This book is for entrepreneurs already in business who want to maximize their profits and create exceptional results for themselves, their family, and their employees. You might be the owner of a service-based company bidding on one project at a time, an artist with creative product outputs, or a manufacturer with forty employees ready to create a new profit center, but you are not a large enterprise. You are like millions of Americans who chose to start a business because you have a technical skill or an interest in something you thought you could develop into a living, and like most entrepreneurs you left out the planning and opened your doors believing your enthusiasm would be enough. You gained a certain level of prosperity through hard work and determination but now face increasing difficulties and need effective methods for managing your effort. You may have purchased this book because you feel these difficulties undermining your success but see no clear path to a stable future. You may find yourself in a crisis, a marginally profitable concern, or an expansion. If you're in a crisis, you may be heavily in debt, short of cash, and losing customers to the competition; if you are in a marginally profitable period or an expansion, you may be uncertain what actions will assure success. The workshops and books entrepreneurs choose as a solution for their difficulties are usually business-planning guides that are well intentioned but present problem solving in absolutely the wrong order, an order that my slow the progress of your existing business. Business-planning books assume you are not in business yet. This book assumes you Are.

Once you start seeing customers, your methods must change, even if it's your opening day. With that in mind, SUCCEED!(TM) begins with measures designed to have an immediate and positive effect on your cashflows and then leads you step by step through efficient problem-solving activities and on to the long-term planning that will keep your company healthy. SUCCEED!(TM) is structured to improve the performance of any business; the sequence is the same for crisis management, profit improvement, recession recovery, or expansion and is a result of observing what works in the real world and improving on it with good, basic practices. If you are ready and willing to look closely at your business with the SUCCEED!(TM) approach, you should be able to make steady and significant progress and transform your firm into your personal vehicle for success.