Business Basics provides would-be entrepreneurs who are planning to start up a first business, experienced entrepreneurs who are preparing to start another business, and leaders of existing businesses with wisdom and directions to accomplish 8,000 times more. The book's 52 lessons are based on the most extensive investigations ever conducted into making business breakthroughs with existing resources, and the lessons show how to: - prepare for leading an extraordinarily successful enterprise - expand a market's size by twenty times and profitably gain market share while doing so - cut a company's costs (and those of its stakeholders) for providing and using an offering by 96 percent - decrease the investments needed to provide and use an offering by 96 percent As a result, revenues grow by much more than twenty times. Profits expand by more than 400 times as revenues soar, while unit costs plunge. Free cash flow is much more than 8,000 times larger because growth requires little or no new investment. The value of a business also expands by more than 8,000 times. Other stakeholders receive exponential benefit gains as well. In contrast to its title, Business Basics is also an advanced book that assumes knowledge of and facility in several of the books developed by the 400 Year Project (founded in 1995 to demonstrate how to accomplish improvements in less than one year that normally take at least twenty years to achieve: see at www.fastforward400.com) including The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, and 2,000 Percent Living. Your time and attention in reading and applying those books will be well repaid by upgrading your knowledge, skills, and resources for breakthroughs you want to accomplish. Business Basics is designed to be read and applied over at least a year. The book's messages are captured in fifty-two lessons presented in the four parts that correspond to the four breakthrough questions listed earlier. Each lesson contains assignments for you. Some of the assignments can be done in a few hours. Completing other assignments may well extend over several months. Think of Business Basics as a book that combines theory, advanced practices, and directions for applied work. Each lesson has been tested by members of The Billionaire Entrepreneurs' Master Mind, a group of entrepreneurs around the world that was founded in 2006. I serve as the research coordinator for the group, and I authored all of the lessons developed so far (exceeding 290 and growing). The fifty-two lessons you find in the book are the ones that were most valuable to the study group's members in recent years for answering the four breakthrough questions. Many people incorrectly doubt that businesses can make such exponential gains. I invite such skeptics to read and apply the book with a critical eye to see if what is shared makes sense. Business Basics is also intended to help business leaders who either copy or just slightly improve on the new business models that are created by the book's readers. As a result of such efforts, my goal is to encourage and to assist a million entrepreneurs to succeed in establishing 2,000 percent cubed businesses for the first time. From the resulting business models, I estimate that over a hundred million vastly improved businesses will eventually emerge. The offerings and benefits for stakeholders from such new business models will improve global prosperity in an unprecedented way, one of the goals of the 400 Year Project (to help everyone on Earth improve twenty times faster than normal from 2015 through 2035). I thank you for helping humanity by reading the book and applying its lessons. You will probably never know all of the good that you are doing.
About the Author: Donald Mitchell is chairman and chief executive officer of Mitchell and Company, a management consulting firm established in 1977 which specializes in business strategy and financial consulting. His consulting clients are often found among the nation's 200 largest corporations. In 1995, Mr. Mitchell founded the 400 Year Project, a global initiative to create improvements 20 times faster for everyone on the Earth (see fastforward400.com). Since 2002, Mr. Mitchell has been developing improved management practices for entrepreneurs and small business leaders. Mr. Mitchell is coauthor of The 2000 Percent Solution: Free Your Organization from "Stalled" Thinking to Achieve Exponential Success (AMACOM 1999), The Irresistible Growth Enterprise (Stylus 2000), The Ultimate Competitive Advantage (Berrett-Koehler 2003), The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution (Booksurge 2007), The Portable 2,000 Percent Solution (Booksurge 2007), and The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook (iUniverse 2005). He is the author of Adventures of an Optimist (Booksurge 2007). He has also been quoted by Business Week, Chief Executive Magazine, Dun's Business Month, Financial World, Forbes, Fortune, Institutional Investor, Money, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News and United Press International regarding business strategy and investments. Mr. Mitchell is listed in many biographical references, including Who's Who in the World. He has published over 20 articles on these subjects as well. Prior to founding Mitchell and Company, Mr. Mitchell was Director, Strategic Planning, for Heublein, Inc. Prior to his position at Heublein, he was a project manager at the Boston Consulting Group Inc. Mr. Mitchell has an A.B. degree magna cum laude from Harvard College and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.