Starting a business is hard enough, but building it up to be successful is an even greater challenge. Many business owners find themselves in an awkward position after getting off the ground, not knowing how to take their operation to the next level. Getting stuck in the startup phase is easier to do than most people might believe, which is why it’s important to understand how to navigate growing your business to new heights.
Each book on this list functions as a roadmap for doing just that—growing your business. With proven tips and tricks on planning and executing a growth strategy, these authors have business knowledge invaluable to those hoping to succeed. A great leader knows that no matter where your business might be on the timeline, there is always an opportunity to learn and grow.
1. Esther Kestenbaum Prozan — Bigger and Better
Small and medium-sized businesses grapple with the false mindset that growth is only possible with large amounts of capital. This mindset is often accompanied by the false belief that it’s impossible to grow lean, fast, and well. The statistics are clear—a shift in this mindset is imperative to achieving sustainable growth.
In Bigger and Better: A Playbook for Quickly Scaling Your Small Company with Limited Resources, multi-industry C-suite executive Esther Kestenbaum Prozan shares her proven system for creating lean, exponential growth. She discusses the importance of knowing where you fit in your industry, focusing on non-transactional sales, practicing radical generosity, future-proofing your customers’ needs, and taking a disciplined approach to every aspect of business.
Bigger and Better teaches that even a small business with limited resources can achieve remarkable growth; it all begins with embracing a radically different mindset. This book is a valuable resource of practical, real-world tactics that any business can put into practice to achieve sustainable growth.
2. Michael Bernard — Creating Strategy
Before even thinking about scaling your business, you need to lay out a plan and adhere to it carefully. It’s not enough to have the passion and the drive to see your business through to the next stage; you need to think through the decisions you plan to make before the time comes.
Michael Bernard speaks on this type of wisdom in his book Creating Strategy: A Practical Guide. Here, Bernard seeks to walk business owners through generating a sound business strategy and what to do when roadblocks occur. To Bernard, the focus is on finding ways to make a plan for the future of your business and embedding that plan into the very fiber of the company.
Some of the strategy elements he shares in his work include building a strong mission for your business as it enters a time of change and customizing your plan to fit your goals. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but Creating Strategy outlines certain ideas that all businesses should consider when entering growth periods.
3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares — Traction
A business is nothing without consumers willing to patronize it. It’s fundamental in the business process to know how to actually get the product or service into the hands of the people who want to pay money for it.
In Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, the duo dives into how to reach your audience. Weinberg and Mares explain that the biggest pitfall for startups trying to upscale their business is a lack of depth among their base of customers.
Traction spends time explaining how to reach and retain new groups of customers to continue sustainable growth. It’s perhaps more niche than some of the other books on this list, but it’s an indispensable guide for any startup working on moving up the ladder.
4. Eric Ries — The Lean Startup
Knowing you want to grow your business is one thing, but knowing how to keep it manageable is another. Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a classic rulebook on how to grow business steadily and manageably.
In his book, Ries discusses how to grow any business through an analysis of what its most important mechanisms are and how to optimize them. This book has stood the test of time as one of the definitive pieces on how to trim the excess weight off a business.
The Lean Startup contains several important practices that can help steer any business toward efficiency. Some of the qualities you’ll find here include how to reduce turnaround on new innovations, reach new customer markets, and stay under budget.
Building Knowledge for Sustainable Growth
Growing a business from infancy to a state of sustainable success is a challenge to even the most seasoned entrepreneurs. The reality is that many founders never make it past the startup phase. Fortunately, there are invaluable lessons that can be learned from other seasoned entrepreneurs. These books act as a reminder that irrespective of where your business stands on its timeline, there is always room to learn and grow. By absorbing the knowledge within these pages, any aspiring entrepreneur can chart a course towards sustainable success.
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