Book

Accelerating Company Growth (A practical guide for CEO’s) written by Brendan Dowling and published by Oak Tree Press, is a step by step guide to help CEO’s and Entrepreneurs, to accelerate the growth of their business. It is full of interesting and entertaining stories, that makes the learning easy and practical, it is not based on academic research like most other business books. This book is written from Brendan’s own experience of business growth and failure and from the experience of the CEO’s and entrepreneurs that Brendan has coached.

The book covers all aspects of growing a business, including:

Elevator Pitch

Value Proposition

Customer Problem and Your Solution

Market

Sales

Marketing

Business Model

Competitors

People and Team

Finance

Operations

An exert from the book “The Introduction”:

I have owned and operated many different businesses over the past 20 years – how time flies when you are having fun! For the most part, it has been great fun, but starting and growing your own business is not for the faint-hearted.

I started my business career when I was in college, trading on the streets of Irish towns and, over the years, I have worked my way up to operating in the boardrooms of international companies. I have had a number of spectacular successes and some spectacular failures – and I have learned a lot from both.

I have been privileged to receive great academic education, but my drive for education was sparked by witnessing my father’s business fail when I was a teenager. He had built up a number of successful businesses, but a single significant change in market circumstances beyond his control brought him down. This gave me the drive and determination to have a qualification that I could fall back on if my business ever went bust. I am glad I did get my qualifications (Commerce degree, MBA,Chartered Accountant, Executive Coach), because sometimes I have needed to get consulting roles, between companies, or at times when my own company could not pay me a salary, which has been too often for my liking.

So I have learned about starting and growing a business both from the classroom and by doing it in the field. Needless to say, the most intense learning happens in the field and not in the classroom. On a recent executive training programme, where I participated as a speaker and coach, the CEOs attending repeatedly stated that it was a story from an experienced business leader that inspired them to change direction or to accelerate their company’s growth through implementing the learning.

It is this firsthand experience that has inspired me to write this book. I want to provide you with practical experience that can be implemented in your business to help you to accelerate its growth. I will not give you any of the classroom theory, only practical advice that I have learned in the field or taken from other colleagues who eat, live and breathe business growth in the real world. This book contains stories and tips that are based on practical experience, learned while growing companies.

One of my overriding reasons for writing this book was the fact that I received very little practical advice myself, as I started and grew my own businesses. I did not have a mentor or coach and practical books with real business advice were hard to come by. I wish I had these resources myself, when I started out on the journey for the first time.

I often equate reading an academic based business book to reading the manual of your latest mobile phone, you know you will learn a lot and get more out of your phone, but if you are like me, you find the book too boaring to read, so we struggle on until we get some practical tips from other users. I hope to make this book interesting, a good read, not the manual to Accelerating Company Growth, but the stories and tips that you could pick up as you meet other business colleagues who have been there and done that.  You could say these are the short cuts to getting the most from your business.

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book and that you take a lot from it and that I can help you to grow your business beyond what you would have achieved on your own.

Please note that, throughout the book, I have used real-life stories and examples based on my own business experiences, but I have changed names and places to protect the identity of the people involved and exaggerated certain stories to make a point. Nonetheless, the basis of all the stories is true and the changes are not critical to the learning.

Brendan Dowling, August 2013