Real world anecdotes and step-by-step strategies to build and sell a successful business Half of the roughly one million businesses that start up every year fail because of insufficient financing, poor management, or lack of basic entrepreneurial skills. Based on his own experience as well as those of the many other successful business owners interviewed for this book, Joe John Duran explains how to overcome these obstacles. This reader-friendly book offers easy-to-follow advice, including 20 vital secrets that will help business owners avoid the most common mistakes, grow their businesses successfully, and then sell them at the highest price possible. Joe John Duran (Santa Monica, CA) built a national investment firm with billions under management and thousands of clients. Within 10 years of creating it, he sold it to General Electric for tens of millions of dollars. He is a chartered financial analyst, CEO of Alchemy Capital, Chairman of Finance of the Santa Monica Bay Young Presidents Organization (YPO), and a member of the Association of Investment Management Research (AIMR) and the Los Angeles Society of Financial Analysts (LASFA).