17 Books for Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Startups: What I Learned
Whether you’re a small-business owner, an entrepreneur, or working in a start-up environment — the last thing you probably have is TIME.
So here’s a quick rundown of some of the top recommended small-busines, startup, entrepreneurial books, & what the author’s have to say.
Build it and they will come. Forget about the product, focus on the people.
Many entrepreneurs have spent immeasurable amounts of time (and many sleepless nights) carefully crafting the perfect innovation, product or experience. Waiting for the “perfect” product or business model that will finally take the market by storm.
None of these incredibly hardworking people are at fault here, and at first glance the logic makes sense! Many people who head down the highly vulnerable & risky entrepreneurial path were technicians to begin with, highly skilled and interested in their profession with their sights set on building something new. Making their own contributions to their industry.
Contrary to these enthusiastic and well-intended efforts, every business is a system that needs careful consideration for deployment. A system that can be rendered down into simple terms:
Person/Team/Business (X) solves a specific problem for a specific group of people (Y), such that group (Y) values this solution enough to pay (X) for it.
With this in mind, remember why you started what you started, why you do what you do. Not every business owner is going to be a multi-millionaire.
As an entrepreneur, you likely just want autonomy over your work and freedom to personalize your creative solution or service. You likely also value work-life balance and autonomy over your daily life. Not everyone is a crazed, money hungry capitalist.
As a manager or technical member of an innovation team in a large company, you’re likely also driven by the exact same desires: developing something new, making your creative or technical mark on your industry, positioning the company you believe in and its products above others on the market.
*Summary: Who are your people?
Be painfully specific about this. Who are your customers and what are their stories? What do their daily lives look like? Putting yourself in their shoes will help you and your business best be of service to them.
How will your product or service help them most? Why would they pick you and your team over the competition?
2. No plan needed. Just ‘Grind.’ Have a Clear Plan, then Pivot or Preserve.
Most people know that just ‘grinding’ everyday isn’t the best way of getting stuff done.
Queue the New Years Resolutions we’ve heard a thousand times: “Starting Jan 1st I’m gonna get up at 5:00am every day, start that keto / carnivore diet, and hit the gym every single day.” Again, although these are great intentions and it’s always good to get started, these extreme changes are often short-lived and closely followed by regression at the very least or burnout in extreme cases.
Building a business or innovative solution are mountainous tasks and should be treated accordingly. Especially if you’re doing it on your own, you need to make the best use of your time and hone in on what matters most.
If it helps, make a weekly list of all the business activities on your agenda and categorize those action items in order from what has the most immediate impact to what has the least and go from there.
Take the time to set specific weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals for yourself and your business that can be measured overtime.
From the outset and in addition to consistency, what can be measured should be measured!
As you get things rolling, collect as much data as you can. Whether it’s through your social channel analytics, website traffic, or in-person when chatting to your colleagues and customers.
For communications, campaigns, newsletters, and promotions, you can carry out “A/B” tests and see which type of website UI or outreach communications are resonating most with your customers and why.
*Summary: Pivot or Preserve
After you’ve trialed a new product, service, and gathered responses and data from your team and customers, just keep it simple.
‘Preserve’ or Stick with what’s working, or ‘Pivot’ try something new or leave certain product features, website UI’s, or marketing/communication strategies behind.
3. Get the latest & greatest and it’ll sell itself!
Your financial position is the lifeline of your business. So when you have to spend, make it count!
As we all know, supply chain logistics, especially for certain components and materials, have seen far better days. So it can be tough to manage spending if you need to order business supplies or components several months in advance.
Invest in what your business needs right now, not what it “may” need in the future.
Save for the sake of saving.
Using the ‘Pivot or Preserve’ model will help save costs by investing only in marketing efforts that have worked and products & services that sell.
Ultimately though, a business needs to spend money to make money. So use all of the tools at your disposal and be confident that you’ve done you’re due diligence before footing the bill.
Given the new-found confidence in your business spending / budgeting, you’ll know what you can afford, when, and what’s worth the investment. Some thing’s —like marketing— when done right are designed to pay for themselves. Other’s are more of a roll of the dice.
4. Hire an SEO expert! For most small-businesses using modular website builders, hiring an SEO firm may be entirely unnecessary.
With a little research and an afternoon of work on your website, SEO and PPC are not entirely difficult to learn and not as time-consuming as you might think.
If you’re business is still in it’s infancy and just starting to gain traction, I’d suggest spending a bit of time familiarizing yourself with how pay-per-click advertising and organic keyword searches work on prominent search engines like Google.
There are also quite a few free tools you can use like the popular Website Grader from HubSpot to check in on your own site to see how things are looking. - https://website.grader.com/
Although it’d be impossible to narrow down this many titles into a 1-page summary, I’ve done my best to highlight 4 of the easiest and most important thing’s you can do today or over the next few weeks in your daily work-routine to make a marked improvement on the performance of both your personal work activities and your business — Thanks for stopping by & best of luck out there!
READING / BOOK LIST:
1. Brian Tracy - Marketing (The Brian Tracy Success Library) - amazon.ca
2. George S. Clason - The Richest Man in Babylon (Original Edition) - amazon.ca
3. Seth Godin - This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See - amazon.ca
4. Michael E. Gerber - The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It - amazon.ca
5. Burton G Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wallstreet - The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing - amazon.ca
6. Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - amazon.ca
7. Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money - amazon.ca
8. Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends & Influence People - amazon.ca
9. Peter Thiel - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or how to build the future - amazon.ca
10. Chris Guillebeau - The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future - amazon.ca
11. Eric Ries - The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - amazon.ca
12. Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah: Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online - amazon.ca
13. Pete Moon - Startup Mind$et: Help Me Start a Business: 10 Lessons on How to Overcome Fear, Learn the Millionaire Start-up Mindset, & Become a Confident Leader - amazon.ca
14. Gino Wickman - Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business - amazon.ca
15. Robert T. Kiyosaki - Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! - amazon.ca
16. Allan Dib - The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd - amazon.ca
17. Joe Pulizzi - Content Inc., 2nd Edition: Start a Content-First Business, Build a Massive Audience and Become Radically Successful (With Little to No Money) - amazon.ca
