What is a boutique?
A boutique is a professional services firm past the start-up stage but prescale. Examples can be found in consulting, marketing and advertising, IT services, etc. It's basically anyone who sells their expertise.

There are 1,465,900 boutiques. This book is for them.
It is about what firms at scale do. It is about what boutiques need to do to scale. And this knowledge gap between those at scale, and those not at scale, makes all the difference.

There is about $2 trillion spent per year on professional services. Those at scale capture most of it. If you want a bigger piece of the pie, you must scale.
We are in the golden era of boutiques. The business models of your clients are being disrupted. This makes it virtually impossible for them to have all the required expertise in-house. They are looking for external expertise. They have big budgets to spend. Clients are buying from boutiques in record numbers.
The sun is shining. Time to make hay.

The Secret Is in the Numbers

There's a common belief in the hospitality industry that the financials are best left to professionals who can sort out the complex interplay between the different departments of a hotel. This idea is just a myth-one you can bust wide open with this book. Having confidence and knowledge around the financials is the key to a successful hotel career and-to a very large extent-your own personal prosperity.

This book is about the business of hotels. It's written for two groups:

• non-financial people who want to become leaders with business mojo
• financial leaders and managers who want to bring everyone in their hotel into the loop

When everyone's on board, everything runs more smoothly and we're all part of something bigger and better-together.

This book shows you not just how to get comfortable with the numbers, but how to dance with them. It's inspirational, educational and chock full of tips and tricks to familiarize yourself with the inner workings of the hospitality industry-including links to online videos to supplement your learning. The Prosperous Hotelier puts financial literacy at your fingertips!

In today's competitive global markets, simply making a great product is not enough. To achieve profitable growth and stand out among competitors, you must start to strategically compete through service and innovative solutions for business customers.

Professors Christian Kowalkowski and Wolfgang Ulaga guide you how to shift your business from a goods-centric to a service-savvy model. The authors' proprietary twelve-step roadmap to profitable service growth will help you break out of a narrow product-centric logic and discover how to

- determine if your company is fit-for-service,

- make the most of your existing services,

- innovate and create value-added services and customer solutions beyond your products,

- embed a true service-centric culture in your organization,

- drive change and align your service strategy with corporate goals,

- transform your product-centric sales force into a service-savvy sales organization,

- design an organizational structure that promotes service growth, and

- align your interests with distributors and partners.

Kowalkowski and Ulaga's twelve-step roadmap is based on rigorous research and long-standing experience working with businesses. They have worked with hundreds of managers in industrial and professional services companies, conducted research projects, led executive workshops, and published numerous articles in scientific and managerial journals, including Harvard Business Review, among others. Here, they share not only their own insights but the lessons learned from successful case studies and years of extensive research.

Why? is filled with relatable rants about a subject Martha Humler knows well: customer service. My wish is one day stories like these will be few and far between-but in the meantime, I hope Martha's book gives you a giggle.

-Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager(R), Legendary Service, and Raving Fans

Martha's stories are a lighthouse of actionable insights for service professionals that are swimming in a sea of mediocrity.

-Dr. John Timmerman, Chief Scientist, Customer Experience & Innovation, Gallup

We're all consumers, which means we've all been frustrated by poor customer service.

Martha Humler, who spent her career in retail and advertising and is married to one of the kings of customer service-an executive with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co.-shares her frustrations about mediocre customer service in a series of vignettes.

Along the way, she delivers common-sense tips and strategies that managers, leaders, and companies can use to cultivate a culture that revolves around customer service. In fact, this is one book business owners should provide to all staff. Topics include:

- self-checkouts and why they might not be the best way to slash costs;

- ways to keep delivering service after the sale;

- providing small amenities-like bread at restaurants-that build goodwill; and

- ways consumers can speak up to demand better customer service.

If you've ever left a drive-through window only to discover missing items, received items from an online purchase that look nothing like what you ordered or are tired of long-winded answering messages with dozens of prompts, then you'll laugh out loud at these relatable rants.

What if everything you think (but can't say) about funeral service is true?

Death care isn't what it used to be. Cremation rates are sky-high, customers have changing expectations, and new competitors materialize every day. It's no surprise that an entire generation of family funeral home owners are wondering if this is the time to get out.

