11 Books that will help Entrepreneurs take control of their Startup!
Nothing in the world can replace the wisdom that exists in books.
Lots of new businesses open their doors each year, and while it’s an exciting time for owners, it’s also the most difficult. A third of these businesses won’t survive two years, and half won’t make it to the five-year mark. After 10 years, only a third remain. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, these numbers are similar across a wide variety of industries.
The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that there are nearly 30 million small businesses in the U.S. employing around 57 million people. The owners of all these businesses must overcome common obstacles that exist independent of their specific industries.
When running a small business, the most valuable resource is almost always time. The multitude of small, time-consuming headaches owners have to deal with often compound into large-scale nightmares. While entrepreneurs might think they need to accept some of these hassles as part of the job description, there are easier and better ways to handle them. Here are some books that will help you in your entrepreneurial journey!
1. Meaningful Work: A Quest to Do Great Business, Find Your Calling, and Feed Your Soul
The founder and CEO of Askinosie Chocolate, an award-winning craft chocolate factory, shows readers how he discovered the secret to purposeful work and business — and how we can too, no matter what work we do.
Askinosie Chocolate is a small-batch, award winning chocolate company widely considered to be a vanguard in the industry. Known for sourcing 100% of his cocoa beans directly from farmers across the globe, Shawn Askinosie has pioneered direct trade and profit sharing in the craft chocolate industry with farmers in Tanzania, Ecuador, and the Philippines. In addition to developing relationships with smallholder farmers, the company also partners with schools in their origin communities to provide lunch to 1,600 children every day with no outside donations. Twenty-five years ago, Shawn Askinosie was a successful criminal defense lawyer trying his first murder death penalty case that would later go on to become a Dateline special. For many years he found law satisfying, but after several high profile trials he reached a breaking point and found solace in the search for a new career.
In this inspiring guide to discovering a vocation that feeds your heart and soul, Askinosie describes his quest to discover more meaningful work — a search that led him to volunteering in the palliative care wing of a hospital, to a Trappist monastery where he became inspired by the monks focus on “being” rather than “doing,” and eventually traipsing through jungles across the globe in search of excellent cocoa bean farmers to make award winning chocolate. Askinosie shares his hard-won insights into doing work that reflects one’s values and purpose in life. He shares with readers visioning tools that can be used in any industry or field to create a work life that is inspired and fulfilling. Askinosie shows us that everyone has the capacity to find meaning in their work and be a positive force for good in the world.
2. T Is for Transformation: Unleash the 7 Superpowers to Help You Dig Deeper, Feel Stronger, and Live Your Best Life
As a fitness icon and motivational mastermind, Shaun has helped millions of people transform their bodies and their lives through his Hip Hop Abs, INSANITY, and CIZE workouts. But people who think of Shaun as just a workout force are missing something. He has always focused on building inner strength first, then moving to the exterior. And that inner focus started in his own life. He became the man and motivator he is today after escaping from the abuse he suffered as a child, and fighting his way back from a 50-pound weight gain in his early 20s. He knows firsthand that you can’t drop weight or enjoy better health until you overcome the mental obstacles that cause bad choices in the first place.
In T is for Transformation, Shaun unveils the 7 transformational principles that guided his progress through life and that are at the core of his incredibly successful workouts. T is for Transformation is a motivational master class as Shaun shows you how to become more flexible and resourceful, give everything you’ve got, and, most importantly, trust and believe in your path to success. The only real obstacles in life are the mental ones, and T is for Transformation can train you to achieve astonishing results in your own life, just as Shaun has in his.
3. The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder’s Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.
Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term.
The Founder’s Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.
People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.
4. Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship
Tired of sleepwalking through a mediocre life bribed by mindless video-gaming, redemptive weekends, and a scant paycheck from a soul-suffocating job? Welcome to the SCRIPTED club — where membership is neither perceived or consented.
The fact is, ever since you’ve been old enough to sit obediently in a classroom, you have been culturally engineered for servitude, unwittingly enslaved into a Machiavellian system where illusionary rules go unchallenged, sanctified traditions go unquestioned, and lifelong dreams go unfulfilled. As a result, your life is hijacked and marginalised into debt, despair, and dependence. Life’s death sentence becomes the daily curse of the trivial and mundane. Fun fades. Dreams die. Don’t let life’s consolation prize become a car and a weekend.
Recapture what is yours and make a revolutionary repossession of life-and-liberty through the pursuit of entrepreneurship. A paradigm shift isn’t needed — the damn paradigm needs to be thrown-out altogether.
The truth is, if you blindly follow conventional wisdom pushed by conventional people living conventional lives, can you expect to be anything but conventional? Rewrite life’s script: ditch the job, give Wall Street the bird, and escape the insanity of trading your life away for a paycheck and an elderly promise called retirement.
UNSCRIPT today and start leading life — instead of life leading you.
5. Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup
Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special — they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply.
You will learn:
- Why the “F” word — focus — is crucial to a startup’s success
- Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face — and how to overcome them
- How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd — it’s not just about technology
Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want.
Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
6. Entrepreneurship: A Real-World Approach
With millions of people launching their businesses each year, entrepreneurs & small business owners are making a greater impact than ever before on the economy and are finally gaining the recognition they deserve. But many people struggle to get started, waste time reinventing the wheel as they launch their businesses, or need inspiration to help push them to the next level. As a best-selling author and syndicated columnist on small business matters, Rhonda Abrams, CEO of PlanningShop, has written the book on entrepreneurship to address all of these issues — Entrepreneurship: A Real-World Approach.
