Ready to ditch the dusty business books gathering dust on your shelf? In this episode, we’re cutting through the noise to reveal the top business books that actually changed how we operate. Forget those towering to-be-read piles; we’re sharing the titles that led to real shifts and actionable strategies, even if you never pick up the book yourself. Whether you’re a voracious reader or struggle to find time, we’re giving you the good stuff – from profit-first principles that supercharge your cash flow to burnout breakthroughs and unconventional wisdom from a former poker pro. Get ready for practical takeaways and game-changing insights that will transform your business, one episode at a time.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Books That Changed How We Do Business
Introduction: Business Books That Changed Us
We are cutting through the noise and sharing the books that didn’t just sit on our shelves looking pretty, Gwen. They fundamentally changed how we operate our businesses. I don’t know about you, but most of the business owners I know are drowning in business book recommendations. They’ve got a two big red pile higher than their nose. While everybody has the best of intentions when they make recommendations, we’re sitting here going, “I don’t know. Is that really worth our time?”
Gwen, what you and me are going to do is we are going to share our top three business book recommendations, and not just any business book recommendation because we can all sit here and talk about all the books people tell us that we should recommend, but the books that have actually changed how we do business.
Whether you are an avid reader or somebody who struggles to find time for books, this episode is going to give you tips that you can apply immediately. Here’s the clincher, Gwen, I hope you’re listening. Even if our reader never decides to read the book themselves, we’re going to give them the good stuff. Gwen, kick us off. Which book would you like to share first?
Profit First: Master Your Cash Flow Now
This will surprise you. Absolutely zero, and potentially anyone who’s read more than a few episodes, it will also not surprise them either, but I would say the book that being the biggest impact in my business was Profit First by Mike Michalowicz.
A moment of silence for all the people who are shocked right now.
There’s multiple reasons that this made an impact. It’s been so long, I can’t tell you how long ago it was I listened to this book the first time. Of course, all of mine are listens because I don’t actually read. If I was in this business, I was very early stage, I was still doing a lot of my other knitting business. When I listened to it, it all made perfect sense. Part of the reason is because it’s based on this envelope process of budgeting that a lot of folks did as a way of managing the home budget. My parents did that. It felt very familiar.
That was one of the things. I was very quickly I was able to say, “I get how this conceptually works.” The other was by doing the steps, by implementing it and doing the things, it made immediate difference in the bottom-line cash in my pocket. The stuff that actually matters to most people like exceedingly quickly for me. I will say it’s easier for a service-based business than it is for a product-based business to see the change really fast. I’m just going to put that little disclaimer around there right away. It can, and I’ve now worked with enough product-based businesses on it and everything else. I’ve always seen it. When people actually use the process, really use it the way they’re supposed to, hold to it and not let it slip away, it makes giant impact on their cashflow.
Cashflow is so huge for success, particularly for very small businesses. Big businesses, the big corporations, they can manage through cashflow crunches, but small, tiny businesses, most of the small businesses that had struggles through COVID that didn’t survive, it was because they didn’t have strong cashflow and even a little hiccup, let alone the big hiccup that COVID turned out to be, there was not a chance that they were going to survive. I haven’t gotten statistics. At some point, I probably should talk to Mike and see if he’s got numbers of how many Profit First businesses that were fully implementing it actually made it through COVID. I bet you it’s a way higher percentage than those who weren’t.
Cash flow is so huge, particularly for very, very small businesses. Share on XHow did Profit First change your approach to business? Keep in mind, I didn’t know you when you were a brand-new baby business owner, but from my perspective, you’ve always been so smart with business.
The thing is I actually did have good accounting practices. It was part of the reason it was easy for me to implement. Really thinking ahead of time about the categories of how much am I actually pulling out to be paying myself for the work I’m doing? How much am I setting aside for taxes ahead of time? When the tax bill came, I didn’t panic. I hadn’t panicked before because we had savings that we could easily pay for it. Now it was like, “I’m not having to touch the family savings. This is all being done out of the business.”
Being able to really say how much money do I actually have to spend on things that are probably more discretionary, conferences that I may be going to, all of those things and being really realistic about what that is. All of that, it became so simple to do. It wasn’t like I wasn’t doing any of it, but it became so simple to do, I was able to do it consistently. The consistency is really where I think that it made the difference.
As I said, my own profitability and the money I was able to take out of the business went up significantly. Even though, like I said, I was doing good bookkeeping, I was paying attention to all this, it wasn’t like I was a flipping disaster at all. I still made a huge impact, which is why I know it makes such a huge impact even more so with folks that aren’t doing a good job.