This book has the answers. Author Eric Layer has spent his career helping brands navigate the winds of change, after spending most of his life in and around the family business of funeral homes and cemeteries. He leverages that unique perspective to paint a vivid picture of what today's funeral directors are getting right-and what they're doing wrong.

The current uncertainty around death care is not morticians' fault, but it is their problem. The calling is hamstrung by mixed messages. It's tough for a modern funeral director to decide whether to be leader or follower, salesperson or confidant. But there is a right way to do death, and funeral professionals are experts. The future of the business will require a recognition of that truth so that those who work in death care can reclaim the soul of the calling and guide families with care and confidence.

Layer's firm, McKee Wallwork + Co., has spent more than a decade meticulously researching and consulting with funeral homes and related businesses. The firm has been a pioneer in industry research, having fielded the first-ever national funeral consumer psychographic segmentation study and co-invented the Death Care Genogram, as well as the Death Disruption Index. In The Right Way of Death, you'll find a crisp and insightful portrait of the modern business of death that draws evenly from that extensive research, business case studies, and poignant personal anecdotes.

An engaging, thoughtful, and surprisingly enjoyable rebuttal to Jessica Mitford's controversial 1963 book The American Way of Death, Layer's The Right Way of Death is a must-read for any American funeral director, cemeterian, or mortuary owner ready to do death better.

Services Marketing Essentials You Always Wanted to Know is a practical, concise, and straightforward guide on the essential aspects of services marketing.

Vishal Desai, a seasoned business professional with specialization and expertise in sales and marketing, has authored this book keeping in mind the novice professionals as well as the already experienced ones. The book covers the essential topics of services marketing and is a blend of theoretical explanations and practical demonstrations of the services marketing concepts.

This book will help you to

• Understand the Extended Services Marketing Mix which includes Product, Place, Price, Promotion, People, Process, and Physical Evidence
• Learn the different models of service quality
• Gauge consumer wants and perceptions to meet their expectations
• Improve your service design to make it efficient
• Create a pricing strategy according to your service business type

The book is a must-read for young managers, B-school students, and entrepreneurs who wish to enhance their understanding and knowledge of services marketing. It is also a good fit for the teaching fraternity and industry professionals who teach sales and marketing courses at business schools as it includes several case studies, quizzes, and activities to liven up the subject and demonstrate the practical implications of it in real life.

Services Marketing Essentials You Always Wanted To Know prepares the readers to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities in today's dynamic marketplace, especially when the service industry is growing exponentially worldwide.

This book is part of Vibrant Publishers' Self-Learning Management series that aims to equip working professionals and students with essential knowledge of management subjects through compact and beginner-friendly books.

How can you guarantee that your company delivers great service, has a great culture, and still manages to stay profitable? You need to follow certain Unbreakable Rules for success. Best-selling business author and coach Karl W. Palachuk draws on more than thirty years of owning and running service-based businesses to present the rules his companies live by.

These rules will help you align your personal and professional goals while creating standard operating procedures to automate successful habits. Notice that The customer is always right is not on the list. Why? Because everyone knows that's not true. Customers are frequently wrong, or would make bad decisions if we didn't help them to make good decisions.

Palachuk doesn't waste your time giving lip service to worn out platitudes. Instead, this book is focused on building a great, successful business in the 21st Century. And since the rules are absolutely unbreakable, they will stand the test of time and the changing business environment.

In addition to his unbreakable rules, Palachuk gives advice on identifying your own unbreakable rules. Branding, he says, is everything you do in your company: The way you hire, the way you greet customers, the way you document processes, the way you invoice, how you handle difficult conversations, and much more. Your business is a reflection of your beliefs and values. It should be built with intention, not something that just happened.

Some of these rules help you make money. Some of them keep your work standards high. Some build culture. All of them help your employees and client to understand the culture that embedded in your brand. This book will help you identify and codify the core elements of your success. It will also help you build the definitive list of absolutely unbreakable rules that will guide your business going forward.

