Amazing Adventure; 5 Key Books; Critical KPI; 8 Traits of Transformative Companies
November 3, 2011
Entrepreneurial Bullets; 4 Best Books for 2011; Year in Provence; Summer in Barcelona
November 17, 2011

George Clooney; Best Website; Entrepreneur Rally; Martha Stewart

"…keeping you great"

HEADLINES:   

Best Aussie Event — actor George Clooney and entrepreneur Martha Stewart will lead a line-up of internationally acclaimed business leaders (Russell Simmons, Jeff Taylor, Muhammad Yunis, and Michael Fertik) who will present at the inaugural Global Leadership Forum at the Sydney Convention Centre on December 12 — hosted by our Gazelles partner The Growth Faculty . This one day seminar is an opportunity for businesses and their employees to be inspired by leaders who have revolutionised the way we communicate, invest, shop, use technology, act and live in global business. For more info click here. Use promo code "gazelles" to save some money.

Best Website — Dr. Glen Richards' Brisbane-based Greencross Vets website is one of the best I've seen in any industry. What I like best is how everything aligns – the photos, messages, and support – with the needs of pet owners. No wonder they are the largest vet clinic group (75 locations) in Australia. Proud to have them as a Rockefeller Habits practitioner.

Best RIA — and congratulations to Steve Sansom and his Memphis-based team at Green Square Capital, focused on entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs invest, for winning one of Schwab's three national Pacesetter awards for Registered Investment Advisors (RIA). Notes Schwab "Taking a page from the Rockefeller program, Green Square developed a strategic plan by working backward. It began by creating a 10-year view and worked backwards to create a one-year and quarterly view." That 10-year goal includes $10 billion under management. Today they are at $1.5 billion with just 12 employees, one of the most efficiently run RIAs in the nation. Congrats Steve.

Best Victory — if you need cash, Woodie Neiss has done the impossible – pushed through a crowd-funding bill that creates an SEC exemption for small businesses and startups trying to use the Internet to raise relatively small contributions from a large number of people. Notes Neiss "See what happens when you mess with an entrepreneur who wants to crowd-fund money from his friends, family and community but is shot down by archaic security rules??? Crowd-fund Investing had a HUGE VICTORY in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday! Our bill HR 2930, passed with a rare, almost unanimous burst of bipartisan support 407-17?!?!"

Best Rally — now Neiss needs to get it passed in the Senate. As part of the Global Entrepreneurs Week, Neiss is holding a rally outside the offices of the SEC in DC on November 17, 8am – 2pm – the entrepreneur's version of Occupy Wall Street! For more info and/or to contribute (Woodie is raising $10k to support the rally – I donated) go to this site and watch Neiss's short video.

Need Best Corporate Start-up Stories — did you work for a large company and then made the plunge to launch your own business? My next FORTUNE column will focus on five avenues/ways a person can make the leap. Do you have an interesting story of how you escaped and got started? How did you finance it? How did you survive without the big salary? Did you take an entire team with you when you left? Did you write a book that then launched your own solo career? Did you join an angel network or judge a business plan contest and found a venture you could leap into, getting a piece of the business? Did you have a neighbor with a great technology, but needed someone with corporate experience to run the business side of the venture? Send a quick note to [email protected] – we'll call and interview you.

Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” and WEO’s “Advanced Business” executive program both held at MIT. Founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and coaching company with over 150 coaching partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past three decades helping companies scale-up. The “Growth Guy” syndicated columnist, he’s also the Venture columnist for FORTUNE magazine. He’s the author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0); Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; and along with the editors of Fortune, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times," for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. Verne also chairs FORTUNE Magazine’s annual Leadership and Growth Summits and serves on several boards including chairman of The Riordan Clinic and the newly launched Geoversity. He is an investor in many scale-ups. A father of four, he enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.