Showing posts with label business secrets and success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business secrets and success. Show all posts

The Interior Designer's Guide to Pricing, Estimating, and Budgeting (Second Edition) Review

The Interior Designer's Guide to Pricing, Estimating, and Budgeting (Second Edition)
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The Interior Designer's Guide to Pricing, Estimating, and Budgeting (Second Edition) ReviewOne of the hardest things to learn about interior design, or any other service industry is that the only thing you have to sell is your time. To do this in a profitable manner, you need two sets of skills.
The first is the one you know about. You've got to find customers, you've got to do the job they want done and you've go to make them happy. This is probably the job you've trained yourself to do through experience, through training, and through the basic aptitude that you had to get into that business in the first place.
The second job is harder. You've got to realize that you are a business manager. You need accounting (to keep your business partner the IRS happy). You need to develop a busines plan, budgeting, etc. You need to know how to prepare and send out bills and how to handle the money when it comes in. And the most critical of all, telling the customer what your effort is going to cost him.
In this book Mr. Williams gives an excellent introduction on how to do these critical things. He also includes enough war stories from his past to give you the understanding of how he learned these things.
I really enjoyed his page one story of starting his own company: sold his car so as to eliminate the payments, crammed his office into his bedroom, paid off all credit cards, in general reduced his expenses to a minimum. When I started I did almost exactly the same: I had a very tiny kind of dumpy house in not too good a neighborhood - but no payments. I had an ancient vehicle - but no payments. Like with him, I was profitable the first month, but you had best not bet on it.
Mr. Williams has been there, done that, walked the walk. His book makes excellent sense.The Interior Designer's Guide to Pricing, Estimating, and Budgeting (Second Edition) OverviewThis second edition is updated throughout and includes additional material on time management and numerous interviews with leading designers. Empowered by the step-by-step guidance in this book, interior designers will be able to establish prices and budgets that make their clients happy and their businesses profitable. Written by a designer and veteran expert on pricing, estimating, and budgeting systems, the book provides practical guidelines on how to value the cost of designing commercial or residential interiors, from the designer's creative input to the pricing of decorating products and procedures. The book shows how to determine a profitable and fair hourly rate, balance the client's budget with his or her wishes and needs, negotiate prices with suppliers and contractors, write realistic estimates and clear proposals, manage budgets for projects of all sizes and types, and position the firm's brand in relation to its practices. Interviews with experienced interior designers, case studies, and sidebars highlight professional pitfalls and how to master them, from daily crisis management and self-organization to finding the perfect office manager. This superbly thorough guide offers pricing, estimating, and budgeting advice that is a necessity for every designer and firm pushing to bolster the bottom line.

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Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed Review

Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed
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Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed ReviewIn Working Together, Michael Eisner uses the stories of several successful partnerships (including his own) to find commonalities and perhaps offer the reader a formula for identifying or creating the same.
The stories are great and every reader will find a different partnership that he or she identifies most with, but the overriding lesson is that the best two person teams have partners who have very different personalities and skill sets, but shared values, beliefs, ethics, and ultimately goals.
As an investor, I particularly liked the chapters on Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and John Angelo and Michael Gordon, which remind us that most great partnerships have at least one optimist and one skeptic. The trust that Warren and Charlie have developed in one another was a key feature of several other partnerships including Joe Torre and Don Zimmer of the New York Yankees who also discovered that trust fostered loyalty and an ability for partners to benefit from each other's strengths, without feeling compromised by their own vulnerabilities.
Several notable stories emerged from Eisner's interviews like Bernie Marcus asking Arthur Blank to just keep bumping the revenue projections up on the first Home Depot store until the projections showed profitability. While this obviously worked out for them, I imagine there are more than a few entrepreneurs where that wasn't the case. I also enjoyed learning about Brian Grazer's networking techniques at Warner Brothers which ultimately led him to his partner, Ron Howard.
Ultimately, Eisner draws a set of conclusions about successful partnerships that lead to the whole being greater than the sum of the parts which can be measured in both financial and emotional terms. Eisner's book is a relatively quick read with enjoyable stories and relevant lessons for anyone interested in how to identify or create the next great partnership.Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed Overview
Dig deep and you will find the most compelling argument for working together: Happiness.

In business there are always unique individual achievers, but pull down the veil and you'll often find someone alongside them. Michael Eisner does just that in Working Together. Using his own collaboration with Frank Wells at Disney as a launching point for examining other famously successful partnerships, Eisner offers us an intimate and deeply personal look at some of the most rewarding business partnerships, uncovering what makes them tick and offering unconventional wisdom and unexpected insights. In this essential book for businesspeople everywhere, Eisner shines a light on these startlingly long-lasting and enriching partnerships, weaving together ten separate narratives-from investment gurus to entertainment impresarios, from fashion designers to big-box retailers-into a larger story about the true nature of achievement in life and in business.

Ten Stories, Ten Magical Partnerships:
Michael D. Eisner and Frank Wells (Disney) Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway) Bill and Melinda Gates (The Gates Foundation) Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (Imagine Entertainment) Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti (Valentino) Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell (Studio 54) Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus (The Home Depot) Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (restaurateurs) Joe Torre and Don Zimmer (New York Yankees) John Angelo and Michael Gordon (finance)
Collectively, the stories you're about to read form a blueprint for building partnerships that matter, that last, and that allow each of us to do our very best work.


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