Start-up business owners encounter many problems with regard to their businesses. Some of them are internal. These include finance, machinery, human resources, etc. Other factors are external and include competition, the state of economy, changing consumer behavior, etc. These are all challenges for these business owners. Here are books that are likely to help them manage their business better.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Timothy Ferriss
In this book, Timothy Ferriss uses an acronym DEAL to represent the main four chapters. The acronym DEAL stands for Definition, Elimination, Automation and Liberation. Definition means your objectives, to set goals, to decide what is important, to overcome fears. Elimination represents the time management, because 80% of your benefits come from 20% of effort. Automation is about to increase your cash flow. Liberation represents freeing yourself from traditional expectations, design the job to increase mobility.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don’t – Jim Collins
Jim Collins defines greatness of a company in terms of its performance. Its performance should be several folds better than market average continuously over a time period. Reading this book, you can know leaders’ the characteristics that enable them to their company from ‘good’ to ‘great’, and hire the right people.
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael E. Gerber
This book helps small start-ups grow the business in an assured and productive way. In this book, Michael E. Gerber walks through the steps in life of a business. It is from the entrepreneurial infancy to mature entrepreneurial perspective through adolescent growing pains. The book is a good guide for all businesses that want to succeed, and shows the lessons to apply the franchising any business (whether or not it is a franchise). The author overlooks the difference between working in your business and working on your business.
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future – Chris Guillebeau
In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau discusses the challenges a small business encounters when starting and growing. This book is a guide for small business start-ups to overcome these challenges. The $100 Startup is the result of research by surveys and hundreds of interviews with startup businesses. Most points in the book are illustrated by examples.
Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion – Gary Vaynerchuk
This book is about knowing your passion and earning profits pursuing it using the Internet. Gary Vaynerchuk says you need to have the passion to make profits. The author emphasizes using online platform and personal branding to promote business. The book is a good guide for people who want to start business promotion through social media tools, to succeed offline or online business.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries
The Lean Startup approach encourages companies that are able to leverage human creativity effectively and are able to use capital more efficiently. This assertion is an inspiration from lean manufacturing. The whole logic of the book depends on rapid scientific experimentation, validated learning, a number of counter initiative practices that can shorten product development cycles without resorting to vanity metrics, measure actual progress, and knowing customers’ real wants. The book helps start-up owners know how to manage their organization better.
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers – Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
The book is a collection of data design and a serious method for business models to create and analyze. The authors have developed a nine point model from their research that includes resources, costs, partnerships, channels, distribution, sources of income, and customer segments. The theory in this book is easy to implement immediately in your business.
The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything – Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki in his The Art of the Start offers with his two decades of business experience a broad range of advice for businesses to run start-ups efficiently. Guy Kawasaki explains the arts of starting, positioning, pitching, writing a business plan, bootstrapping, recruiting, raising capital, partnering, branding, rainmaking and the art of being a person with honesty and honor.
Rework – Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
The book shows you an easier, faster and better way to succeed in business. By reading this you will know about, ignoring competition, why you do not need outside investors, and why plans are harmful. The book explains that you need less than you think, there is no need to be a workaholic, no need to staff up, no need to waste time on meetings and paperwork, but you need to stop talking and start working. This book shows the way to be more productive and other ideas that will prompt and inspire you.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
Some organization and people are more profitable, more influential, more innovative than others. Some command greater loyalty from employees and customers. Among the successful people only a few are able to repeat their success again and again.
Simon Sinek has found in his study on leaders (those who have had greatest influence in the world) that they all communicate, act and think in exactly the same way, and what everyone else does is exactly the opposite. The book provides a framework upon which people can be inspired, movements can be led, and organizations can be built. It all starts with why.
The books discussed help start-up business owners get a positive perspective to approach the diverse challenges they encounter.