Your LifeShift Manual Ebook

Your LifeShift Manual

Tried and tested by thousands of 'LifeShifters', Your LifeShift Manual is a breath of fresh air. It is the only small business book to integrate personal fulfilment comprehensively with the practical business of turning skills into money.

When life matters more than lifestyle, and work is a context for personal evolution not a distraction from it - the practicalities still have to be handled!

Thousands of people have ideals, dreams or 'creative visualisations', but get stuck on the implementation. Your LifeShift Manual breaks through the impasse.

The key to success, once you are clear what you really want deep down, is to develop a strategy for achieving a healthy balance of work and life. Your LifeShift Manual covers all this, but without getting ponderous or lost in tedious detail.

Andrew Ferguson is one of the pioneers of Coaching, having set up the first service in 1985. The LifeShift approach has been distilled from his training and counselling work with nearly 10,000 career-shifters. Most of these have as a result created a self-managed or self-employed career.

Now you too can live the life you want. You can set off on the journey of personal discovery that is self-employment. Your LifeShift Manual shows you how. Andrew Ferguson has condensed what was a 30 day £1500 Business Training down to 150 pages of simple, essential reading.

1. Have Fun Running your Own Business - Most books on business focus on the 'nuts and bolts'. Your LifeShift Manual is different; it puts having fun at the heart of the process. We start by ensuring the enterprise you're about to embark on is more fun than anything else you can imagine. This first chapter gives you an overview of what is involved in developing your enterprise - the Seven Steps it takes to manage your own business or career, a map of your options and opportunities. This turns your personal vision into 'a thundering good Business Idea' that draws on your talents, arouses your passions, feeds your spirit and enables you to achieve your goals.
   Chapters 2 and 3 then take you through the process again in more detail. Where you stop, and skip to the next chapter, is up to you. Your LifeShift Manual lets you cover the ground at your own pace, gradually adding layers of detail as appropriate to you.
2. Who will Buy - Chartered Marketer Andrew Ferguson sets out what is involved in marketing your products and services. He guides you expertly to uncover your Unique Selling Propositions to your very own niche markets. He summarises the 10 Ps of Marketing, the difference between market sectors and market segments - defined by needs, and the importance of giving customers a vital 'experience'. By the end of Chapter 2 you have an outline Marketing Plan, homed in on the bullseye centre of your target market.
3. How it works: the essential building blocks for success - Every business has a life cycle. Andrew explains how to work with it, and not get bogged down in over-planning - or destroyed by the lack of it. You end this short chapter with all you need for now - a 'back of the envelope' overview plan. How you do a business is very much a personal matter - this chapter guides you to understand the style of strategy that will work best for you. It also gets you to separate out the short-, medium- and long-term timescales.
4. What's it worth? - putting your money where your mouth is - This chapter explains what makes money work for you - commitment and openness to abundance; Andrew tells you how to acquire these strange new attitudes, and then covers in simple terms the essential facts about costs, funding and pricing. It has taken him 28 years to reduce this unnecessarily complicated subject to such simple, understandable terms. You will at last make sense of money, and colonise the commitment you need to face the next chapter.
5. Nuts & bolts time - Any fool can make it complicated; it takes a genius to make it simple - this is genius! Self-employment tax all done and dusted in a couple of pages; a simple step-by-step process for creating sales estimates, cost budgets and cashflows; book-keeping and money management so you can do your own tax returns; credit control, P&L, Balance Sheets, premises, insurance and the lowdown on all the nuts and bolts all reduced to their bare essentials. Detail will never make a business; keep it to a minimum.
6. Getting the message out: how small business (net)works - The inside track on promotional strategy from a genuine small business perspective, crucially networking, writing copy, brochures and news releases, exhibiting, selling and negotiating. Equip your allies and create a vibrant network. The leading small business marketing expert puts you through your paces.
7. You and whose army? - How you recruit, manage and motivate your team, including resolving conflict - again reduced to the basic essentials, (but not just a few tips and anecdotes!)
8. KOKO: keeping on, keeping on - Time, stress and diary management approaches for effective action planning. This final chapter also provides several inspired review processes to keep you on track. Your LifeShift Manual gives you all the practicalities without loss of fun.

Appendices to Your LifeShift Manual  provide a complete business audit self-assessment checklist; The Seven Steps to Success Questionnaire; The 100 crunch marketing questions checklist; a viciously selective list of useful web-sites; a handy training topics checklist; and finally a guide to becoming your own counsellor. This is the most rigorous and comprehensive guide without being tedious or long-winded.

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