What we’ve promised is one practical, actionable takeaway, even if they don’t read the book. When it comes to Profit First, what is one thing readers can do now to start that process?
The thing that Mike asked you to do, and it really is the easiest actionable step, is set up a separate account and put 1% of all of your income into it as it comes in. That is your profit, not your pay for doing the work that you do, but for taking the risk of being a business owner. It’s like your shareholder account.
Okay, so just 1%.
One percent is all that he asked you to start, because if you can run the business on 100%, you can run it on 99%.
Step two is, what do I do with that money? I’m just like putting 1% in a bank account
Once a quarter, take half of it out and go splurge for yourself or something.
That’s my one actionable step. I am going to take that, then.
What’s your first book?
Burnout: Understand & Beat Stress Cycle
My first book is Burnout, which is by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. It’s funny is, it’s not like the first book that changed everything, but the book Burnout, it’s all about how burnout affects women specifically. Emily is a researcher and she’s done amazing research in a lot of different areas. Her sister is actually a concert conductor. I don’t know much about music, so that’s all I got for you people.
This is a book I recommend listening. Even if you’re a reader, listen to the book because they narrate, they alternate the chapters. Every time they say the word patriarchy, they go, “Ah,” and it’s just entertaining to me to hear somebody do that repeatedly. The thing with the book about the book Burnout is it really leans into the physical consequences of burnout.
What resonated with me, how it totally changed everything about me, is it explained how we oftentimes think of burnout as situational or environmental. One example in the book that they use is you have a lot of stress at work. You’ve got that one coworker and that one coworker makes you hate going to work every day.
Your stomach hurts, you’ve got headaches, your hair’s falling out and that coworker leaves or you get a new job. Get a new job, that coworker’s not there, you love everybody, but you still have headaches. Your stomach’s still hurting and it doesn’t make any sense because you’re not with the jerk coworker anymore. What they talk about is biologically, your body is still holding all of the stress and all of the angst related to that experience because your body doesn’t care about the environment.
There’s just the impact it makes. Understanding how to divorce the feelings and actual burnout and all that is associated with burnout from the circumstances that cause it. Understanding that you’re still going to have to process through all of that even after the fact was really powerful for me because then it led to the second point in the book that I think is really interesting.
It talks about how burnout is actually a side effect of not fully completing the stress cycle. Stress has a cycle. You’re feeling stress and it causes all these hormones and chemicals that resonate in your body, and you’ve got to burn the chemicals off. There’s a lot of ways to burn off the chemicals. One is physical activity, but if you don’t burn off the chemicals, then the chemicals keep ping ponging inside your body.
Burnout is a side effect of not fully completing the stress cycle. Share on XFor a lot of women who wake up in a cold sweat somewhere between 1:30 and 3:00 AM, it’s actually because they didn’t burn off their cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and that activates adrenaline. The adrenaline is what wakes you up in the cold sweat middle of the night. It’s not hot flashes, it’s not menopause, it’s not perimenopause. It’s actually just a side effect.
It can be that, too.
It can be, but the thing is when women are of a certain age, everything gets blamed on perimenopause. Oftentimes, it’s not that, actually. It’s a whole other thing. How that changed my approach to business is it took crappy clients, crappy peers, being in that mastermind where you constantly go in and feel misunderstood, it made me realize that it wasn’t me being a delicate flower.
This isn’t, “I just need to suck it up.” No. This actually has lasting effects on me and I don’t have to keep doing that. What I would say as my actionable takeaway for our reader is, first and foremost, understand that the circumstances that may cause stress, because stress is what causes burnout oftentimes. The circumstances that may cause stress don’t eliminate the stress. Just when you eliminate the circumstances, you got to figure out a way to work through all that.
In women, burnout has so many more physical manifestations than anybody ever thinks. If you are that person with some unexplained health issues, you might want to be looking at your stress level and really examining whether you’re burned out. That might do more for you than becoming the human pin cushion. Your turn.
Rocket Fuel: Value The Integrator Role
My next book is Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters. It was written after Gino Wickman wrote Traction, which was about the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. A lot of people have heard about EOS. The reason this book was so impactful for me was it was the first time I felt seen as almost a human, not quite, but pretty close. They were describing what makes a really good, they call it an integrator. We would call it a COO or an operations person. There’s lots of terms for it, but their trademark term is integrator. As they were describing it and saying, “Yeah, you’re really good, but you don’t actually care if you get gold. It’s okay if you get silver.” It was this whole thing.
