Welcome

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I want to welcome you to my new blog where I want to help you succeed in your small business.  You may have just started a new business or perhaps you've owned your small business for many years, but one thing I know about small business owners is that they are always looking for tools to help them succeed.  Owning a small business has never been easy, and it's been especially difficult for the past few years with a weak economy.  When you add to that the uncertainties around the changes in health care and taxes it becomes even more difficult to own a small business.  That's why I have created this blog.  I want to help you find tools that will make your task easier and your company more profitable.  Let me begin by telling you a little about myself.

For twenty years I served as a bivocational pastor of a small, rural church in our community.  For much of that time I worked in a factory before taking early retirement from the factory job.  However, two years before that retirement our family took ownership of a small business which I managed for the next 15 years.  For the first couple of years I pastored the church, worked my factory job, managed the business, and completed my bachelor's degree.  Believe me, I was glad when I retired and a year later earned my degree!  That allowed me to focus on our business and my pastoral work.

Unfortunately, I knew nothing about owning and managing a small business.  For the first several years we did very well due to a strong economy and an experienced work force who knew our company much better than I did.  The mistakes I made were overcome by those two factors, but when the economy began to go down my mistakes became magnified.  I learned a lot from those mistakes about leadership and the factors that make for a successful small business, but those lessons cost me more than my college degree did. 

Shortly after I sold that business I wrote a book that detailed many of the lessons I learned while managing the business in the hopes that others could learn from my mistakes.  I have found that it is always less costly to learn from other people's mistakes than from your own.  My book is titled Mistakes: Avoiding the Wrong Decisions that Will Close Your Small Business.  It includes chapters on such important topics as managing your cash flow, how to hire and develop top-level employees, what happens when the owner doesn't have a vision for the future of the business or a strategic plan to achieve that vision, marketing, misplaced loyalties to bad employees, vendors, and even customers, as well as other topics.

This book is only available at this time on NOOK products and apps and sells for the low price of $7.99.  I read a lot of books, and it would be difficult to find this much material that is written specifically for the small business owner for such a low investment.

I want this blog to be a dialogue so please feel free to respond.  I intend to provide you with numerous resources that will help you own a profitable company that will enable you and your family to enjoy the life you've always wanted.  Please bookmark this blog and follow it.  You can also follow me on Twitter @DennisBickers and on Facebook.

Thanks for stopping by and checking me out.