Recommended Reads

Create solid contracts for your business

As a small business owner, you can't afford to farm paperwork and contracts out to a lawyer--you have to deal with them yourself. With Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business, you can act with confidence.

Here you'll find the forms you need to start and grow your business. Each document comes with thorough, plain-English, line-by-line instructions to help you:

• write contracts
• prepare corporate bylaws
• prepare an LLC operating agreement
• buy a business
• hire employees and consultants
• create noncompete agreements
• protect your trade secrets
• record minutes of meetings
• lease commercial space
• buy real estate
• borrow or lend money, and
• much more.

The 11th edition has been thoroughly reviewed and updated by Nolo's experts, and provides the most up-to-date legal information for small businesses.

With Downloadable Forms: Download and customize more than 65 forms to help you start and run your small business (details inside).

Step-by-step advice on preparing a business plan

You need a sound business plan to start a business or raise money to expand an existing one. For over 30 years, How to Write a Business Plan has helped fledgling entrepreneurs—from small service businesses and retailers to large manufacturing firms—write winning plans and get needed financing.

This bestselling book contains clear step-by-step instructions and forms to put together a convincing business plan with realistic financial projections, effective marketing strategies, and overall business goals. You’ll learn how to:

• figure out if your business idea will make money
• determine and forecast cash flow
• create profit and loss forecasts
• prepare marketing and personnel plans
• find potential sources of financing, and
• present your well-organized plan to lenders and other backers.

The 13th edition is updated to reflect best practices for raising money (from SBA loans to equity crowdfunding).

The perfect resource for your journey to start a business

Entrepreneurship For Dummies is the essential guide to becoming your own boss and a successful entrepreneur. We make it simple to learn every step of the process. Identify an opportunity, learn your customers’ needs, test your product, protect your intellectual property, secure funding, and get ready for that all-important launch. In classic Dummies style, this book is packed with practical information and useful advice, all in a fun and easy-to-follow format. Take fear out of the entrepreneurship equation and build the confidence you need to make your fantastic business idea take flight. Get up to date on the latest lingo, new ideas for raising money, and the latest ways to do business in the digital age.

• Understand the process of starting a business, from beginning to end
• Complete the necessary planning and meet legal requirements, without the headache
• Get expert tips and tricks on funding your idea and bringing your product or service to market
• Build the foundation you need to keep your business thriving and growing

Entrepreneurship For Dummies supports you as you travel along the road to success.

Create a lifestyle you love by pursuing your passions and turning profits

Turn Your Passions into Profits outlines step-by-step guidance for turning your passions into a profitable and lasting business. Author Matt McWilliams, a successful entrepreneur and in-demand online business coach, shows you exactly how to do just that. He details how to find and attract your audience, build a following, and ultimately how to monetize your venture quickly and sustainably.

Turn Your Passions into Profits will help you:

• Gain clarity on the exact steps it takes to start, grow, and monetize your online platform
• Build up the confidence necessary to share your message with the world
• Realize that you deserve to create a good income doing what you love
• Acquire the tools and strategies needed to succeed with an online business and compete against established platforms


• So many entrepreneurs either run a profitable business but hate their work or run a business they love, with a message they’re proud of, without making any money. There’s a better way to build a business, one that helps you wake up every day excited and full of purpose and make a profit.

The Wall Street Journal Bestseller

For so many entrepreneurs, running a small business ended up looking different than they imagined. They're stressed, discouraged, and not confident in their plan for growth. In How to Grow Your Small Business, Donald Miller gives entrepreneurs a 6-step plan to grow their businesses so they produce dependable, predictable results.

Using the exact steps you'll learn in this book, Donald Miller grew his small business from four employees working out of a basement to a 15 million dollar operation, increasing revenue sixfold in just six years. As Miller grew his own business from the ground up, he realized nobody had put together a simple, step-by-step playbook for growing a business. That book didn't exist. Until now.

In this book, you'll learn the 6 steps to grow a successful small business and create a playbook to implement them- your Flight Plan. When you have a completed Flight Plan in hand, you can stop drowning in the details and spend more time doing the things you truly love- in your business and your life.

In How to Grow Your Small Business, you'll learn how to:

• Cast a vision for your company that includes three economic priorities
• Clarify your marketing message
• Install a sales framework that makes your customers the hero
• Optimize your product offering
• Run a management and productivity playbook that aligns your entire team.
• Use 5 checking accounts to manage your cash flow

If you're ready to experience freedom, flexibility, and growth for your business, How to Grow Your Small Business is the book you've been waiting for.

