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“Making Money is Killing Your Business” is named Business Book of the Year

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Making an impact.

NFIB, the leading small business association with 500,000 businesses, has named my book, Making Money is Killing Your Business, the number one business book of 2010.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses, or NFIB, rated it #1 because they thought it has the most potential for real impact in the lives of the readers.

Readers are indeed finding their lives and businesses transformed by the principles and practical in this book.

“Never in my life have I read a book so full of transformational content that actually got me creating a better business for myself.” – Julia Gentry, TheUltimateE.com

“Every small business owner will benefit from this easy yet profound read. I was ready to throw in the towel on our six-year-old real estate business, but after reading Chuck’s book we have increased our gross revenue by 27% and doubled our net profit.” – Sandy Corrigan, The Corrigan Group

Making Money is built on profoundly simple ideas that have been around forever and ignored as being too simple to work. I’ve learned the hard way that the profound things are always simple and will revolutionize any business willing to give up complexity for effectiveness.

Making Money helps business owners move from a focus on trying to make money to building a business that does it for them while they’re on vacation. It debunks the idea that small business is a 30 year grind, and introduces the concept of building a business in just three to five years that runs itself.

Making Money also replaces the traditional concept of retirement with using your business to quickly build your Ideal Lifestyle, moving you and your business from survival through success to significance.

The principles and tools in this book grew out of years of hacking it up in the trenches and learning what really works. It’s been a privilege to start and build a number of businesses before helping others do it. I don’t see myself as a business coach, advisor, consultant, etc., but as a guy who built a number of businesses and now helps others avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

My company, The Crankset Group has an off the grid approach that has been adopted by thousands of business owners. We’re growing internationally now with 3to5 Clubs (our committed communities for 24 business owners each) starting in throughout the states and in Europe, with an objective of having 3to5 Clubs in every major city in the world.

It’s also been a privilege to have articles and mentions in the last year in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNNMoney.com, NYTimes.com, other magazines and small business blogs throughout the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand.

I firmly believe Making Money is Killing Your Business inspires a new way of thinking that will transform how you approach your business and your future. I’m getting regular feedback from people we’ve never met who confirm it.

I’d love to hear how it’s impacting your business.

So you think you’re in charge? Let’s see.

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Your Guiding Principles are more important to your business than anything you sell.

As my great Irish friend John Heenan says: “If you don’t have a vision for your own life, you become part of someone else’s vision for theirs.” Without clarity of purpose, we don’t own our business, it owns us – we’re employees of ourselves.

Everything we do comes from a belief system, whether intentionally or subconsciously. Do you guide your biz or does it rule you? Who’s really in charge?

Some see this as the soft side of business, the part you can ignore because you can’t track how much money you make directly back to it. “Stop playing office and start making the donuts,” would be a typical response. But that response would only come from someone who is willing to become part of someone else’s vision for their life, and doesn’t want to make more money in less time.

Making money is not an empowering vision. Want to make more money? Get a reason to do it, then have some principles on which you run your business. We talked about they “Why?” (vision) in business a couple weeks ago. This is more about the values that lead us to “How” we run our business.

Like rails that guide a train, your business principles are the core strategy to having a business that knows where it is going and how it is going to get there. If you think you can just make donuts and not know why or what your business stands for in the process, you’re going to miss out on building a business that you own vs. a business that owns you.

Here’s our guiding principles:

The 7 Guiding Principles of TeamNimbusWest:

  1. Make more money in less time
    (don’t work harder, not really even smarter, just more effectively)
  2. Focus on our lifetime goals, not just on growing our business
    (a BHAG will keep us going, but “grow the business” is a lifeless idea. So is retirement.)
  3. Work ON your business, not just IN it.
    (The key to growth – perfecting as we go by strategic planning, not just production.)
  4. Get off the treadmill, own the business instead of the business owning us.
    (The purpose of our business is to create a lifestyle for ourselves and our family.)
  5. Highest and best use of your time.
    (Yield per Hour – stop doing things others could do; do what only I can do.)
  6. Make decisions on where you want to be, not where you are.
    (Clarity of Purpose leads to Hope which leads to Risk. Take good risks to grow.)
  7. Bad plans carried out violently many times yield good results. Do something.
    (Stop planning. Implement now and perfect as you go. Speed of Execution rules.)

What are the guiding principles of your business?

You’ve got values and beliefs that are the foundation of everything you do and those values and beliefs are running the show. You might as well write them down and see if you agree with who/what is actually in charge. If not, change them and take control of your vision…

…so you can make more money in less time, get off the treadmill, and get back to the passion that brought you into business in the first place, in order to build a mature business in support of your lifetime goals. (Just had to get my guiding principles in there one more time). ?