Achieving entrepreneurial business success often begins with a series of questions: How do I define the business? Is the market large enough to support it? How can I reach the right customers?
These two books provide valuable coaching for anyone who wants to get into the game and is seeking profits, satisfaction and real long-term success.
The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time
By Ken Lizotte
Entrepreneurs struggle with intense competition, new technologies and rapid change in the marketplace. Often, despite adherence to best practices in sales and marketing and exhaustive efforts by owners, new businesses fail.
Ken Lizotte suggests there may a means to overcome this. Strategically, this means defining yourself not as a “specialist” or “professional,” but as a “thoughtleader.”
Thoughtleaders are sought out for their expertise. Rather than constantly pursuing marketing and sales endeavors, thoughtleaders gain business through an ever-expanding base of customers who seek them out.
That is not to say that thoughtleaders don’t have to work hard or that thoughtleading as a business strategy doesn’t have its demands. Nonetheless, Lizotte refers to a program of proven ideas that can help transform the entrepreneur or professional into the thought leader. He lays out “Five Pillars of Thoughtleading.”
1. Publish articles and write books.
2. Speak regularly to groups and companies.
3. Inspire “fresh” thinking, via research.
4. Attract ongoing media attention.
5. Creatively leverage the Internet.