I was listening to it because of course I was listening and when I heard it, I started laughing. We happened to be up at our condo and my husband was like, “What are you listening to?” He knows I normally listen to business books. I said, “Let me unplug this and play this for you and you tell me how much this sounds just like me.” He was like, “That is totally you.”
Here’s the thing. I felt it deep in my soul because it was like I remember feeling misunderstood when I was in fourth grade or fifth grade like that people didn’t get this about me. I that I strove, but I didn’t have to be the best in this whole thing, this supporting role, this operations role. The difference it made specifically in my business was I realized this was really a thing.
I could be an operations person. As I looked back over my life, I could see not only could I be an operations, but I could be an excellent operations person because I actually had been doing this for so long in so many other ways. It wouldn’t have necessarily been called this, but this is what this was. This was insight that was just huge for me.
I probably came across it just before or about the time I was starting this business that we’re in now, whenever that was. It probably was a key element in forming this business. It’s transformed over time. It was definitely a key element in forming. What’s the one takeaway is the value of the visionary having someone who functions in this integrator operations, whatever role.
How important that is because if you’ve only got the visionary, they’re off running in a thousand directions, they’re taking risks that the rest of the team doesn’t understand. They’re often taking risks that doesn’t make sense. They’re confusing the issue. There’s a whole lot of things going on here that you need to understand why this operations role is valuable. To me, that’s really what Rocket Fuel is talking about. That you need both roles and it’s okay that you’re one. You need to stop fighting or avoiding the other. It’s actually providing you stability.
It was a word that I was on another call and that was what we came up. One of the things that I provide for all of my clients is I provide them a stable sounding board. I don’t get caught in their visionary energy. That’s one of the challenges I think a lot of people have when they’re in these mastermind groups and whatnot because they’re in a bunch of groups with a bunch of other visionaries. They’re all just creating more and more ideas and energy and whatnot. When actually what you need is someone that’s providing stability. That’s where I think the value of Rocket Fuel is, to help see the value of the stability in helping balance the power and the value of the visionary.
Free Time: Defining Enough In Your Business
My pick is not as deep, so I don’t have as much to say about it, but it’s Free Time by Jenny Blake, which is a book you introduced me to shortly after we started working together. It’s a book I recommend because I oftentimes will listen to a business book first, then I decide whether I buy it. Sometimes I buy it because I’m like, “I’m going to want to refer to this frequently and I’m not going to want to have to fast forward through chapters on Audible.”
Other times, I buy it like Profit First for instance, because it had mathematical formulas and I just need to see those. Jenny’s, I bought the hard copy simply because I do refer to it frequently. The thing that I liked about the book or what the book’s about is maximizing your free time. That as a business owner, rather than living to work, you should work to live. Only work as much as you need to get what you need.
As a business owner, rather than living to work, you should work to live. Only work as much as you need to get what you need. Share on XI remember I was driving around and I pulled over on the side of the road to re-listen to this part, which is when she talks about the concept of enough and defining what your enough is. She talked about how so many of us, especially women, a lot of our business circles are male dominated. It’s always like, “Sell more, do more. You hit $8,000, let’s hit $9,000. You hit $10,000, let’s hit $11,000. You’re six-figure. Okay, now we got to aim towards seven-figure.”
She was like, “What if you didn’t? What if rather than going, ‘Okay, I need to get as high as I can, as much as I can,’ what if you just stepped back and said, ‘What do I really need? What would be enough to get by? What would be enough to achieve the goals I want,’ and then built around there?” That was the first time where I actually looked at my business overhead, not from the perspective of, “This is the minimum amount of money I can afford to make this month,” but from, “Okay, if this is what my overhead is, then how much above and beyond that would feel good and what do I have to do to reach that number?”
That’s when my business goal shifted from, “I need $20,000 a month to, “$6,000 month actually pretty good and $8,000 a month is great.” Everything shifted accordingly because then my perspective shifted from, I don’t have time to be the person who goes to the afterschool activities and takes my kids to school and picks them up and stuff to, actually, I do, and I don’t have to feel badly about what the P&L says every month so long is I don’t bloat the overhead.
The restraint I have to show is I don’t bloat my overhead. My margin stays pretty consistent. That’s how it changed how I do business. As far as actionable steps, because I do think that it is important to have that one takeaway. I think for me, what I would recommend is lean into the idea of what is enough. This is something I have this conversation with all of my private clients now.
