Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups: How to Succeed by Creating Your Own Business

             Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups is a must read for anyone with a business idea and the desire to be successful. It gives the reader the skills and knowledge to survive in today's innovation and entrepreneurial-focused world.

            This book is about starting a business. It's about putting your toe in the entrepreneurial water - perhaps through doing a short term business gig or a pop-up business- and then seeing what happens. It shows you how to listen to the customer and work out why failures may happen, and when they do, you'll learn how to deal with them and create a new business that is robust and ready to grow. Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups shows you the best ways of starting, testing and growing a business. It shares the stories, experience and insights of those who've done it, and explains how to innovate, trial, refine and succeed.

            Even if your business idea struggles, you'll find out how to learn so much that you'll pivot your business, try again and then win big time. You'll learn from a range of organizations including abnormal beauty company Deciem, Leon fast-food, Triumph lingerie, New York fashion tech Nineteenth Amendment, Brew Dog beer, Cambridge Satchels, Allbirds, and the Cornish Seaweed Company.

·  1 The ups and downs of starting a new business

·  A story about a successful start-up

·  Monty’s Bakehouse

·  The entrepreneurial landscape

·  Who? Where? How? What?

·  Focusing on those three key entrepreneurial cohorts

·  Have you got what it takes to succeed?

·  What no one talks about, but you need to know

·  Being top-boss for the first time isn’t that easy

·  Why some businesses fail and others thrive

·  Notes

·  2 The start-up revolution

·  An overview

·  A paradigm for the 2020s

·  Helping start-ups to win

·  Perspectives and stories

·  Start-up stories from millennials

·  Start-up stories from women

·  Start-up stories from experienced executives

·  A more global perspective

·  Start-ups: lessons, surprises and insights – a summary

·  3 Pivots, refinements and surprises

·  What is a pivot?

·  How pivoting works in practice now

·  Pivoting and people

·  The big pivot

·  Pivoting in action

·  Five pivoters and their stories

·  Minor pivoting or just refining

·  Trends and revolutions

·  4 Pop-ups, questions and experiments

·  What is a pop-up?

·  Pop-ups in action

·  A pop-up story

·  Understanding markets and people

·  Pop-ups as cultural phenomena

·  Pop-ups create ideas and save money

·  Note

·  5 Start-ups: How to do them. How to succeed

·  Preamble to a toolkit

·  Content

·  Snapshot lessons from recent start-up people

·  Preparation

·  Planning

·  The basics

·  Money

·  Performance

·  Thinking

·  People

·  Customers

·  Running our business beyond start-up

·  A guide to presenting for new business

·  The story of an award-winning success

·  6 Conclusions and summary

·  Why this book matters

·  Finally, do you want to make a difference? Do you want to feel wonderful?