Create Your Own MBA Program

Many small business owners are typically self-taught in the ways that make them successful. Most small business owners do not have an MBA, which actually is a good thing. Formal business education, specifically the typical MBA program, is geared more toward the large corporate environment and not the small business environment that agency owners operate in.

So, how would one design a two year MBA program for the small business agency owner? The program is based on a trimester system and the students are required to read a book a month for two years. There will be six areas of study, with a bonus session to allow a concentration for the insurance industry. By the end of these two years, students will have the right information to operate a small business and be successful.

The key purpose of this program is to accelerate through the learning curve. Much of the information the students will learn has been around for a while and it works. Successful business owners do not re-invent the wheel. They take a proven idea and adapt it. This cuts out the time and expense of having to learn it on their own.

1. The first trimester focuses on understanding one self and others. What skills and knowledge are needed to be successful? All of these books are classics and three of them have been around for over 75 years. In order to be a great business owner, one needs to understand themself, as well as understand how best to relate to other people.

· 7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Steve Covey

· How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

· Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

· The Richest Man In Babylon by George S. Classen

2. The second trimester is an introduction to business and the philosophy of business. Most small business owners got into their business because they were good at what they did. Michael Gerber created the mantra of “Work on the business and not in the business,” so his book is a must read. The other books will round out one’s understanding of what it means to be an entrepreneur and small business owner.

· The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

· Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish

· Rework by Jason Fried

· The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business By Josh Kaufman

3. Sales and marketing is covered in the third trimester. The books in this session will go from the big picture of sales and marketing to the nitty-gritty details of how to do it. Sales people will like the books by Schley and Holmes and the marketing folks will hone in on the books by Heath and Gladwell.

· Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

· The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

· The Micro-Script Rules: It’s not what people hear. It’s what they repeat… by Bill Schley

· The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

4. Welcome to year two! The fourth trimester is all about management and leadership. Satisfied employees are critical to the success of a business. Some people are natural leaders while others can be great leaders with some training. The material and ideas in these books are practical and easy to learn.

· The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spenser Johnson

· The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

· The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell

· Drive by Daniel Pink

5. The fifth trimester focuses on an area that business owners easily get or perpetually struggle with – economics and business financials. Even if it is a turn off for some small business owners, it is still important that the basics are understood. Accounting is a subject that does not translate well to books, so that subject will be covered using online videos. There are many free videos that will cover both the basics and the details of accounting.

· Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy and Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

· Financial Intelligence A Manager’s Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean by Karen Berman and Joe Knight

· Various online videos on accounting

6. Now that the business is running, what is next? A successful business is not static; it undergoes constant change and improvement. The sixth trimester introduces philosophy of change and techniques on how to re-think the business operations.

· Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras

· Who Moved My Cheese by Spenser Johnson

· What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

· First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman

Congratulations! Reading these 23 books will provide information more valuable to the small business owner than taught in most MBA programs! Graduates of this program now have the skills and knowledge to be even better business owners. Some graduates might want to continue on to a concentration within their industry.

Formal education can be valuable. However, the stereotypical small business owner has neither the time nor patience to attend an MBA program. There is so much good information that all business owners can easily have a customized “MBA Program.” So, crack open a book, turn on a kindle or plug in some ear buds, school is in session!

Six Elements of a Value-Added Internship Program for Your Private Business

Starting an Internship program for your business requires clear objectives, a solid plan and disciplined oversight to run smoothly. Intern recruiting starts as early as February – best to approach a local school where your firm already has a relationship or where a curriculum matches your organization’s needs.

Both the student and the business have shared objectives and expectations – both seek a productive experience and the opportunity to learn valuable skills. Internship programs have always been a great source of talent for firms and opportunities for students. It starts with defining the purpose and impact of the internship on your business.

Essentials for building a successful Internship Program:

  1. Establish a clear objective (i.e. Improve or update the firm’s prospect files or expand the firm’s Social Networking reach)
  2. Assign a title (i.e., Sales Intern, Account Executive Intern, Marketing Intern, etc.)
  3. Align the Intern to two individuals: One should be the direct reporting manager and the other individual should be a mentor (for best results make sure the mentor has the same area of subject matter expertise)
  4. Map out a Training Plan: The intern will need formal orientation to your business PLUS subject matter or product training. You can blend the training schedule with an increasing amount of work responsibilities. Training needs to be measurable. While department round robins seem like a great idea on paper, to be successful they need to link in assignments and follow up.
  5. Empower the Intern to Impact the Organization: Plan ahead. Since this is a college student, minimize the clerical duties. Select meaningful projects and assignments that will bring value to your organization. Examples might include social networking postings or content creation for newsletters; workflow analysis and updates; procedure guides for specific positions; identify and centralize key forms on a shared drive for use by others in the organization, etc.
  6. Supervise the Intern: Start the week with a clear plan and goals. End the week with summary and feedback including positive achievements and encouragement for further growth. Be ready to increase responsibilities for the Intern if they are performing at a top-level. If the Intern appears to be achieving all assignments above average and fits within the company’s culture, be sure to discuss full time/future employment before their assignment ends.

