If it were your job to bring a company to the bargaining table so it could merge, sell or divest, you had better have the stamina and guts as well as an intricate knowledge of how the human mind operates. Negotiating these kinds of deals is not for the faint of heart. But for over fifty years, one merchandising giant after another—Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Home Depot, Nine West, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, CVS, The Limited, Dollar Tree, Eddie Bauer, Interparfums, Jeffrey Stores, and Jos A. Bank, to name a few—have relied on Gilbert Harrison to help them forge just these kinds of deals. Have they all been signed, sealed, and delivered? No, that’s not how the game works, and getting many of these deals negotiated is exactly that—a game. In all deals, nobody knows who to believe or not to believe, and what a company’s objectives are. But whether buying, selling or divesting, it has been Harrison’s job to try and figure out the secret competing interests of a company and to get those deals across the finish line. Deal Junkie is the story of Gilbert Harrison’s rise to becoming one of the true lions in the field of retail, apparel, beauty, footwear and other merchandising and consumer-related companies.

In the tradition of Blackout and Permanent Midnight, a darkly funny and revealing debut memoir of one woman's twenty-year battle with sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction, and what happens when she finally emerges on the other side. Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all: a top-notch private school education, the most expensive summer camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Soon, if you could snort it, smoke it, or have sex with, she did. Smart and charming, with Daddy's money to fall back on, she sort of managed to keep it all together. But on Christmas Eve 2011 all of that changed when, high on Oxycontin, she stupidly "brandished" a bread knife on her husband and was promptly arrested for "felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon." Within months, she found herself in the psych ward--and then penniless, divorced, and looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, assigned to a Hollywood Boulevard "chain gang," she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties. In the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, Amy Dresner's My Fair Junkie is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest memoir of one woman's battle with all forms of addiction, hitting rock bottom, and forging a path to a life worth living.

Go Do Deals provides entrepreneurs with a practical method to source and buy companies without having capital and without borrowing lots of money. For those who are ready to take the next step on the entrepreneurial ladder and make the shift from customer to shareholder value creation, Go Do Deals shows them how to: Bypass the brokers and find businesses that are NOT for sale Find, approach, and have positive conversations with potential sellers Structure deals so that they do not need to contribute cash upfront Choose the right deals and avoid buying themselves a job Know the best time to exit or sell their business Buying a company can double one’s business in an afternoon, free them from the treadmill of staff and customers, and avoid the blood, sweat, and years of start-up pain. It’s time to Go Do Deals.

The past thirty years have seen dozens of otherwise successful investors try to improve education through the application of market principles. They have funneled billions of dollars into alternative schools, online education, and textbook publishing, and they have, with surprising regularity, lost their shirts. In Class Clowns, professor and investment banker Jonathan A. Knee dissects what drives investors' efforts to improve education and why they consistently fail. Knee takes readers inside four spectacular financial failures in education: Rupert Murdoch's billion-dollar effort to reshape elementary education through technology; the unhappy investors—including hedge fund titan John Paulson—who lost billions in textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin; the abandonment of Knowledge Universe, Michael Milken's twenty-year mission to revolutionize the global education industry; and a look at Chris Whittle, founder of EdisonLearning and a pioneer of large-scale transformational educational ventures, who continues to attract investment despite decades of financial and operational disappointment. Although deep belief in the curative powers of the market drove these initiatives, it was the investors' failure to appreciate market structure that doomed them. Knee asks: What makes a good education business? By contrasting rare successes, he finds a dozen broad lessons at the heart of these cautionary case studies. Class Clowns offers an important guide for public policy makers and guardrails for future investors, as well as an intelligent exposé for activists and teachers frustrated with the repeated underperformance of these attempts to shake up education.

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. As you'll discover in his incomparable memoir, inventor, mechanic, TV presenter and walking tall as the definition of the British eccentric, Edd China sees things differently. An unstoppable enthusiast from an early age, Edd had 35 ongoing car projects while he was at university, not counting the double-decker bus he was living in. Now he's a man with not only a runaround sofa, but also a road-legal office, shed, bed and bathroom. His first car was a more conventional 1303 Texas yellow Beetle, the start of an ongoing love affair with VW, even though it got him arrested for attempted armed robbery. A human volcano of ideas and the ingenuity to make them happen, Edd is exhilarating company. Join him on his wild, wheeled adventures; see inside his engineering heroics; go behind the scenes on Wheeler Dealers. Climb aboard his giant motorised shopping trolley, and let him take you into his parallel universe of possibility.

This book was designed not only for owners and managers of middle market businesses but as a training text for middle market M&A investment bankers and consultants. It discusses the art and science of middle market M&A as well the all-important psychology and behind-the-scenes negotiations pursued with a particular emphasis on obtaining the absolute highest value when selling a business. Subjects addressed include valuation, taxation, negotiations, M&A conventions, among many others from the buy-side and sell-side perspectives. Subtitled “Tales of A Deal Junkie,” this serious but occasionally irreverent book tells it like it is, including anecdotes to provide a “feel” for what really goes on in middle market transactions. The author, a former practicing CPA and a business valuation expert, is a veteran M&A investment banker with years of real life experience. He also is a widely-acclaimed instructor in the M&A field and a nationally-respected practitioner who has trained thousands of investment bankers. No comparable book on the market today provides this degree of comprehensive and invaluable insight.

Thor Bjorgolfsson is a self-styled adventure capitalist with an addiction to debt and an insatiable appetite for business deals who became Iceland's first billionaire. After 10 years establishing his financial empire with alco-pops and beer in the lawless 'Wild East' of newly-capitalist Russia in the 1990s, he moved on to merging, floating, spinning off and privatising businesses from Finland to Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and the Czech Republic. On his 40th birthday, and worth $3.5 billion, he was sitting on top of the world; only 250 people in it were richer than him. His most spectacular triumph was the takeover of Iceland's second-largest bank, Landsbanki - he had expected his investment's value to double or treble in four years, and instead it rose ten-fold. But when financial meltdown hit Iceland in October 2008, Landsbanki crashed and burned, taking Bjorgolfsson with it. Within 12 months he had lost 3.3 billion euros - 98.5% of his wealth - and was treated as a scapegoat in his native country for supposedly bringing about the disaster. Faced with appalling debts, Bjorgolfsson has made good on his promises to repay his creditors, and at the age of 47 is now a billionaire once again.