About Karl

Karl W. Palachuk is the author of more than twenty books. He has started and run several businesses over the last twenty-five years, including a business training and coaching company that has taken him all over the globe. He is a popular blogger, YouTuber, podcaster, and keynote speaker. You can find Karl's blog at RelaxFocusSucced.com.

Karl has worked with thousands of business owners and managers - and helped several of them make the move to self-employment. With this workbook, Karl will help you make the launch as well. This workbook is guaranteed to help you learn about what it takes to start and run your new business.

Transforming a B2B services business model to a more scalable, profitable, productized company can have many points of failure - but the biggest and most underserved is the cultural transformation required to support successful productization. The encore book from Eisha Armstrong and her team at Vecteris, Fearless tackles this frequent point of failure and dives deep on the change management required to build a Product-Friendly Culture.

Building on the insights presented in Productize, Fearless details how shifting a business model from services to products requires a profound, fearless cultural transformation; the book is uniquely focused on B2B services organizations and the complex challenges that come with productizing a culture that delivers highly customized services.

The authors have seen firsthand the significant organizational change required, and from those experiences they describe the hallmarks of success and drivers of failure. They share stories from services organizations who have made this transformation and use their insights to provide a clear roadmap for B2B services firms hoping to successfully productize. Fearless outlines:

• The steps required to design a compelling vision for your productization strategy
• Methods to attract and retain digital product talent in an increasingly competitive marketplace
• How to determine the right organizational structures and operating models to support ongoing product innovation and management
• The tools, exercises, and resources to help bring the concepts to life

The service process design landscape is rapidly evolving, with technology-enabled innovations allowing the service provider to create a more personalized service experience and customers to take a more active role in the service process.

Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value was written to help you understand the opportunities (and challenges) for value creation in this dynamic environment. You will learn about approaches for designing all types of service processes, as well as the unique challenges of designing knowledge-intensive services. And because service performance outcomes are dependent on the knowledge, skills, and abilities-that is, capabilities of both service providers and customers, the book concludes with strategies for unlocking these capabilities to further boost value co-creation.

This edition was being revised when artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) was being embedded in more and more service processes ranging from knowledge-intensive professional services to transactional services we engage with every day.

Much like the COVID-19 global pandemic, AI and other developing technologies such as robots, extended reality, digital twins, Internet of Things, and other smart technologies, will continue to have profound impacts on how services are designed, delivered, and experienced by service providers and customers, as well as the communities and world in which we live.

This edition includes new and updated examples of technology-enabled innovations that provide unprecedented flexibility in service process design and continue to transform how service providers and customers co-produce services. At the same time, you will see how these and other service innovations can have important-and sometimes surprising-impacts on the benefit and cost trade-offs and synergies that determine value co-creation.

Comprehensive in scope, this totally revamped edition of a bestseller is the ideal desk reference for anyone tasked with hazard control and safety management in the healthcare industry. Presented in an easy-to-read format, Healthcare Hazard Control and Safety Management, Third Edition examines hazard control and safety management as proactive functions of an organization.

Like its popular predecessors, the book supplies a complete overview of hazard control, safety management, compliance, standards, and accreditation in the healthcare industry. This edition includes new information on leadership, performance improvement, risk management, organizational culture, behavioral safety, root cause analysis, and recent OSHA and Joint Commission Emergency Management requirements and regulatory changes.

The book illustrates valuable insights and lessons learned by author James T. Tweedy, executive director of the International Board for Certification of Safety Managers. In the text, Mr. Tweedy touches on the key concepts related to safety management that all healthcare leaders need to understand.

• Identifies common factors that are often precursors to accidents in the healthcare industry
• Examines the latest OSHA and Joint Commission Emergency Management Requirements and Standards
• Covers facility safety, patient safety, hazardous substance safety, imaging and radiation safety, infection control and prevention, and fire safety management
• Includes references to helpful information from federal agencies, standards organizations, and voluntary associations

Outlining a proactive hazard control approach based on leadership involvement, the book identifies the organizational factors that support accident prevention. It also examines organizational dynamics and supplies tips for improving organizational knowledge management. Complete with accompanying checklists and sample management plans that readers can immediately put to use, this text is currently the primary study reference for the Certified Healthcare Safety Professional Examination.