Finding the Sweet Spot

The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work

by Dave Pollard

Number of pages: 224

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

BBB Library: Entrepreneurship

ISBN: 9781933392905



About the Author

Dave Pollard spent 27 years working as practice leader and advisor to entrepreneurs and as chief knowledge officer. He recently became vice president of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants with responsibility for research and professional guidance on sustainability, his family in Toronto, Canada.

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Editorial Review

Whatever your situation, this is the book to help you get started. Finding the Sweet Spot explains how sustainable, responsible, and joyful natural enterprises differ from most jobs, and it provides the framework for building your own natural enterprise. You’ll learn how to find partners who will help make your venture successful, how to do world-class market research, how to innovate, how to build resilience into your enterprise, and how to avoid the land mines that sink so many small businesses. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to find the sweet spot where your gifts, your passions, and your purpose intersect.

Book Reviews

"Pollard gives an insightful overview of the entrepreneurial process, and the book itself stands testament to the success of the author’s methods. " - The Publishers Weekly

"Sweet Spot is written in clear, conversational language that is easy to understand. Pollard’s enthusiasm for the subject comes through and he uses anecdotes from his own life in some cases to illustrate points." - The Panelist

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Wisdom to Share

Although we all like the idea of starting our own business, we all have fears that hinder us from doing so.

Some of us are afraid of failure due to our ignorance of the fact that failure is an integral part of success.

Actually, we do not need an MBA to be great entrepreneurs; we just need some essential entrepreneurial capacities and knowledge.

Finding what you were meant to do is about finding where your gifts, talents, and passions intersect with your purpose or what is needed.

We lack the ability to imagine what is possible as our education systems are very adept at driving the creativity and imagination out of us.

Finding the sweet spot comes down to the challenge of finding the ideal partners for your enterprise.

Find people who share your purpose or whose purpose can be readily combined with yours to create a collective purpose you can all embrace.

The paradox of research and invention is that needs are sometimes not recognized until a solution to them has been developed.

As you articulate a possible idea, answer or approach, the people you speak with will gain a deeper understanding of what they really need.

Imagination is the ability to conceptualize something out of nothing.

Creativity is the ability to model things concretely in the real world.

Innovation is the process of taking ideas and putting them to practical use, figuring out how they might work in the real world.

People love to offer their opinions when they think the person asking for it really cares about their answers.

The process of doing so-called-sense-making is more of an art than a science.

The communication that occurs during the collaboration is constant, candid, interactive, open and constructive involving all collaborators equally.

Talk to your pathfinders to discover what happened when they tried to find a solution to the need.

Collaboration is working together to achieve collective results that the individuals would be incapable of accomplishing alone.

Customers often do not know what innovations they need.