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Belly Button to Belly Button

by Syd Stewart

221 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-2288; ISBN 1-4251-0530-0; US$48.33, C$48.33, EUR33.01, £24.95

Starting your own business or expanding your current business, this easy to read practical handbook tells you how to become a smiling owner of a great small business.

About the Book

Many people want to be their own boss, gain financial independence, gain creative freedom, and determine their own fate by setting up their own business. Their success rate is very poor: 50% of businesses fail by year 3. Why? They…

-failed to keep tight control of their business
-failed to choose a viable market or failed to adapt to changing market conditions
-suffered some unexpected crises

Even when businesses survive, many are not highly successful and profitable.

The handbook offers a complete and balanced guide to overcoming these failings and to setting up, operating and expanding a great small business using an evolutionary approach based on the powerful principles of nature and genetics. It is packed with practical tips, techniques, checklists, book references, and methods to help you apply these principles practically. It is quick and easy to reference...ready made for a busy person.

This book is written from the trenches to help the reader achieve
-profits that zoom year after year
-employees that smile each day
-customers that rave about your work

‘Belly Button to Belly Button’ is a metaphor for the first of eight key business success principles in this handbook – ‘Maximise outside influence and external contacts'. In other words, the more people of the right type you meet or contact each day i.e. go ‘belly button to belly button’, the more success and enjoyment you will have in business.

About the Author

Syd Stewart graduated in 1968 with an honours degree in chemical engineering from Strathclyde University, Glasgow. For the next 12 years, he worked for ICI – the then-giant chemicals company – mainly as production manager. During this time he became a Chartered Engineer and developed an interest in computer-supported performance-management systems, with an emphasis in trending techniques for the early detection of change.

During this time, he was also a tutor for the Open University in Systems Performance: Human Factors and System Failures. He concluded his time with ICI as part of a three-year joint study with IBM into how computing could improve the performance of a large chemical factory through better management information.

He joined a small planning consultancy, specialising in information, database and strategic data planning, and over four years was a consultant to companies such as Unilever, Shell, British Nuclear Fuels, Norsk Hydro and ICI Pharmaceuticals.

In 1984, he and his wife Sheena started a company specialising in database and information systems for many different many industries. In the last 20 years, it has specialised in healthcare decision support systems – for example, managing patients taking dangerous medications. This company has never made a loss, despite two recessions, and today is highly successful with 400 customers in 17 countries.

Recently, the company has begun to specialise in the deployment of rapid 'business intelligence' software: this helps managers to get a better understanding of what is really going on and to make evidence-based and data-driven decisions rather than intuitive ones.