This week on UniquiTV I share my favourite books to learn about how to grow your business. This one is for Shaun Joubert from NFU Mutual who asked me about this subject:
Links for the books mentioned, on Amazon:
- Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish: http://amzn.to/2uazJqz
- Traction Get a grip on your business by Gino Wickman: http://amzn.to/2huoIdO
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: http://amzn.to/2uaxROV
- The 48 Hour Startup by Fraser Doherty MBE: http://amzn.to/2wdV3sV
- Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp: http://amzn.to/2wdZaVP
- Radical Focus, Achieving your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke: http://amzn.to/2weH31N
Transcript: The Best Books about Business Growth
Hi I’m Laura Janes, welcome to UniquiTV every week we answer your marketing questions and this week I was asked “What are your favourite books for learning about growing a business, I can tell you that I’ve read a fair few and I’m a massive fan of audible, listening to business books online. Today I’m sharing a few of my favourites greats, as the holiday season is upon us, I’ve compiled a great little list for you to read on the beach. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, I really like this book as it has a lot in it, my favourite part of it is there is a one page template that you can use for strategic planning I think the method that they cover in this is really a robust and strategic framework for doing what you need to do for a smaller business, some of it’s not as applicable as some of the meeting frameworks are perhaps over engineered for a small business, and more appropriate for a bigger company, I really like this one.
Similar to that but probably for a slightly smaller business is Traction, lots of similar principles and lots in there again about setting up your processes in the right way, how to recruit the right staff, how to structure your strategy. Again, maybe not for the smallest business but if you are starting scale and growing and starting to think about how your processes can scale then this is really great too, they also have a one-page template which I think is really useful. I have my own one-page planning template which is a kind of a hybrid between the two. I found that using this on my own business and with my clients is very useful.
This is a classic book, probably more if you’re thinking about launching new ideas or if you’re on the start of your journey, The Lean Startup is a really great book that talks about how to put customers right at the centre of everything that you’re doing and how to radically innovate within your business and the kind of methods you can use to do that and how to think really lean, so how to have test ideas quickly, how to make things happen quickly, it’s a classic and I Iove it!
Another one that I found really useful especially at the beginning of my business was the 48 Hour Start-Up, the idea is that you can do the launch in one weekend, you can get everything done in one weekend, there are lots of very useful tips in this one and again if you’re trying to implement new ideas into your business this is a great book!
And another one on a similar theme is Sprint, this presents you with a framework of how to solve any big problems and solve them in five days, I love the approach of this that you can take almost anything and within five days have built a prototype and tested it with customers and have a much clearer picture of where you want to go, I’ve certainly used this for testing new ideas. I think it’s a fantastic book and the thing I like about this book is it really shows you on the inside, the kind of methods that you could use and tells you exactly how to take the steps to achieve the Sprint on your own terms.
The other one I’ve been reading at the moment is called Radical Focus and that’s about how you set objectives within a business I haven’t got the hard back version of this, I have it on audible but I really like how they structure the objectives and goals in the book, and how you structure your whole team around achieving those goals, hopefully that’s given you some food for thought on growth books, I would love to hear what your favourite growth books are too and I look forward to seeing you next week.