Whether readers dream of launching their own ventures, are new entrepreneurs, or have been in business for years, Entrepreneurship: A Real-World Approach provides everything they need to know to start and run a successful business — from idea formation and feasibility analysis, to launching the venture, growing the business, and even making a successful exit. The hands-on approach of the second-edition of this jam-packed guide helps entrepreneurs think through their businesses and take steps immediately to help move their vision from dream to reality.
It features dozens of worksheets and checklists to kick start the process and includes inspiring real-world cases in each chapter to show how real entrepreneurs, out in the trenches, have overcome common obstacles. And critical thinking exercises recap each chapter’s core objectives. NEW IN THIS EDITION: crowd funding and new ways to raise money; disruptive industries; minimal viable product, lean start-up, and innovation; expanded ethics and social responsibility; updated real-world cases; revised critical thinking exercises.
7. The Myth of the Idea and the Upsidedown Startup: How Assumption-Based Entrepreneurship Has Lost Ground to Resource-Based Entrepreneurship
Based on decades of global insights into the life of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs, Professor Campos deconstructs the myth that successful startups are built upon great ideas, once and for all proving the vast majority of aspiring entrepreneurs are positioned to explore their potential before having a specific idea in mind for a new venture.
In a friendly yet defiant and inverted manner, the book starts with the traditional end — by drawing a supported conclusion about modern entrepreneurial endeavors. Professor Campos then succinctly navigates through real cases and recent powerful concepts such as Design Thinking, Effectuation and Lean Startup, in an audacious quest to explain why execution is emerging as the main source of entrepreneurial achievement around the world.
The Upsidedown approach is presented in a conversational tone, allowing readers to discover an entrepreneurial process based on their ability to explore existing resources and social connections, thus debunking the myth that the idea is the crucial first step.
8. Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business Into an Enduring Great Company
“This is a hands-on guide to making your company a compelling marketplace force.” — Industry Week
Every great company, no matter how large or small, has as its core a compelling vision. Beyond Entrepreneurship explains step by step how any firm can develop this vision and achieve enduring greatness. It provides a complete blueprint for steering your company to success.
Packed with real-world examples of firms that have grown and attained corporate greatness — including Nike, L.L. Bean, Mrs. Fields’ Cookies, Sony, and FedEx — this inspirational yet practical book . . .
- Covers in depth the five key elements common to all great enduring companies
- Shows how to lay a foundation for greatness while a company is still small and adaptable . . . how to set values, purpose, and mission, and instill them into the very roots of your organization
- Demonstrates how to develop the most effective leadership style for your specific situation
- Shows how to translate vision into effective day-to-day business tactics -and how to foster consistent tactical excellence in everything your company does
- Explains how to resolve the critical strategic issues faced by every small and mid-sized firm
- Prevents a set of concepts — and a host of practical techniques — for stimulating creativity and maintaining innovation as the company evolves
9. No Dead Monkeys: The Communications Survival Guide for Startups
No Dead Monkeys is the essential communications handbook for startups. In clear, easy to understand language, authors Jeremy Kirk and Jonathan Englert deliver a step-by-step approach that will help your venture use communication to thrive from Day One while sidestepping catastrophe along the way.
10. Startup Evolution Curve From Idea to Profitable and Scalable Business: Startup Marketing Manual
It’s like an IKEA guide for building your next startup. Based on research of 1,447 startups and highly recommended by more than 30 international experts. It’s not a book you read in a day, but like a manual you take with you and consult from time to time. Every startup founder should have it on the desk!
Shows The Way
Donatas Jonikas (PhD) provides clear and actionable guidelines for what to do next if you want to transform your innovative ideas into profitable and scalable startup business:
- What should be done and why it is needed
- Actionable steps how to start a startup
- Examples from real case startups
- References for further reading
- Templates and swipe files for download
Saves Your Time
This step-by-step guide is designed for people who don’t have time and want to take action right now. If this describes you, here is how you should use this book:
- Choose one of the five startup development stages you are currently most interested in
- Review the topics to get of what should be done in that stage
- Review the “how to do it” infographic at the beginning of the topic and follow the instructions
Covers All That’s Necessary
The concept of Startup Evolution Curve has five stages with seven lessons (or tasks to be done) in each. This is a comprehensive manual with 35 lessons on startup marketing strategy and implementation that expands the lean startup methodology by covering:
- Feasibility study
- Hypotheses and experiments
- Fundraising
- Product launch
- Growth hacking
Provides Additional Resources for FREE
- 20 templates and swipe files for download
- Online video course on how to create an irresistible offer (growth hack #1)
- Invitation to join the group of like-minded startup entrepreneurs
Having even great startup business ideas is not enough anymore. All startup ideas need verification from the market and this is one of the most comprehensive marketing books explaining how to do that. Startup Evolution Curve goes beyond the lean startup, minimal viable product and customer development concepts and provides clear, easy to follow instructions on building an innovative start up business.
WARNING: it’s dangerous to focus on startup growth hacking until you’ve implemented core steps from this marketing manual on how to start a startup!
11. The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from Their Founding Entrepreneurs
According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, more than 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010 in the United States alone — each one of them hoping to strike gold. The Startup Playbook will help them succeed. Going insider to insider with unprecedented access, New York Times best selling author and Clickable CEO, David Kidder, shares the hard-hitting experiences of some of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs and CEOs, revealing their most closely held advice. Face-to-face interviews with 40 founders give readers key insights into what it took to build PayPal, LinkedIn, AOL, TED, Flickr, and many others into household names. Special sections include topics ranging from how to select the right idea to pursue to finding funding and overcoming inevitable obstacles. In an economy demanding change, The Startup Playbook is the go-to for entrepreneurs big and small.