Aim to make the internship a victory for both the student and your business. If you have recruited well and created a successful internship program, the success will lead to full time job offers and hires that will carry an immediate impact on your firm.

The iGoogle Homepage Is Shutting Down – Which Google Program Will Be Next?

Next month, Google is shutting down the popular iGoogle Homepage on Nov. 1st, and many Google users are not happy. Like the Google Reader users before them, they can cry tough kitty all they want. Google does as Google does as Google does.

The iGoogle program has been around since 2005 and lets one bookmark all their favorite gadgets, read news headlines and play games right on their own personalized homepage. Many users simply loved this program and will hate to see it go.

As a user of many Google free products it also scares the bejesus out of me sometimes. Google has closed down some of their popular programs, and it leaves one wondering what is going next? My one main concern – will Google+ go the way of Google Buzz? Will Google drop Google+ and Google Hangouts?

As someone who is using and building up their contact list of subscribers… losing Google+ would be a major blow for me. Besides, while I like and use Facebook for family connections, Google+ has become my online marketing or business hangout – I simply don’t want to lose it. No matter how much I have criticized Google Search in the last little while, they do do something right, and in my opinion, Google+ is one of them.

While it has been described mainly as a ghost town by many and user numbers haven’t exactly been earth shattering – Google+ still plays an important role in Google SERPs and markup. After all the programs Google has closed, it is within reasonable thinking that if Google+ costs too much to run or usage drops significantly – Google may shut it down. Judging purely from past closures, it would not be a great leap of faith to believe it is indeed possible.

For me, another major worry is Google Analytics, will Google shut it down? While it is not totally accurate, the data is a bit off, I can’t imagine my marketing day without real-time analytics running in the background. It gives me so much information on how my actual visitors behave on my web pages and sites. Although it is probably giving Google invaluable search and site data, Analytics must be a very costly program to run, even for Google and their vast resources. Just hope it’s the last free Google program which closes its doors.

Another one is Webmaster Tools, losing this program would also be a major loss, especially if you use it to keep your site or sites in line with Google’s countless rules and guidelines. While it hasn’t been very helpful for me, I still check it to see if anything is totally out of sync with Google’s rules. Webmaster Tools is such an integral part of Google’s whole setup; one can’t imagine it going the way of other lesser programs, such as the Google Affiliate Network.

Perhaps, besides AdSense and AdWords, the only other Google programs, which I would be somewhat disappointed to see disappear, are gMail, Google Earth and Google Chrome. I occasionally use all of these and would hate to see them gone – especially Chrome, which I have installed on several of my computers. However, for privacy reasons, I have been using those less and less, so I could survive their closures without too many withdrawal pains.

Actually, if you’re concerned about your own online privacy, you’re probably better off staying away from Google and any free Google programs. Needless to say, for advertising purposes, Google is collecting every bit of data, every keystroke and every subject you have shown even the slightest interest in pursuing. While all this information is supposedly “collectively gathered and processed” according to Google’s prospective, please use your own discretion if online privacy is top on your list of priorities. Truth be told Google has become the largest list builder and consumer data collector on the web and in the world. This collected user data has become Google’s most valuable asset – one which can be milked for years into the future.

It’s simply the price we have to pay for using these programs, after all you didn’t really think these products were truly free, did you? Then again, is anything in life really free?

Google’s products and programs are no exceptions, while I don’t want to be too cynical, but one has to be realistic about Google’s ultimate goals and objectives here. It’s a publicly traded company, and generating revenue is its lifeblood – the more it makes the merrier everyone will be. Nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong with Google giving us all these countless free products and programs, as long as we realize the price we’re paying for those products.

I for one, am more than willing to pay that price, and I truly hope iGoogle is the last one of Google’s products on the chopping block. At least for the immediate future, but I am not holding my breath.

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