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All right, it’s ready. The business is up and running and ready to start making a profit in no time. All we need is a couple of good employees and get on the supplier’s good side and… wait, why’s there only half the inventory? Why I can’t see the last two months of bookkeeping? What is going on!?
Big and small businesses alike have the very same problem, astonishingly bad business decisions occur and fall through the cracks until they become too big to ignore. Big businesses have the cash to brush them aside, of course. Now, small businesses are not so lucky.
A small business owner soon learns that the path of entrepreneurship is rife with dangers that you need to handle sooner lest they eat you later. It’s impossible to cover every eventuality but teaching how to think so you can confront most is exactly what these books for small business owners are going to teach you.
The company goes at length about customer service and how a company should nurture the relationships it has with it’s clients as personal ones.. Customer service has been one of the main pillars of our company and the way we conduct business has always been customer oriented, but there are a few things in the book that we’ve implemented already. One of which is that we’ve made everyone at the company aware that the customer care isn’t a department and it’s something everyone has to participate in.
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Small business marketing budgets can be tight to nonexistent. This book is the perfect step-by-step guide to mastering LinkedIn (one of the most powerful business tools on the planet) to generate leads and convert them to customers without spending a dime.
Whether you’re a savvy social media user or a novice, you’ll come away with simple but powerful strategies for creating a magnetic profile that will attract lucrative new customers and building an impressive network that will be happy to open doors of opportunity for you.
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For any small business owner looking at their website and realising they don’t know where to start, how to manage someone they might hire, or what to look for and ask about their site, this is a great book.
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Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares is an excellent guide for any small business seeking to scale. The book helps readers to start at square one with their customer acquisition processes. Readers walk through nineteen traction channels ranging from Google Ads to publicity stunts, weighing the costs and benefits of each channel in a highly methodical fashion. The authors encourage the reader to ignore previous biases about the efficacy of particular strategies, prompting honest consideration and a robust brainstorming process. Business leaders who read Traction will consider every possible marketing initiative available to them, and they will be encouraged to methodically test, eliminate, and re-test particular channels.
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This is a book to keep handy for those sleepless nights when you (owner, manager, or any leader) need actionable advice on how to handle some of the toughest decisions that Small Business Owners face – from firing your first employee to dealing with debilitating cash flow, or when your team rebels. This is not a book about how to build a great business – but instead, how to turn your business around when it turns from dream to nightmare. It’s full of scenarios that all business owners have or will face.
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Legendary. To this day Patagonia stands out as a company who has stood-fast in their pillars. As you walk through the history of how Yvon started under a cardboard box, through creating classrooms and cafeterias for his employees – the lessons to be learned about true leadership are hard to miss. But truly, the ability to stay true to one’s path through decades of political, climate, and market changes is a true testament to Yvon – and lessons that leaders of startups, corporations, and small businesses alike – tend to miss.
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This book is inspirational – meant for those just starting out, to see how one of the behemoth brands started out, grew, waned. Written by the founders of Banana Republic – this book details the account of how they started, a very unknown story, packed with anecdotes that many struggling owners will immediately identify with and be inspired by. The way that Mel and Patricia approach problems in this book are eye opening – though fair warning, it does come off a little optimistic. This is not about the Banana Republic we now know today – but instead it much more vibrant origins.
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Malcolm Gladwell defines the tipping point as the moment when an idea or trend breaks through and spreads like wildfire. This book should be required reading for any small business owner or aspiring entrepreneur as it provides a new way of thinking when evaluating a potential product or service, and how to sell it. The book also provides real-life examples of products that have reached the tipping point such as Hush Puppies shoes for readers to draw inspiration from.
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This is an excellent book for new small business owners. Keys to success in today’s crowded international marketplace include differentiation, authenticity and integrity. Stephanie Chandler helps readers identify, showcase, and profit from all three while, at the same time, bringing tangible value to their unique target audience. The book is filled with common-sense business strategy and Internet marketing advice, tactics and resources. Highly recommended.
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The Lean Startup: As a small business owner, it’s very important to have a deep understanding on what my customers do and don’t want. This prevents me from wasting my limited time and money building products they don’t want. The “Lean Startup” introduces an iterative approach to product development that focuses on delivering the minimum features required for your first few customers, referred to as the “Minimum Viable Product. Once you have those customers, you engage with them frequently to get feedback on how you can better improve the product over time. The beauty of this process is that helps make my product very customer-centric, while limiting wasted efforts.
