Accelerating Your Growth, Growing Your Business During Succession or Transition, and Returning Your Business to Growth
By Andy Birol
Review by Jack Ricchuito
Business growth consultant Andy Birol has a passion for helping business owners stretch their courage and confidence to their limits. In his recent hat trick, Birol delivers three concurrent titles into the still booming business advice market: Accelerating Your Growth, Growing Your Business During Succession or Transition, and Returning Your Business to Growth.
Currently a Solon resident, Birol has worked with over 250 businesses here and abroad to leverage his “Best & Highest Use” approach. He holds an MBA from Kellogg School at Northwestern and boasts a place in the gurusphere as a three times Weatherhead 100 winner.
This trilogy targets business owners who according to Birol should be eternally unsatisfied with the status quo. Writing in an uncomplicated narrative style, all three books feature a brisk pace of tips and models, scenarios and case studies, peppered with provocative questions and client testimonials.
Anyone connected in the Northeast Ohio business community will recognize some of the success stories he uses to drive home the applicability and credibility of his lessons. A follow-up to the examples appearing in this set of books a few years from now might be able to provide a local version of a good-to-great approach.
Birol covers a beachhead of topics with the kinds of management paradoxes genre readers have come to love and expect. Shunning cheesy consultant popularizations, he challenges business owners to consider highest value over lowest price, niche value over me-tooisms, and working from strengths rather than weaknesses.
He suggests that businesses will achieve market nirvana by being context rather than content sellers and relationship-rich than transaction-cheap. Above all, he suggests, strive ro serve rather than out-smart your customer.
One of his mantras running throughout all three pieces is the age-old saw: Know thyself. With the kind of branded moxie and self-confidence he is known for in his consulting and speaking, Birol challenges his audience to be more brutally honest with themselves than ever before. Like a wise doctor though, he uses humor to sweeten the medicine.
One of the themes that emerge and repeat throughout the books is the character of a successful business owner. Birol clearly believes, or so one can infer from the examples, that good leadership is not gender or generation specific. It can be the domain of women or men, in emerging or retiring generations. In any case, business owners who manage their company’s growth effectively tend to be decisive, intelligent risk-taking, and market driven. They treat their business as unique and their markets as dynamic.
In the spirit of the mission and vision of Cool Cleveland, where this review debuts, it is fair to say that one reason why these books should sell well in the Northeast Ohio business market is because it is bread made from local ingredients that have appeal well beyond the local market. They represent the fact that we are a region teeming with people who continuously board planes to be applauded and rewarded as the “out of town” experts. Andy Birol is a member of this club and his messages are timely in their arrival here as we ponder the growth of this region...
http://www.andybirol.com
from Cool Cleveland contributor Jack Ricchuito jack@designinglife.com
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