An eye-opening discussion of the future of marketing, from four of the leading minds in the field

In Entrepreneurial Marketing: Beyond Professional Marketing, a renowned team of marketing leaders, including the “Father of Modern Marketing,” Professor Philip Kotler, delivers a groundbreaking and incisive redefinition of entrepreneurial marketing. In the book, some of the marketing sector’s brightest minds explore the increasingly essential initiative to build new capabilities beyond the mainstream marketing approach that also consider the effect of digital connectivity on consumers and companies everywhere. This book also discusses what marketers need to do to break the stagnation of normative marketing approaches that are often no longer effective in dealing with dynamic business environments.

The authors introduce a fresh entrepreneurial marketing approach, converging dichotomies into a coherent form. The book also includes:

• A post-entrepreneurial-marketing view of the commercial landscape which puts the operational aspect at the center of the action, converging marketing and finance, and adopting technology for humanity
• Discussions of the strategies and techniques that will drive the actions of the marketing departments to create value with values that will lead the company to success through the year 2030
• Explorations of the paradox between the development of core competencies and collaboration with various parties, including competitors

The latest publication from some of the foremost minds in marketing—and in business, generally—Entrepreneurial Marketing: Beyond Professional Marketing is a must-read combination of unique insight, concrete advice, and implementable strategies that introduce a new mindset for every professional marketer, entrepreneur, and business leaders worldwide.

Create a business tax strategy that will save you time, energy, and money

Getting your tax matters on track will free up your time to do what really counts: run a profitable business. 

Tax Savvy for Small Business shows you how to:

• deduct operating expenses
• deduct travel, vehicle, and meal expenses
• take advantage of tax credits
• write off long-term assets
• compare business structures
• keep solid business records, and
• handle an IRS audit.

This completely updated edition covers changes in tax rates, deductions, and credits, including the commercial clean vehicle tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Tax Savvy for Small Business is the up-to-date resource you need to maximize your deductions and boost your business’s bottom line.

In this powerful guide to companywide success, the author of Start Finishing reveals how to improve any team's habits in a way that leads to bottom line results while also boosting belonging, morale, and engagement.

We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.

We all know how important habits are for personal effectiveness, success, and happiness. We can apply many of the same principles and insights about personal habits to our teams. When we do, not only do we accrue the personal benefits for ourselves, but we accrue them with and for our team. If small habit changes lead to powerful results for individuals, imagine what it can do for teams. Focusing on improving how people work together at the team level means there's no need for a top-down initiative or sign-off by the higher-ups to start making our working lives better.

How a team schedules its meetings is a team habit, as is whether and how they share agendas before the meeting. How teammates loop others into emails or Slack messages is a team habit, as is whether they have the practice of cc'ing or group-bombing everyone to make sure they cover their bases. How teammates communicate about being uninterruptible, or that they are never uninterruptible, are team habits. These team habits explain how we can like the people we're working with and feel like we want the same things yet find ourselves regularly flummoxed about how hard it is to work with them.

Team Habits offers a Team Habits Quiz, allowing readers to discover the patterns and areas for improvement on their business team. Gilkey offers tips on Communication ("What needs to be communicated NOW versus what can wait"), Meetings ("The ultimate question to determine whether your meeting was worth it"), Belonging ("Why getting your teammate coffee isn't about the coffee"), and much more.

Full of science-backed tips on how to design any workspace for physical and emotional wellbeing, "Well at Work helps us thrive wherever we work." (Arianna Huffington)



Whether you work in a traditional office or a corner of your bedroom, staying well at work need not be a luxury. But wellness at work isn't just about staying physically healthy; it's also about reducing stress and improving mood, focus, energy, and productivity.



Well at Work reveals how to optimize our workspaces for wellbeing across the seven domains of integrative health: stress and resilience, movement, sleep, relationships, environment, nutrition, and spirituality, and even the air we breathe. You'll learn:

• How the environment you work in all day can affect your sleep at night
• Optimal lighting and noise levels for reducing stress and improving focus
• How to adjust temperature and humidity to stay alert and protect against infection
• Why open-plan offices can keep you more active
• The myriad benefits of access to nature (and how to bring nature indoors)
• Office layouts that foster social interactions but not distraction
• Foods to enhance cognitive performance
• And more

Along the way, you'll meet the scientists and doctors, designers and architects, and building science professionals who are striving to make workplaces more conducive to wellbeing. And you'll glimpse into the future of the workplace, where artificial intelligence and the metaverse will help us create environments that respond to our individual needs.