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Written by a psychiatrist (who later became an internationally-recognised organisational consultant and corporate trainer), this reasonably-short, easily digested book is a practical guide to help small business owners and entrepreneurs (as well as their managers and employees) overcome the self-sabotage that often blocks career advancement, business success, and overall satisfaction (both on and off the job). Real-life examples drawn from Dr. Goulston’s consulting experience demonstrate how his clients have achieved success by following his advice.
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The Slight Edge, Turning Simple Disciplines Into Massive Success, by Jeff Olson is one of my all time favourite books for entrepreneurs. Jeff details his secrets to turning small habits into massive results through the power of compounding. If you’ve been looking for a book to help you create a foundational mindset for success, look no further, The Slight Edge delivers the goods.
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Blue Ocean Strategy is a must-read for any new business and will show you how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant. The theory behind this book is simple: most new businesses enter into highly-competitive markets (red oceans) and simply don’t have the resources to stand out. This book shows you how to create and benefit from an uncontested market place, your so-called blue ocean, even in traditionally saturated markets.
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I recommend it because it deals with the key issues that millennials are dealing with in their career development.
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This book turns a lot of preconceptions about human behaviour on their head, and has been heralded by some of the leading business people of our time. The experiments covered can be particularly insightful for small business owners, covering many business related topics from marketing to relationships.
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Our book is both serious and playful as the story is told through a young couple’s journey in starting, growing and selling their business. They learn the importance of planning and collaborating in order to grow and create sustainable value. As a reader, you’ll “peak in” on the couple’s introduction to the Biz Fab Five™ (accounting, economics, finance, law and communication), their discussions with key partners, and their growth in learning about business life cycles.
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Everything a startup business owner needs to know ranging from valuations to growth hacking tips.
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Part memoir, part business book, Rand pulls the curtain back on building and growing a fast-paced internet business from his living room to the board room.
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Anyone managing a team should read this! Kim offers advice on how to communicate effectively and give honest feedback to coworkers and team members.
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The perfect how-not-to business book for entrepreneurs. This nonfiction narrative reads like a page-turning thriller and leaves you wondering how the business villain got away with her story for so long.
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For the entrepreneur wanting to understand the factors that can help make an idea, video or product go viral. If you have ever wondered like I did why people talk and share certain things rather than others? Or, why more than 200 million consumers are willing to share a video about something as boring as a blender? This must-read book pulls back the curtain and gives practical and relevant tips on spreading your message regardless of the type of business you own or run.
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The premise is that if you improve by 1% a day the compound of your improvements over a year or 2 or 10 is massive. The book clearly got me to see that the little things matter and they are worth it. As I write this I am looking back at just the last year and the growth was massive even though it felt like we were in the trenches most of the time. We grew because of the compound effect.
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Network Marketing is a powerful small business that’s like a Franchise in Disguise. In fact, network marketing is such a smart small business, Toni Vanschoyck wrote Effing Simple to show others how to get started or restarted in this business that changes lives. Efffing Simple is Your Guide to Growing Your Network Marketing Business and Changing Your Life. Not only does she outline the opportunity in plain language, she provides personal stories for motivation and inspiration too.
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One of my favourite books as a small business owner is the Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. I love this book because Tim interviews hundreds of the most influential people on the planet. From Tony Robbins to Peter Thiel – the book covers business, wealth management, health, and much more. If you can only get one book, this is a great choice.
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The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks is my recommendation for every small business owner to read because it provides actionable tips on delegating, outsourcing, prioritising, and hiring. The idea of working in your Zone of Genius is the main theme of the book. It’s important to focus on what you’re exceptionally good at to move the needle forward in your business and leave the rest to others more suited for the job.
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As one of the first books I’ve read that talks about starting a small business and creating personal brands, this book is one of my favourites. It’s a greatly motivating book that in a pretty straightforward manner explain what it takes to open and run a small business. There’s a ton of real-life advice that can be translated into personal situations, and the author offers some valuable insight into the steps needed to successfully operate a business. If you’re looking to get extra motivated, then you should read this book. It’ll push you into the start-up world and make you believe in your own vision. Also, if you’re still hungry after reading, there’s a ton of materials online, for free, that the author published on his website. The book will help you mold your ideas and your passion into a workable model you can use to start your own business. It’s written in simple terms, and at less than 150 pages, is a quick read. This book will pump you up and leave you hungry for more.