All of my private clients, when they’re like, “This is what I want.” It’s like, “Why do you want that? Will that be enough?” What I often find when I’m talking to women, they’ll tell me they want a six-figure business because that’s the circles I run, women who are trying to get to six figures. What I find out is they actually have zero motivation to get there.
Their thought on six figures is actually because they think that’s what takes them from hobby to business because they don’t have a financial need for their money. The groceries get on the table independent of their business. We said, “What would be enough? Do you need $100,000 a year to feel like you’re a grownup business owner if you don’t need that money to survive?” Oftentimes, what we find is actually it’s 1 to 2 paying clients consistently is their enough.
Thinking In Bets: Choice Vs Result In Data
I love that. My third book was a book that someone recommended that I really wasn’t that necessarily interested, but the woman who recommended it at the time said, “No, you really want to listen to this.” I was like, “Okay.” Occasionally, when someone gets pretty passionate about it, it’s like, “Okay. I’m going to.” It’s Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.
Annie Duke was a former professional poker player. That’s why the bets is in there because it’s actually related to the things that she’s learned and applies in her business and life based on what she learned as a professional poker player. The reason that this changed my business is it changed how I thought about my data. There’s a whole bunch of things, but one of the early premises that she talks about is we have been conditioned, for whatever reasons, and part of it probably is just the nature of being human, that if we got a bad result, it was a bad choice. If we got a good result, it was a good choice. We conflate the result with the decision.
Her whole point is you can make a really good choice and still have a bad result because there’s a lot of things that are still out of your control. You can also make a really bad choice and still get a good result for the same reason because there’s still a lot of things that are out of your control. Sometimes that works for you and sometimes it works against you.
I have been such a data person for so long, I’ve always tried to correlate the data directly to the result. This was a bad result, so that must have been a bad choice. This was a good result, so this must have been a good choice. What I realized as part of this, and some other thoughts as well is you actually need to look at more data and trend it.
Intuitively, I knew this based on all of my history in the IT world and whatnot. You think about it differently when it’s your decisions in your business and you aren’t able to get 1,000 points of data, like you can get 2 or 3 points of data. Seeing a trend over three points of data isn’t much of a trend. It’s information and it’s useful. Getting into that thought standpoint to say, “Did this outcome end up the way that it did because of the decision or was it some outside factors?”
The big thing is we are taught to think that life is like a chess board. The thing about a chess board is you can see, if you know how, every possible move that can happen because you know all of the information where all of the pieces are both your pieces and their pieces, and you know exactly how all of them are allowed to move.
There is no surprise. Now you don’t know which thing someone else is going to do, but you can still anticipate that that is a possibility. Her thought is life is much more like poker, where you do know what all the cards are, but you only have a tiny bit of the information. You know what you’ve got, what’s showing and whatever hands and whatever way that you’re playing. You know what all of the possibilities are, you know what the percentages are, etc., but you still don’t know what that turned over card is that you can’t see. You can make a bet based on what the probability is that it’s going to be X, Y, or Z. It could be a good bet and you could still lose.
You can also make a really bad bet on what the probability is and you could win. Thinking about that overall in my business and how I look at my data just made a huge impact across the board. I can’t give you specifics, but thinking about it all the time of saying, “I’m going to consider the result separate,” not completely separated, not conflated with the decision and trying to make those choices. What the tactical thing is, the practical thing that I would say is to start separating your result from your choice and saying, “This turned out bad. Did it turn out bad because I actually made a bad choice or did it turn out bad because of things there was no way I could have known at the time?”
Maybe I know that, so can I make a different choice because I’ve got additional information. If you’ve ever watched a poker game or played a poker game, you bet once, but then you may bet again and again, you can start making better choices as more information comes to light. At some point, you still aren’t going to have all the information. You’ve got to make the choice. Instead of just assuming that a bad result is a bad choice, it’s like, was it, or did we just have an yet usual set of circumstances? Also on the other side, which is as important, just because you got a good result doesn’t mean you should do it again.
Just thinking of all the different choices and outcomes and separating them in my head right now. That is a good one.
It’s a fascinating exercise. It really is. I think that’s where the practicality is of starting to pay attention. Have I just conflated it? Was that actually accurate?
My last book is when I thought you might pick and you didn’t, so I’m glad because I didn’t actually have a good backup.
I know you told me what it was going to be. I was like, “I should have picked that one too,” but I’m glad you got it.