Above all, you'll come away with a menu of simple, "innovative, and often overlooked" (Dr. Richard Carmona) steps anyone can take to be--and stay--well at work.

Create A Successful Online Business

Thinking about starting your own online business or taking your established business online so you can sell products to a national or global audience? Discover what's possible using the Shopify ecommerce platform and learn secrets for operating a successful ecommerce business. This new and independently published book from Entrepreneur Books (publisher of Entrepreneur magazine) offers a comprehensive introduction to the Shopify ecommerce platform and is chock full of useful information that's presented in a non-technical and easy-to-understand way.

Also featured within this book are a collection of exclusive and in-depth interviews with Shopify experts who share their real-world advice and explain how to avoid the most common mistakes start-up ecommerce businesses often make.

The Ultimate Guide to Shopify for Business explains:

• How to choose what to sell and effectively target a niche audience.
• Strategies for creating and publishing a well-designed and professional-looking ecommerce website using the Shopify platform.
• How to choose the best Shopify theme and apps to enhance the capabilities of your website.
• Ways to advertise, market, and promote your online business to drive a steady flow of traffic to your website.
• What you need to know about SEO and how to convert website visitors into loyal paying customers.
• Ways to offer a superior shopping and customer service experience for your customers.

Creating an online business requires the operator to simultaneously juggle a wide range of essential responsibilities, while catering to the wants and needs of their customers. The Ultimate Guide to Shopify for Business takes the guesswork out of becoming a successful online business operator.

Growth is a leadership issue, not a sales issue.



However you define business growth--total revenue, net income, margin expansion, number of products and services, or customer loyalty--sustained and strategic growth requires an organization to do more than sell by simply communicating the value of its products or services. It must create value in the way it sells by delivering a compelling experience that adds value beyond the product itself. As a leader, it's your job to build and guide that experience.



The Growth Leader reveals how top executives create profitable growth through the intersection of strategy, leadership, and sales. With a clear strategy, inspiring leadership, and aligned sales, powerful leaders understand that true competitive advantage doesn't come from innovation alone but belongs to companies that use their sales organization to add and create value. In this leadership guide, you'll learn how to ensure growth strategy is aligned at every level of the company, from boardroom initiatives to daily customer interaction.



​Best-selling leadership author and business growth consultant Scott K. Edinger helps CEOs and leaders intentionally and strategically engage with the customer experience to differentiate, innovate, cultivate loyalty, and grow. With this growth strategy mindset, your teams will know what they're supposed to be doing, have the skills to accomplish their work at a high level, and be properly supported by systems, process, and environment. But they can only do all this if you lead them. Are you ready to be a Growth Leader?

A revolutionary new guide to negotiating in the face of stress and adversity--from an award-winning professor of negotiation and conflict management who teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business and Columbia's School of International & Public Affairs.

Negotiation is hard. It's especially tough when you feel like the underdog--whether you face a 'Godzilla' counterpart, face threats of budget cuts during a downturn, or know that you need a deal more than the other side does.

Seth Freeman can help. Freeman is an award-winning professor who has taught negotiation to thousands of leaders and students. His clients range from Fortune 500 executives to kindergarteners, from top corporate lawyers to grad students just beginning their careers, from UN diplomats negotiating global problems to small business owners negotiating terms with suppliers. In 15 Tools to Turn the Tide, he shares field-tested techniques that can turn anyone into a much better negotiator.

Unlike other negotiation books, 15 Tools doesn't just give key principles. It also gives you a suite of customized, step-by-step devices--simple phrases, mnemonics, glance-and-go play sheets, and more--that you can learn, remember, and deploy well whenever you need them. Freeman guides you every step of the way, from preparation to the encounter itself, to the decision whether or not to accept the offer. Digestible, memorable, and groundbreaking, these tools are also designed to help you "win warmly"--doing well for yourself, even as you care for the other person too.

One tool, for example, gives you a handy 1-page 'play card' that guides you throughout the talks, eases your cognitive burden, and helps you discover hidden, satisfying deals others miss. It's just one of the many innovative and much-loved instruments Freeman's created that can dramatically improve your chances.

Whether you're closing a multi-million dollar deal in a recession, negotiating a job offer, or just working out holiday dinner plans with your in-laws, 15 Tools to Turn the Tide gives you a roadmap to your goals--a relentlessly practical guide you'll actually use again and again.