Bøger af Bruce Murray Firestone

Wondering where you should put your money after being disappointed with the performance of all your other investments? Look no further than real estate, still the single most dependable investment you can find. In many ways, real estate is unique. You can rent it to third parties who help you pay off your mortgage. It doesn't go out of fashion. Unlike ideas, which are in infinite supply, real estate is not. When your city or your neighbors build new infrastructure and structures around your property, it's goes up in value without you having done a thing. These are just a few of real estate's unusual characteristics. Another aspect to like about this industry is that business models built around real property are not as complex as, say, running Apple or Facebook let alone Alphabet. It's basically a business model for dummies. In this book, Prof Bruce adapts Warren Buffett's investment philosophy to the real estate industry... the concepts are simple: buy smart, well located property using debt, manage them well, add differentiation, drive up income and value, refinance them so you can take out cash tax free and without any transaction costs such as attorney and realtor fees, rinse and repeat... eventually passing them on, efficiently and effectively, to your heirs. It's a buy and hold strategy for the most part, not buy and flip. Bruce M Firestone, PhD, brings his own unique flavor to this business by explaining how you can increase revenues in both residential and commercial real estate through a process he calls "animation." Prof Bruce is the ultimate real estate coach; you don't only learn about real estate, you learn about life, Gheorghe Adamache, real estate investor, air traffic control officer I think I've learned more from Bruce Firestone in the past year than I had in the entire decade prior, Brian Dagenais, Dagenais Properties founder

Gadgets and Gizmos-how to tell if you own a real business or just an expensive hobby-was written for all creators and entrepreneurs who dare to dream, innovate, experiment and produce services and products that transform our lives as well as make a profit.Think about just the last few years-our ability to seamlessly communicate at very low cost with a worldwide community via email, websites, messaging, crowdfunding and crowd sourcing, skype and zoom, as well as a huge diorama of social media to select from. How about the rise of the sharing and gig economies-how many of us can make a living or at least add to our incomes using these services invented by (mostly) young people, but open to every age group willing to learn new ways of doing business? Next, we are going to see an explosion in productivity through AI.Many entrepreneurs quit before their sales are given a chance to really takeoff. This is because a) they start listening to Monday morning quarterbacks who disparage them and their company and b) they don't have a coach/mentor/teacher/adviser who can counteract this by telling them they are on the right track/keep growing (or when to pivot if they are on the wrong one). But like many aspects of entrepreneurship, things are never really this simple-there is always ambiguity. So, how do you recognize when you own a Zombie company or when a project, product, service or division of the organization is dead and needs to be pruned from the herd?This handbook answers this question and a lot more... "I believe in mentors. If we all lived to be 300, then we wouldn't need them-we could learn everything on our own. Coaches like Prof Bruce are your shortcut to success-they are the least costly, highest ROI investment you will ever make," Fab Di Franco, Technology Executive+++Another reason I wrote this handbook is because I am always pushing myself and my clients to prove their concepts before they spend a ton of time, money and sweat launching a product or service that, it turns out, the marketplace rejects. The market is always right, even when it's wrong. This means-don't substitute your own views/opinions for what the market demands, something that can be proven/ demonstrated. You are NOT the market. In this learning outcome handbook, you'll learn, for example, how Ryan North failed to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter for his proposed book project-To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure. Indeed, Ryan failed miserably to raise $20k. Instead, he successfully ended up with 15,352 backers who between them pledged $580,905 USD to help bring his project to life. At the time, it was the #1 most funded publishing project on Kickstarter ever. When this happens, you no longer have to guess if your product or service will be a success nor do you have to risk anything but your own time to find out...+++I've been known to (accused of) putting the cart in front of the horse. Why? Because once you have three sales (of just about anything) a) you have "proven" your concept, b) it forces you to accelerate delivery and c) no matter how smart you are, as soon as you come into contact with a potential client, s/he will ask you questions/challenge you in ways that no matter how much time you spent pre-planning your rollout of a new product or service, you could never anticipate. +++Here's a 48-second video I did riding around with my friend Walter Willett, Horse Country Campground founder, https: //youtu.be/k7a3p6O_sn0. Its title is: Don't know anything about business? "Don't worry. Your customers and clients will teach you all you need to know," Walter says, who knew zilch about running Horse Country Campground when he started. Prof Bruce

Here I present ten mini case studies-mostly about real estate but some about business too.These case studies show people at their most inventive-how they get themselves into a jam and then (hopefully) out of it. I also deal with failure because you can learn (sometimes more) from your lack of success too.It's often said that: The two sure things in life are death and taxes.I disagree.They're three things: Death, taxes and change.So, be prepared to alter course and learn as you go.--This handbook is dedicated to all my students and coaching candidates who, over the years, have taught me almost as I much as I have them. It takes a yard of guts to start a business, any business. And every startup, every new organization is an experiment until proven otherwise.No amount of pre-planning can substitute for contact with the marketplace.While I strongly believe in 1-page business modeling, I am not a fan of 30-page business plans full of graphs and charts often signalling nothing of importance. Huh?That's right-it's because no business plan (like no battle plan) ever survives more than a few hours or days without significant changes after contact with the "enemy," ie, the marketplace. Business models also have to be reviewed and updated regularly lest you get swept into the dustbin of history, but at least here you are updating a one-pager, which is fast and cheap.Your business model is the engine of your business-it shows clients and customers on one side, suppliers on the other and you in the middle. It also has a brain on top (matching clients and suppliers much like an online dating app does) and it has an orthogonal dimension-a marketing side. Because, if you can't obtain new clients and customers in a cost-effective manner, your organization doesn't have long to live. Your model may also have an NFP (not-for-profit) enterprise bolted onto the main business and vice versa. That is, an NFP may be permitted these days to have a for-profit business bolted onto its main charity function, like what Habitat for Humanity does with its ReStore network of shops selling (gently-used and new) renovation and construction materials as well as appliances. --Have you ever heard of a startup that tells investors, lenders, employees, or suppliers that their revenue growth or subscriber growth is likely to be flat and remain that way? No, you haven't, which means that, if every organization experienced this kind of exponential growth, the entire population of the planet would, by now, have Jeff Bezos-style wealth (less whatever he will share with his soon-to-be-divorced spouse and mother of his four children.) All this to say that business plans may not be very helpful in evaluating a startup organization. The differentiated value inherent in their business model plus their ability to execute excellently are much more likely to be evident (or not) during a slidedeck presentation of the opportunity by the founders themselves. You can read their body language and tonality plus other non-verbal cues that way too. Was Google the first search engine? It was not. Remember WebCrawler and Lycos from 1994? How about Excite and Yahoo! from 1995 or Ask Jeeves from 1996 and AOL NetFind from 1997?Google was a 1998 late-entry to the party, but they had three things (or soon would have) going for them-a trusted do-no-evil algorithm that produced (largely) unbiased results, a stupendous ability to execute on a planetary scale, and a business model that clearly differentiated advert placements from search results. Bruce M Firestone, PhD