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Six Small Business Books To Enlighten Even The Savviest Entrepreneurs

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One of the most fun things, but also most frustrating, about entrepreneurship is that there is never a shortage of areas to learn about, strengthen and develop. Even when business is going well and you’re loving what you do, you should think about selling. Even if you think you have all of your intellectual property protected, you probably overlooked at least one area to fortify – mistakes can be trade secrets! Even if your pipeline is full and you’re a known expert in what you do, you are still losing ground just due to natural market forces. The notion of preparing to sell a business you never intend to sell, to lock down mistakes like intellectual property, or to proactively manage for your inevitable downfall are just three critical areas even savvy entrepreneurs may overlook. Here are six new books to help you think differently about your small business:

Exit Signs: The Expressway to Selling Your Company with Pride and Profit by Pamela Dennis

Are you sellable? Even if you don’t intend to sell, Dennis outlines what you need to have in place in order to do so. That preparation will improve your business regardless of how you decide to exit, if ever. It will also expand your thinking about next steps for your business and your life.

Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage by James Pooley

What is your intellectual property? Pooley has covered trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and other ways of protecting intellectual property for decades, and while this sounds like an esoteric subject, the book is accessible and entertaining even while imparting important business information.

So what exactly is a trade secret? The short answer is: anything you don’t want the competition to know…The most seemingly trivial things can qualify….your knowledge of an important customer’s favorite wine…may seem relatively unimportant to you. You may have spent little or no money or effort coming up with the information. Indeed, you may have discovered it by chance. However, it is yours, and it gives you an advantage over your competition. – James Pooley, in Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage

Magnetic: The Art of Attracting Business by Joe Calloway

Are you doing all you can to keep customers coming back and to encourage customers to share their positive experiences with others? While this book covers word-of-mouth referrals specifically, it also covers marketing and performance quality more broadly,

Never stop improving. My guess is that almost all of the people who claim that they are always improving really aren’t. They may be thinking about it, and I’ll be they’re talking about it, but they’re probably not really doing it – Joe Calloway, from Magnetic: The Art of Attracting Business

Unscalable by Charlie Guo

Is your business scalable? You might want to think again after reading this collection of stories about businesses that were able to scale complex, hands-on processes and services. I particularly liked the thread of how all of the businesses were incredibly inefficient to start and had to execute manually with lots of sweat equity before figuring out where and how to automate.

Always focus on the next order of magnitude. Don’t overthink growth or scalability. Don’t be worried about your thousandth user when you don’t have your _ rst. And don’t be worried about your millionth user before you have your hundred thousandth. You shouldn’t try to build for success you don’t have. It’s much better to be so successful that you can’t keep up, you can’t keep the website up, rather than being stuck with a product that scales to ten million users when you have ten thousand. – Charlie Guo, on the story of TeeSpring in Unscalable

An Entrepreneur’s Manifesto by Steve Mariotti

What is the larger purpose, not just for your business, but for you as a business person? In the case of Mariotti, his business, Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) is promoting business opportunity for all, especially at-risk youth who might otherwise not have considered entrepreneurship. When you read Mariotti’s excitement about entrepreneurship and the importance of entrepreneurial access for everyone you can’t help but look more expansively about what role you can play to make as much of a difference.

Resiliency and flexibility are emerging as key twenty-first-century virtues. Supporting an entrepreneurial personality should be one of the primary goals of education at all levels. We are all entrepreneurs in the sense that we all sell our time, and we all must learn to bounce back from failure and adapt rapidly to change. – Steve Mariotti, from An Entrepreneur’s Manifesto

Expect A Miracle: A Mother’s Talke of Brotherly Love, Faith and the Race That Changed A Family’s Life by Jenny Long and Bob Der

What can you learn in unexpected places? Expect A Miracle is not a business book, but it is about leadership by example of a different kind. It tells the story of a family helmed by a high school dropout mother, married to a convicted felon, with two sons, one disabled. The brothers entered triathlons together and became the Sports Illustrated Kids’ SportsKids of the Year. When you need a real-life example of grit and resilience and a reminder that, if you think you have it bad, you really don’t, this is a breezy, inspirational read. The fact that it’s about life challenges not business and models kids not adults is also a great reminder that business lessons are everywhere – are you paying attention to all the opportunities to learn?

Caroline is the author of Jump Ship: 10 Steps To Starting A New Career. She has coached executives from American Express, Citigroup, Condé Nast, Gilt, Goldman Sachs, Google, McKinsey, and other leading firms.

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