The past few years have brought plenty of changes to our everyday lives. We’ve learned to think, behave, and work differently. Some have chosen to follow their passions outside of their regular office hours, and others were forced to reinvent themselves, having lost their jobs. As a result, the number of small businesses and young entrepreneurs in Canada has grown significantly.
If you’re an entrepreneur yourself, you must already know that running a company is no joke. New challenges come up no matter how many years of experience you have under your belt. The nature of this business requires that you continually develop new skills and improve on the ones you already have.
There’s no better way to do that than learning from others, their strategies, achievements, and mistakes. Luckily for you, many have documented their entrepreneurial experiences and the knowledge they’ve picked up along the way in books. Stay with us and discover five must-read books for entrepreneurs and how they can help you on your path to success.
The first on our best business books for entrepreneurs list is Traction by Gino Wickman. It was initially published in 2010 as the first in a series. This book and said series promise to help you wrap your head around EOS, learn about the tools and concepts behind this strategy, and implement it in practice.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. It’s a business system created by Wickman to help business owners and their employees come to a better understanding and work together more successfully. It’s meant to help with organization, communication, planning, problem-solving, prioritizing, taking the lead, and many other vital aspects of business.
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business outlines six key components crucial to EOS and explains how you can use them to your advantage. It dismantles an outdated system that’s fixed, rigid, and based on preconceived ideas and implements a flexible business model. It allows you to find what works for your business, create your own business culture, and set and reach your own goals.
Implementing Value Pricing by Ronald J. Baker sits in second place on our top five best self-help books for entrepreneurs. It was written by a best-selling author who has a background in business advisory services and is the founder of VeraSage Institute. The book was first published in 2010.
According to numerous experts, value Pricing is one of the best finance books for entrepreneurs you can find today. The book delves into customer orientation, economic theory, service positioning, value identification, and pricing strategy. It’s a blend of theoretical knowledge, tactics, and practical examples.
Baker wrote the book hoping to show you why the old business model of pricing based solely on effort and time invested in creating a product doesn’t work. It outlines a business model that will help you focus on and identify the value of the product/service you’re providing and determine the price that way. The book also conveys how cost-effective that strategy can be and highlights the companies already using this system successfully.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries comes third on our list as a book on business development strategy that has taken the new entrepreneurs’ world by storm. It was written by an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author who has worked with big companies like Toyota and General Electric as a business consultant.
The Lean Startup introduces a business strategy that helps new entrepreneurs get off the ground quicker. Its mission is to help you reduce wasteful practices, and skip over the initial business-establishment stages spent on research, product perfecting, and business plan creation. This book shows entrepreneurs how to run a successful business simply by developing their products and collecting customer feedback.
By using the Lean Startup method, Ries enables new entrepreneurs to minimize risks that are generally considered inseparable from the process of opening a business. He assures you that you’ll have less to lose if you start by releasing your MVP (minimal viable product), continue experimenting while your business is running, and learn through your customers’ feedback.
SPIN Selling is the oldest but, at the same time, one of the most relevant books we’re recommending in this article. It was written by Neil Rackman, the former president and founder of the Huthwaite corporation and initially published in 1988.
If your line of work is related to sales and marketing, this book can be of great value to you.
It was written based on thorough research and analysis of over 35,000 sales calls conducted worldwide by top sales teams. Rackman used this research to create and outline the so-called SPIN strategy that rests on four core elements — Situation, Problem, Implication, Need.
SPIN selling defines the techniques you can use to increase sales, shows why conventional methods often don’t work, and backs all that theory with hard data.
We’re ending our must-read books for entrepreneurs list with a new addition to the field of entrepreneurial literature. Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin P. Hardy was published in 2020. Sullivan is a co-founder of Strategic Coach, an entrepreneurial coaching program, while Hardy is an organizational psychologist and author of numerous best-selling books.
This book highlights the value of teamwork and the benefits of entrusting others with tasks that you would not be able to accomplish alone. It posits that entrepreneurs figuring out how to solve problems by acquiring new skills from scratch is a huge problem in the field. It then offers a remedy to this problem in the form of a strategy based on the question: “who can do this for me?”
Who Not Why shows how you can save time, build talented and competent teams, focus on your goals, and run your business more effectively simply by implementing the strategy we’ve mentioned.
What is your favourite business book? Have you read a book where you experienced a sudden insight or understaning of your business? Let us know.
_______________________________________________________________
Schedule a call today with one of our team members to discuss your accounting or tax needs – For More Details, Click Here.
_______________________________________________________________
This blog is not meant to provide specific advice or opinions regarding the topic(s) discussed above. Should you have a question about your specific situation, please discuss it with your GBA advisor.
GBA LLP is a full-service accounting firm in the Greater Toronto Area, but we primarily service all of Ontario as well as the rest of Canada virtually, except Quebec. Our team of over 30, provides Audits and Reviews of financial statements, and Compilations of financial information, as well as corporate tax returns. We provide specialized corporate tax and succession planning for small and medium businesses, in addition to general advisory services.
If you would like to schedule a call to discuss your accounting or tax needs with one of our team members, please complete the free no obligation meeting request on this page.
0 Comments
