Tag: predictable success

Business, Financial and Self-Help Books

In the previous post, I listed out the 72 books that I read in 2017. In this post, I continue my analysis of them. I won’t address every book, more the groups of them, with some call-outs to the most impactful.

(That being said, if you have questions about any one, feel free to ask in the comments below.)

My biggest category was business…

13 Business Books

  1. The Great Disruption by Rick Smith with Mitch Free
  2. Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! by Greg Crabtree
  3. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and J.J. Sutherland
  4. Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker
  5. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  6. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
  7. Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
  8. Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
  9. The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
  10. Predictable Success by Les McKeown
  11. No by Jim Camp
  12. The Synergist by Les McKeown
  13. Key Performance Metrics by Bernard Marr

Business is a broad category, and these books run the gamut.

Predictable Success as the most impactful as it changed how I look at business, as well as giving a big picture gameplan that has already turned out useful. I wrote about Predictable Success in this previous post.

Though not on the same level, The Synergist, his follow-up title was also good.

Who by Smart and Street was another impactful read. This details an extensive hiring system, proven to work great, that we have starting using as best as we could at Lost Empire Herbs.

Another favorite was Hacking Marketing. This came right after Scrum and is about that same topic. However reading the former was more applicable to me, using it inside marketing team, rather than in software development, where it was created. This is still an aspirational read as we haven’t quite got there, but the idea of it excites me.

No by Jim Camp was another great one. Famous email marketer Ben Settle kept talking about it and I see why. I haven’t studied negotiation much at all. But I applied just a few principles from this book and landed a high-dollar client without really even trying, by going for the no.

5 Financial Books

In the past, as I detail in the introduction for my money system book, I’ve read a lot about the topic. Now, not so much. Most of these occurred after I had purchased a home and wanted to expand in some new areas.

  1. Succeed and Grow Rich through Persuasion by Napoleon Hill
  2. The Sale of a Lifetime by Harry S. Dent Jr.
  3. The Last Safe Investment by Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg
  4. Automatic Wealth by Michael Masterson
  5. Buffettology by Mary Buffett and David Clark

Of these, The Last Safe Investment was the most different. Really the concepts transcend age, but especially for any young person looking for an alternative path the the classic college route, this would be a great read. This book challenges conventional wisdom, which makes it great (since so much convention is wrong).

8 Self-Help Books

Self Help Books

  1. The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope
  2. The Book of Joy by Douglas Adams, Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
  3. How to Live a Good Life by Jonathan Fields
  4. Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal
  5. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
  6. Essentialism by Greg McKeown
  7. The Art of Living by Bob Proctor
  8. The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

Looking at it again, I lumped all these into self-help when it really covers a wide variety of things.

Tools of Titans covers lots of major topics so I just lumped it in here. As that is a collection of wisdom from many people, distilled down, I found a lot of useful bits in there.

My favorite of this group was The Great Work of Your Life. This was recommended over and over by Yanik Silver. (Actually half of these books came from him and other Mavericks!) This book is great for you finding more of your purpose or calling in life. I will likely re-read this one over time as there are lots of great stories and ideas in it.

More next time…

Predictable Success

I read lots of books. When that happens you often come across books that leave you thinking “I wish I had read that earlier.” Or even a stronger feeling of “WHY WAS I NOT TOLD ABOUT THIS SOONER?!?”

Predictable Success by Les McKeown was such a book for me. (If that name looks familiar, I mentioned him in the previous post, talking about his second book.)

A big thank you to Michael Danner, CMO of DrAxe.com, for mentioning this book while speaking on stage at Ezra Firestone’s Blue Ribbon Mastermind.

In this book, Les describes the life-cycle of any business, and their movement through seven stages.

Businesses must move through these stages in order, except that they can go backwards too, and most businesses don’t make their way through all seven.

Predictable Success
The Seven Stages as outlined in Predictable Success

I’ll briefly describe each one of these stages here:

Early Struggle – The start-up phase where the business seeks to make sales and cash. To go from idea to proof of concept in the marketplace. Many businesses never get past this point.

Fun – Like the name implies this stage is a lot of fun. You’re making sales. You’re meeting the demands of the market place. There’s a flurry of activity and the business can pivot on a dime. Often just a few people are involved.

White Water – The business grows to the point where it begins to get chaotic. More people, more operations. It becomes a battle of constantly fighting fires. This is where systems must come in.

Predictable Success – The best stage to be at. As the title implies it is both successful and you can predict it will continue to be. Not based off of people working 20 hour days, but by different people properly and predictably fulfilling their roles. This means the business sets goals, and hits them. Of course, there are still fires to put out, but things run smoothly based on systems and processes, while the business continues to grow.

Treadmill – Here, the business becomes over reliant on those same processes and loses that entrepreneurial spark. In fact, for many businesses this is the stage when the founders leave and the environment becomes much more corporate.

The Big Rut – This is a continuation of the above, except at this stage it has gone on too long, so that the business cannot recover, not by itself.

Death Rattle – There is usually a brief flurry of activity before the end. Perhaps the business is acquired, or tries to be so. Perhaps there is an attempt at restructuring or bankruptcy. Many just fade away.

How Do My Businesses Stack Up?

The reason I loved this book so much is that I can see in my career how I’ve moved through some of these earlier stages.

Lost Empire Herbs is the best example.

It’s startup involved being an outgrowth of Legendary Strength. A new website, finding a couple suppliers, and then selling some herbs from the kitchen table. It couldn’t have started on less of a shoestring. It went on like this for almost two years before we hit our stride.

The fun stage can really be marked as when we got our first office, officially formed a new LLC for the business. Shortly after this we got our first employees. It seemed like sales were growing by at least 20% each month, sometimes more.

Unfortunately, the Fun didn’t last too long. A few office moves, some changes in management and we landed in Whitewater. I’m very intimate with this stage because we’ve been living it the past few years now.

(The feeling of “Why was I not told about this sooner?!?” is because if I had this as a roadmap I believe we could have gotten to the next stage much faster.)

Legendary Strength itself has never moved past the Fun stage. The typical internet business based on cash flow and lifestyle actually aims only to get to this stage and stay here. It is purposefully kept simple to be a so-called lifestyle business. Nowadays I see this and aim to keep it that way. Previously, I didn’t know the difference.

Thus, with Lost Empire I was completely unprepared for the new things I had to learn with a “real business.” Thankfully, I’m good at learning, and beyond books, have lots of smart people that have done these sorts of things to learn from.

And we had a lot to learn. Here were a few of the activities of the past couple years:

  • Bookkeeping and how good finances work.
  • How to systematize and SOP the business.
  • Hiring and onboarding employees.
  • HR stuff such as insurance, payroll, firing, etc.
  • How to run more complex operations
  • Standardizing things so that it’s not all different
  • Good project management
  • And plenty more

I feel like right now we are just emerging from White Water into Predictable Success. It’s a good feeling. In fact, I feel so strongly about it that it has become Lost Empire’s theme for Q4 that just began.

Before I read this book, I was engaged in many of the things needed to do so. But it would have been nice to know about whitewater before I even got in it. Oh well, at least I’ll know this for next time…