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How's it going everyone? Welcome back to another video with me, Jamie Simpson. I help systemize and scale businesses doing between 1 million and 10 million in revenue, and these are the 11 books that I recommend most to small business owners that are trying to grow their own empire.
So let's start with book number one. Here we go!
Number one: It's probably my favorite book of all time, "Papillon." Now, although not a traditional business book, it's a book that I recommend to all entrepreneurs. It's about overcoming obstacles, beating the odds, keeping your eye on the prize, and just keep grinding and grinding and grinding until you win. There have been a couple of films on this book; I believe one was an Oscar winner back in the 70s, and there was one a few years ago, but nothing actually beats the detail, the characters, and the adversity in the book itself. So number one is my favorite: "Papillon."
Number two is "Chop Wood, Carry Water." It's a really, really small book, a nice quick read, but it's essential for all business owners. It reminds you to go back to basics, focus on what you can control, and execute on small, chunked-down action steps instead of constantly chasing the big goal. Just chunk things down, go back to basics, and execute on the small actionable steps that you're in control of every single day. Sometimes when I start to feel overwhelmed in business, I go back to this book as a really nice refresher to remind me that everything is in my control and to just take things down into actionable steps.
Number three is "Delivering Happiness: The Zappos Story" by Tony Hsieh. This book is essential for any business owner that truly cares about their customers or their clients. Zappos was a small online shoe company that Tony Hsieh invested everything into. He sold all of his assets—his properties, his cars—and he put everything into this business. The model of the business was to focus on customer success and company culture rather than just making money. Eventually, this company that struggled year after year exited to Amazon for nearly $900 million due to the strength of the company culture and the way they looked after their customers.
A great example of what's in this book about culture is how Zappos would offer new employees $2,000 to quit, to see if they were really bought into the culture or not. They wanted to weed out all the people that weren't there for the right reasons, and over a period of time, these small little changes compounded and compounded, and they ended up with a fantastic workforce that put their customers first.
Number four is "75 Hard" by Andy Frisella. Now, Andy Frisella has one of the most successful business podcasts of all time. He's got a huge company worth over a billion pounds, where he's never had any external investment, and he's in great shape. He’s got a business full of employees who really buy into his culture and the company brand, so he's someone that I really aspire to be like. He created the program "75 Hard" when he wanted to fix the mental challenges he was having because, although successful in business, he felt like he wasn't fulfilling his potential. He was stress eating and wasn't doing the things that he preached to other people to make them feel good about themselves.
So he created "75 Hard," which is a mental toughness program rather than a physical transformation program that everybody thinks it is. The steps in "75 Hard" are: you have to do two 45-minute workouts a day, one of which has to be outside; you have to take a progress picture every day; drink 4 liters of water a day; and read 10 pages of a self-help or business book. And now you've got 11 of them to work your way through. You also can’t drink alcohol, and you have to stick to a food plan of your choice. I'm actually on this plan at the moment; I'm on day 27, and the difference is just unbelievable.
It's the mental clarity; you wake up feeling excited about the day, and you go to bed feeling like you're a winner because you've executed on all the tasks. Ultimately, you're keeping the promises that you tell yourself, which builds self-esteem and makes you feel good about yourself. This book outlines step by step every aspect of the program, the benefits of it, and probably how you're going to feel throughout the program through certain different phases. Having done the program a couple of times myself and being on it now, I can attest that this book is a fantastic book to help you improve your mental toughness and make you have better self-esteem through executing on the promises that you set for yourself every single day.
Number five: "Go Do Deals" by Jeremy Harbour. Now, Jeremy is a mentor of mine and has turned into a friend of mine as well. He's a very successful gentleman who made his money buying and selling businesses. In this book, he outlines the different structures that he uses to acquire these businesses, what he does with them once he buys them, and then how he goes about generating shareholder value by selling the businesses.
The reason I love this book is because of the detail he goes into and gives us a bit of his backstory. Jeremy is one of those people who has inspired me to not just share their success—because he is very successful—but to also share his failures and how he uses those failures to structure deals moving forward so he never makes the same mistake twice. That's why I love this book: "Go Do Deals."
Number six: "Man Up" by Bedros Kullian. Now, Bedros is an Armenian immigrant who moved to LA, and he always aspired to be a successful business person. He achieved a little bit of success, but one day he woke up and realized that he perhaps didn't have the success that he wanted. He wasn't as financially secure as he envisioned, and he was out of shape. So he went through a step-by-step process to get himself and his business not to the next level, but to multiple levels.
