The Toolbox for Business Leaders, Management Teams, and Consultants
You have a powerful concept and you’re starting or building a company…
How do you handle the everyday challenges of organizing, financing, managing, marketing, policies, procedures, selling, and everything else?
Easily! With a “toolbox” full of customizable prebuilt software-driven financial, strategic, and operating templates ideal for starting, growing, and/or rebuilding your business.
Why spend $1,000 – $10,000 (or $100 – $500 / hr) paying someone else…
When you can easily do it yourself?
Quickly. Easily. Better.
“I’ve never met Burke but am huge fan of his products and his company. In my various roles as a VP of Marketing at a $400M company, as an independent consultant, and as an entrepreneur, I have used several Business Power Tools programs. In sharp contrast to cookie-cutter, turnkey packages that promise much and deliver little, Business Power Tools products are clean, powerful, and effective. Based on applications you already know how to use – and tailored to specific issues, they enable you to ground your mission in reality while enabling your creativity to run free. I strongly recommend this man’s company and products.”
~ Carl D. Melville, Chicago, IL
Who am I and where did the Business Power Tools software come from?
I’ve been an entrepreneur for more than 40 years. My idea of changing the world has evolved to providing the tools that you need to help you change the world through your own business.
I graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BA in Business Economics (and a minor in Electrical Engineering) in 1979.
Out of college, I was hired as a “Field Sales Engineer” for Texas Instruments in Orange County, California. Next, I moved to the “purchasing side of the transaction” when I became the electronics buyer and then a copywriter for the Sharper Image® catalog.
Next to make more money, I sold stand-alone word-processors in Silicon Valley.
After Macs and PCs killed those, I started creating sales literature for tech companies.
A friend of mine was in the process of selling his engineering software to Apple. However, Apple wanted to evaluate his business plan to ensure that his company would stay in business to provide upgrades and support their software.
At the time, I considered a business plan as an elaborate catalog that would sell his concept to people at all levels and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (I learned that selling word-processors.) And they needed all the information in one document. (I learned that at the Sharper Image.)
We got the deal with Apple.
Over the next year, I attracted other entrepreneurs who had great ideas but were not being funded and needed help filling in the missing parts of their business plans.
Along the way, I noticed that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. And I wanted the ultimate business plan for myself when I had an invention I could build a company on. So, I took all the content that I had developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a customizable software template that many people could use.
This software “template” became BizPlanBuilder® and my company took off!
We followed up with MarketingBuilder (picking up where BizPlanBuilder left off) and then continued with PublicityBuilder™ (including sample press release templates and a comprehensive PR tutorial). Subsequent software tools included EmployeeManual-Builder™ and SafetyPlanBuilder®, each full of actual policies and procedures.
Altogether, I had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees.
Today, all of our products have been integrated into a streamlined online dashboard.
By now, we’ve sold more than 2 million copies of our software worldwide.
Along the way, I was elected to the White House Conference on Small Business (1995) and was nominated for Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Yay!
Let’s say your business is… your dojo.
What is it teaching you?
I also wrote a book, Business Black Belt, that chronicles the application of lessons learned from 40+ years of “personal development” training, martial arts, flying, and real-world business success building companies — to inform your decisions and ideas for dramatically improved outcomes in every area.