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Whether you’re a small business owner, a manager in a business without an HR department, or even a seasoned HR professional, The Essential HR Handbook will help you handle any personnel problem—from on-boarding to outplacement—quickly and easily. This fully updated 10th anniversary edition is packed with information, tools, checklists, sample forms, and timely tips to guide you through the maze of personnel issues in today’s complex business environment.
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This book is for anyone who wants to perform on a higher level of conscious relationship building. The success model, exercises, tools, and tips will provide a structured approach to clarify purpose, raise self-awareness and accelerate success. The 9 Dimensions of Conscious Success will help identify and evaluate personal success behaviours and barriers that affect how others see your strengths and weaknesses. A great book for both young and experienced professionals.
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I recommend this book because the author discusses what the journey is for a small business to be successful. From his experience, he gives us wisdom about the myths of running a small business and discusses the various steps it takes to reach the intended business goal. It is truly a must have.
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I highly recommend Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty, and Maximise Profits by John Goodman. The delivery of excellent customer service is inextricably linked to overall business success, especially a small business. The author argues that a business does better when they align customer service within their overall strategy. He explains through a step by step process how this can be achieved – from traditional customer service delivery, to planning, and back again to explaining tactical issues and associated responses. A must read for those small business owners out there!
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I love this book because it more or less perfectly encapsulates what I’ve tried to do with my business. My goal was to get away from high-stress, high-pressure, long-work hour corporate world and do something on my own terms. However, I didn’t want to recreate the pressure of my corporate job in a new business.
This book explains how business owners can create good, sustainable, profitable businesses, without a grow at all costs mindset. It’s a great antidote to so many business books out there. And even if you’re planning to create the next Facebook, this book is great as an alternative perspective on how businesses can be run.
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This books is for those business owners who do not know how to make themselves effective in their job and work and set the wrong example. In this book you can learn, by looking the need of the business, you have to determine where your influence or contribution will make the great impact, execute it, and then delivering for the business that needs to be delivered.
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In this book the author reveals many tactics like an effective framework for setting, measuring, and tracking goals in the organisation and show why effective management is the critical component of entrepreneurship and how it’s essential not just for building a startup, but also sustaining it.
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A very well-known book by Robert Kiyosaki in which he summarises that there is a difference between being poor and being broke. He also writes that money comes and goes, but if you have the education about how money works, you gain power over it and can begin building wealth.
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This is an awesome read for any small business owners or entrepreneurs who need an assistant, whether in-house or virtual. Virtual freedom is the step-by-step guide every small business owner needs to build his or her business with the asset of working with virtual employees.
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Balanced between work and life is a real challenge for entrepreneurs, especially during the startup phase. It is the bestselling book about how to balance your personal and professional life. It offers timeless advice and personal development tips in areas such as productivity, management of time, and positive thinking.
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If you hate selling, you’d love this book. Does exactly what it says on the tin and more…. If you’re a small business owner, solopreneur or looking for just looking for a little side hustle action, this book is for you. A non-intrusive, altruistic guide on how to sell yourself and your business. No posturing or grandstanding, just simple, effective tips from a super nice guy.
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This book is great for not only CEO’s but even veteran marketing professionals. The reason I like it is that the author Alex Rodriguez simply breaks down all of the essential elements for successful digital marketing campaigns from start to finish. He also includes very valuable tools and resources to accomplish them.
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The book was something of a phenomenon in terms of business self-help books when it was first published in the 1980s and is still relevant today. The seven habits Covey wrote about provide the reader with advice on how to become a successful business leader. The author’s approach revolves around fairness, integrity and everyone getting the best deal. And this is something I firmly believe in, up to the extent that it lies in the core of our 360-Degrees Happiness Philosophy.
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Collins’ book provides a perfect answer to the question entrepreneurs are asking: “How come some companies succeed and others don’t?”. The author participated in a 9-year-long research and he offers an answer to the big question in the form of intriguing stories. In my opinion a large proportion of his advice very practical and applicable, especially in the current volatile market. Following his ideas has not only helped my company to survive in a competitive industry, but also to become a market leader.
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