That's why I like this book; it covers mindset, marketing, business strategy, and also the benefits of fitness and how they help business and your mindset. Quite similar to the previous book, "75 Hard." So I highly recommend "Man Up" by Bedros Kullian. It's only a short read, but there are lots of actionable points in this book for anyone that owns a small business.
Number seven is "An Extravagant Life" by Aristotle Onassis. Onassis is one of my business heroes; in fact, I've even got his name tailored inside one of my suits. In the 60s, he was the richest man in the world, and he did that by thinking big, constantly dreaming, and always wanting more. He ended up marrying Jackie Kennedy and lived on a huge, glamorous yacht. He was one of the first people that owned a super yacht in the world that he used to travel from country to country, mainly to avoid tax.
There's a famous quote by Aristotle that I use in business: "There is only one rule: there are no rules." So, if you want to do your research on one of the wealthiest men in the history of the world, give this book a read.
Number eight is an absolute classic for anybody that wants to fulfill their potential: "The Magic of Thinking Big." This book is all about mindset, but it doesn't just talk about mindset; it gives you a step-by-step action plan on how to personalize your goals, your plans, your dreams, and have actionable steps along the way to implement them. I try and read this book about once a year just for a refresh. It's an absolute classic for a reason, and I highly recommend it to anyone that owns a business.
Number nine is "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant." Now, this book is interesting because it's not written by Naval, but because he has got so much wisdom out there, a couple of other people decided to actually get it published and put it in a book. Extremely, extremely clever gentleman. He's an investor and an angel investor over in the States, but this book focuses on three different aspects of life: wealth, happiness, and philosophy.
One of my favorite quotes from this book is, "A goal is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you achieve it." So you need to be very careful with the goals that you set, and that's always stuck with me. This is a fantastic book for anybody that wants to level up personally, improve their skill sets, and really generate some wealth rather than just some cash flow. I'm sure you would have heard quite a few aspects of this book already because I know Alex Hormozi is a big fan of his and regurgitates a lot of his stuff.
Number ten is the one most people would never expect. Now, I'm not a big tennis fan, and I've never been an Agassi fan; however, this book has been recommended to me by multiple CEOs of big companies, so I thought I'd give it a go. Agassi was made to play tennis by his dad, so he never really enjoyed it. Although he was successful—number one in the world, rich, and had glamorous girlfriends—he felt empty and started to spiral out of control.
This led to him smoking crack and dropping to number 300 in the world. That's about halfway through the book; you think, where's this going? But then he chunks things down to basics again—there's a theme here of all these books—and he reinvents himself. He starts setting daily goals; he sets the goal to become number one again, but this time on his terms, not because his dad wants him to do it. He documents step by step how he does this.
There's a great video of him on YouTube talking about success and failure, and I'll put it in the comments actually because this guy was number one, went to rock bottom, and then got himself back to number one again. I don't think you could do that with talent alone; that's all about mindset, grit, fighting back, and never giving up. I think that's why this is one of my favorite business books—albeit it's about tennis.
Number eleven is "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink. Jocko was a leader in the Navy SEALs during a war zone, so every decision he made could have the consequence of life or death. Now, running a business can be very high pressure, and the consequences can seem huge, but they're very rarely as serious as life or death. So if Jocko can execute great leadership with the pressures of war and his team being killed on a day-to-day basis, he thought he could teach these learnings to people in business where the pressure perhaps isn't so high, and they could get even better results.
The three takeaways for this book for me are: extreme ownership (the title of the book), own every situation, perhaps even if you don't feel that you should. The reason Jocko recommends this is because if you own every situation, you can control every situation. If you can control every situation, it allows you to focus on the outputs rather than focusing on the end goal.
It also teaches you how to execute even when you feel overwhelmed, which I know is a huge issue for nearly every single business owner, particularly small business owners doing less than 10 million in revenue because it's your job to do absolutely everything. Lastly, Jocko explains in the book how to delegate properly, which is such a vital skill set for anybody that owns a business.
So these are my top 11 books for small business owners. I'm sure there's something in there for everyone. If you've got any questions, let me know in the comments, but I'll see you on the next video. Thank you for watching. [Music]