Are you an entrepreneur searching for how to grow your business? The secret to running a business as an entrepreneur is finding out what works for you. And you can only find out what works for your business when you read a business book. Business books give you insight on how to be more productive, how to push up sales, and give excellent customer service. It’s important as a business owner to be creative and find innovative ways to grow and improve in your business.
To stay ahead in your niche, you need to be abreast with the latest technological trends. According to a study, it has been proved that self-made millionaires read at least 30 minutes a day. This is why business books can help increase your knowledge of business concepts and bend the learning curve in your favour. Business books are great investments, can give you the information you need to start or expand a business, and take your business to the next level.
10 Business Books to Read in 2020 as a Small Business Owner
How to Win Friends and Influence
Building relationships and networking is an important skill every entrepreneur should have if you are looking to expand and grow beyond capacity. Communication and persuasion are more an art than a skill. Reading this book equips you with timeless principles to help you succeed at both. These principles do not revolve around trends or fads, they are just the building blocks of social intelligence, and how practising good social skills can improve the way you interact with your customers and business partners. In this book ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ Dale Carnegie highlights how you can show genuine interest in others, create relationships and influence people to agree with your business solutions. It encourages relationships and is best for beginners.
The Lean Startup
Most times, we often launch businesses or products, we believe can shape the world in a different way, without running a feasibility test to know if that idea is profitable and is what your target niche wants. In this book, Eric Ries elaborates on how today’s entrepreneurs can use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Reading the ‘Lean Startup’ can help aspiring entrepreneurs discover groundbreaking business ideas, and guide them on how to successfully launch as a product or a business. And also, manage it using some innovative approach and tools, while accelerating towards validation and sustainability. The Lean Startup is a book that teaches you how to drive a startup, persevere and grow the business with maximum acceleration. It offers a principled approach to new product development.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
The common issue experienced among small business owners is getting people to know that your product or service exists and buy from you. For a business to grow and be sustainable, you need to hack customer’s growth. In this book, according to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users. The book explores different channels an entrepreneur can use to build a customer base and offers you a framework on how to figure out your business.
Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job
This book written by Sean Wise and Brad Feld highlights the importance of not quitting your day job before you validate your business idea. He stressed how necessary it is for your income from the new business to be sustained, grown and already flowing before thinking of quitting your job. And how unsafe it is to risk everything when you are just starting building your business since there might be a tendency for it to crumble before it stands firm.
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Deep work plays on the idea of chaos and how small business owners manage productivity. It emphasizes on how you can achieve so much in little time and efficiently. It features examples of people who have used similar methods and been successful. The advice is nicely structured in four rules and includes a “training program.
Publish and Profit
In this book, Koenigs talks about how you can gain a competitive edge through writing. It claims that by writing a book, people can connect with their target audience and build credibility in their market. He believes in using bestselling books to drive a position as a thought leader in a particular industry or run a successful business.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
With this book, Horowitz delves deep into difficult moments, mental battles, and stressful situations using his personal business experiences and his time in silicon valley as a case study. It is a realistic view from a successful entrepreneur, and is very personalized, connects to other entrepreneurs running a business.
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
The book, ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ focuses on teaching uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It helps readers understand market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. It narrows ways businesses can be different from their competitors.
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
As a business owner, you probably know how hard it is to manage your income and expenditures. Especially if you don’t have a stable income and it is really hard to predict it. In this book, readers are offered a classic finance manual on how they can control your expenses.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
This book simply highlights the power of disruption, and why market leaders are often set up to fail as technologies and industries change and how businesses can gain sustainability for a long time. It argues that businesses fail to develop these disruptive technologies or embrace them due to the inability of the organization to adapt operationally or technologically.