The Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurship: Start a Business, Grow a Business, Sell a Business

Would you like to become rich? Stephen Hawley Martin, an entrepreneur who founded and sold two businesses, explains in this book how anyone capable of getting and holding a job can become incredibly wealthy by following one of several paths he sets out. One path is to start a business, grow a business, and sell a business. Alternatives to that direction include keeping a day job and building a fortune by starting and running a business on the side, or by investing in real estate or other passive income generators. Targeted for those under the age of 40 who possess an entrepreneurial spirit, anyone seeking financial independence who reads this book will gain valuable insights about growing his or her net worth to a point the individual will be able to spend each day in his or her own way. Martin asks, “Why complain about the richest one percent? Why not become one of them, instead?” He writes that anyone living in America today can become comfortably well off—even very, very rich—by following certain steps, provided the individual does not wait too long in life to begin. This is true whether a person starts out with a mindset of scarcity or with one of abundance. The right mindset—a winner’s attitude—is, however, vitally important, which is why he devotes an entire chapter to personal transformation and self improvement techniques anyone can use to create the mindset needed to attract riches. He argues that if you think of yourself as rich—that you deserve to be rich because it is your birthright—with a sufficient amount of effort, you will become rich. That, he writes, is the basic message of two of the most popular self-help, get-rich books of all time: “Think, and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill [1883-1970] and “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace D. Wattles [1860-1911]. In summary, Martin shares valuable, hard-earned knowledge acquired over a period of forty years. For six of those years right after college, he worked in an advertising agency, learning that business and industry. He then joined is brother as partner and a principal of The Martin Agency, the ad firm that created the GEICO Gecko and “Virginia is for Lovers.” He helped grow that business to the point that it was one of the nation’s top ad agencies when the Ogilvy Group purchased it for an unheard of ten-times earnings. He then founded an ad agency called Hawley Martin Partners that was acquired by a New York Stock Exchange company, the Interpublic Group, following five years of rapid growth. For a while after that he was self-employed, freelancing for a number of years before founding The Oaklea Press Inc., a book-publishing firm he continues to operate today. Martin has ghostwritten a number of books, and he has authored 18 more under his own name. Many of his titles have reached bestseller status in their categories on Amazon. He is the only three-time winner of the Writer's Digest Book Award, having won first prize twice for fiction and once for nonfiction. He also has won a first prize for visionary fiction from Independent Publisher and a first prize for nonfiction from USA Book News.