Best Books To Read Before Starting A Business

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Are you thinking of starting your own business? Or are you in the beginning phase of creating your first business?

It can be extremely overwhelming to know where to start and even more overwhelming to avoid being distracted from the endless possibilities of what to work on and who to listen to.

There are so many excellent resources to learn absolutely anything these days, but a lack of information is no longer our problem. Instead, the problem has shifted to knowing which resources to start with.

Here are my top three recommendations for anyone starting or wanting to start a business or a side hustle.

1) The E-Myth Revisited – Michael Gerber

Read The Book Summary Here

I believe this should be required reading for anyone trying to start their own business. This book explores why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it.

One of the book’s main themes is the three different persons and personalities required in a business: the Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician.

• The Entrepreneur is the person/personality that creates the vision for what the business should become and what problem they are solving.

• The Manager is the one who systemically translates the Entrepreneur’s vision and dreams into an actionable roadmap and keeps the pieces moving.

• The Technician is the boots-on-the-ground worker who turns the wrenches and bakes the pies. This is who does the work.

Often, we are a technician who loves to create (we are the pie baker, the designer, or the artist), and we view the Manager and Entrepreneur as problems. They are constantly coming up with more ideas and projects that get in the way of the work we are already doing. With this sense of resentment, we strive to quit our job and open up our own business doing only what we want to do. However, this dream quickly fails as the Technician realizes they no longer only have just one job to do. Now as the business owner the Technician also needs to become the Manager and the Entrepreneur. They now need to balance cash flow, market, order supplies, pay invoices, receive payments, and bake the pie while coming up with ideas to grow and manage the priority list.

2) Steal like an artist – Austin Kleon

Read The Book Summary Here

Today, almost every business requires the customer to trust both the product and the brand. The way we build this trust is by consistently sharing our work so that the customers know what to expect from us. This can be through social media, Youtube, blogs, or any other medium where we share our thoughts and work. Each post defines who we are and what we stand for. However, the problem this creates for the creator is multifold, from imposter syndrome to not knowing what to share to not feeling original.

Auston Kleon tackles all of these fears and many more in his three-book series:

• Steal like an artist

• Show your work

• Keeping going

Each one tackles a different phase of putting yourself on the internet and sharing your work.

You can get all three together on Audio as a trilogy.

3) 1000 true fans – Kevin Kelly. This is a short essay. 

When viewing success and financial freedom, it can be difficult to know how many fans (also known as clients) we need to support our work. Kevin Kelly’s essay shows how all we need to make a six-figure income is 1000 true fans who are willing to pay us 100 dollars over a year. 1000 fans X $100 each = $100,000. These numbers can be adjusted depending on what value of an item or service you are selling. For example, if each fan is willing to pay $100 a month—or $1200 a year— you only need 84 clients a year to make six figures.

The essence of this essay is that you do not need to build an audience of a million people. Instead, you can focus on building a smaller audience of true fans.

4) Bonus Tips

• Stay the course on your main goal. If you have to choose what to work on, select the option that moves you closer to your goal.

• Find a way to read a bare minimum of one hour per day. 2+ hours is preferred. Almost every problem has been solved before. By reading more, you can see solutions, mindsets, and points of view that you didn’t even know you needed.

• Produce more than you consume. As we have turned into a consumption society that spends so many hours consuming content, it is more important than ever to spend time producing your own work and providing value to the world.