Run Your Business, Don't Let It Run You: Learning and Living Professional Management

by Clay Mathile

No More 16-Hour Days!

Running your own business—the American dream—can be long days, none of the freedom you envisioned, no time for family and friends, and the unrelenting pressure to keep up the pace. Worse, all this hard work can only take you so far. To get to the next level, you need to stop being “Super-Employee” and become a leader who sets direction, operationalizes goals, monitors and controls results, and involves others. You need to run your business using an integrated professional management system.

Clay Mathile, who grew the Iams Company from $500K to $1 billion in sales, discusses proven management fundamentals applied in a practical way, one that has been used by thousands of business owners. You’ll get real-world details that academic courses don’t teach—true stories from those who, like Mathile, implemented these fundamentals and thrived. Read this book and discover how to make your business more successful and sustainable and your life more fulfilling!

Genres: Business

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Clay Mathile (January 11, 1941 – August 26, 2023) was an American billionaire businessman best known for leading Iams to nearly $1 billion in sales before selling it to Procter & Gamble.

Reviews

[Christopher Lewis Kozoriz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Professional management - a way to run a business employing proven fundamentals and disciplines that empower a business to continually reach new levels of growth..." (Clay Mathile, Run Your Business, Don't Let It Run You, Page 19)

Written by successful billionaire and founder of Iams, a dog food company, which he sold to Proctor & Gamble for $2.3 billion. He says he wrote this book "to pay it forward" from all the mentors that helped him in his businesses. This book is about getting you to the point of you working on your business, rather than in your business. The way he says this is done is through professional management. It is not the professional management taught in schools though, it is professional management, as defined by his non-profit Aileron, a company who helps private businesses grow, become profitable and sustainable.

So, what will you learn in this book?

* You will learn that you require to form a board, who can give you outside advice for your business;

* You will learn that your business requires a structure;

* You will learn that you should do succession planning;

* You will learn that you should be the one working on the strategy for your business, rather than the day-to-day operations;

* You will learn that your businesses values require to be clearly defined;

* You will learn that your vision and your mission require to be clearly defined and aligned with your values;

* how to do performance management, firing, hiring, people development...

Basically, this book teaches you to step back from your business and start to think long-term and how to get the business going, so that you are no longer working 16 hour days, but working smarter.

Professional Management, as not taught in colleges and universities, but by a real successful billionaire who grew his company and then sold it for billions. Rather than theories by a broke professor, who has never employed a person in their life.

Also, if you are interested in an autobiographical account of him and his business: Iams, I highly recommend his other book that I have read called Dream No Little Dreams