does not pretend to condense an MBA or teach particular skills Cliff-notes style.
I would also like to note that, as an MBA myself, I can tell you that an MBA does not make you a biz whiz. Somehow, the business press jumped on the "MBA means success" train and rode it right off the rails. I graduated at the top of my MBA class, but this didn't make me an expert. It didn't give me all I needed for success. Most of my fellow graduates, in fact, have outperformed me in business. Outside the MBA program, they learned some important things that I still don't know.
Having a mentor, someone like McBean, for example, can make a huge difference. This book is a distillation of that mentoring committed to paper. At least, that's how it reads to me.
What's usually missing in the business owner's training is an understanding of what business life is actually about. In a large corporation, you may find MBA's churning out mind-numbing reports. In the nitty gritty world of running a small or medium-sized business, the ability to do that is of no value. The things you really need to know are the kinds of things McBean discusses in this book.
I think most businesses fail not because of doing things wrong, but because of doing the wrong things. This is what I have seen time and again. It's also worth noting that "doing the right things" was one of the seven habits in Stephen R. Covey's iconic book.
McBean tries to teach the reader how to get the right mindset and how to develop the framework you need for successfully running a business through its major stages. He wants you to be able to figure out what are the right things to do at a given stage of the life of a business.
McBean enumerates five major stages (which he calls levels) in the business life cycle:
1. Ownership and opportunity.
2. Creating your company's DNA.
3. From survival to success.
4. Maintaining success.
5. Moving on when it's time to go.
Prior to identifying these stages, McBean lists "the seven facts of business life." Starting with Chapter Three, he devotes a chapter to each of these and discusses that particular fact in the context of each of the five stages. So, he discusses the fact five times. While this process makes that discussion precise and highly relevant to where a business happens to be, it does result in some repetition. Normally, I consider repetition a negative but in this case I don't see how the repetition is avoidable without diminishing the value of the book.
This book does have some negatives.
First of all, it would read much better if someone familiar with Strunk and White copy-edited it. Especially for "needless words." An example is "past experience." Your experience is, by definition, in the past. A few cliches, such as "at the end of the day" also show up and you'll find misuse of "impact" a few times. However, these are mere annoyances. They don't leave the reader confused about what McBean is trying to say. I suppose not every highly successful CEO is also an accomplished grammarian, and expecting that is unrealistic. What we can expect is he can speak and write in cogent sentences so that you understand the point he's making. McBean does that.
Second, there's the repetition I mentioned earlier (gee, I'm doing it too!). This book gives me the impression it was written as a series of independent articles. Maybe that can't be helped, considering the structure McBean chose. A point he makes repeatedly (and I am not complaining about that particular repetition) is various aspects of business are intertwined. This isn't a mindless tome like "Who Cut The Cheese" or whatever that little stinker of a book was called. It's a thoughtful narrative on each of a structured assembly of business topics. How a business owner exerts control at level three will have considerable overlap with how he exerts control at level four. The company isn't a completely different animal as it moves from level to level, nor are its markets or business in general.
This book consists of 9 chapters across 324 pages. It's nicely indexed and has a thoughtful Foreword contributed by Ken Fisher. Mr. Fisher is a widely recognized name in the business literature, so his Foreword is a coup for Mr. McBean.