Bumpers: Setting Boundaries For Success
It is Bumpers by Nic Peterson. We have talked about this book before. It is the teeniest tiniest book. This is a book where I would say just buy the stinking book. You can get it free. I think it’s FreeBumpersBook.com online.
You can get it at FreeBumpersBook.com and if you go and buy it full price, it’s $1.
No, it is $4.99 because it’s the cheapest price that Amazon allows for a print on demand book. He says that. You can get the free PDF if you want to. It is a book. It’s a book you recommended. I feel like I have to give everybody the same disclaimer you gave me, which is, this is the prime example of somebody who said, “This is what I think, and I want to get it out to the world. I don’t really care what anybody else thinks about it.” It’s written in order to drive the cost of the printed book down. It’s written on like romance novel paper like old school Harlequin.
The quality of the book is horrible.
The paper quality is really rough. It doesn’t do a great job if you want to take notes in the margins because the ink bleeds and there’s typos, there’s formatting stuff, but the content is worth all of that. I say that as somebody who has worked extensively in the publishing industry. The thing with Bumpers, there is definitely a theme, and we’ll talk about the themes in our book choices in just a moment.
Bumpers is really a book about boundaries. Nic’s word for boundaries are bumpers. These are the just the guardrails that guide or box in your life. It can be work, it can be business, it can be life and parenting and anything. It’s ultimately a book about boundaries. What resonated with me in that, there are so much of that book that I actually use every single day.
The big one was the concept of raising the floor instead of raising the ceiling. Back to my Jenny Blake free time example of what is enough. If I made a conscious decision that I’m not going to go every month trying to beat my best, I made $7,000 this month, now I need to make $7,500 next month, then how do I do anything other than maintain? Nic’s take is focus on the floor because the floor is actually usually easier to raise and it has a bigger long-term impact.
Rather than saying, “I want to increase my revenue $500 month over month,” why not look at the last year? Look at what your lowest month was and say, “What if I add $500 to that lowest month and say, ‘Come heck or high water, I’m not going to let any month go where I don’t make it least that much.’” Worst case scenario, you end this year, $500 above last year. If you have a business or you have a history of going up and down, up and down, chances are raising the floor is going to have the difference of a couple of thousand dollars.
While a couple of thousand dollars may not buy you a brand-new car, a couple of thousand dollars isn’t nothing. It takes such little effort to raise the floor. That has been my experience, at least. I’m sure for some people, their floor is so stinking low that they can’t climb out. For me, raising the floor was a lot less effort than trying to figure out how to do more and more month over month.
Now, anytime that I’m looking at goals, because a lot of times, with my clients, they’re looking for year over year growth, rather than saying, “Let’s average out the months. You average $6,500, so let’s set a goal for $7,000 every month or $70,000 every month,” depending on the size of the business. Let’s just look at the low points and let’s look at the low points in all aspects.
Let’s look at the lowest points when it comes to revenue, but also let’s look at the lowest points when it comes to capacity. We know everybody goes on vacation in the month of December, and so we end up starting every January behind and backed up, what can we do to ensure that we’ve got some capacity in December to take care of ourselves?
That has just changed how I approach everything, but particularly how I approach business. I feel like the actionable takeaway is pretty stinking clear, but really it’s like in anything that you’re looking at where you want growth, look at the floor, look at the ceiling, and then just figure out like what would it take to raise the floor? Compare the amount of effort, time, energy to raising the ceiling, because maybe in your circumstance, raising the ceiling’s easier. Have not yet had a circumstance since I’ve read the book where raising the floor wasn’t easier.
The thing about that is it very much is that over time, everything’s going to be up because usually, as you raise the floor, you start bumping the ceiling up accidentally. You focus on the floor and it ends up bumping up the ceiling as a part of it.
It feels so much more abundant.
It ties in beautifully with your free time example as well of what do I actually need right now?
If you’re paying close attention and you are a critical thinker, you’ll notice all my books that I recommend have something to do around boundaries. Burnout it’s really about placing where your boundaries because a lot of times we get burned out because we’ve blown through our boundaries too much, or we’ve let people walk all over our boundaries. Free Time, determining what your enough is so that you can put boundaries around that. Bumpers is actually synonymous with boundaries.
A lot of times we get burned out because we blend our boundaries too much or let people walk all over our boundaries. Share on XGwen, you’ve got some themes here, but your pattern isn’t as clear because of course, Profit First and Thinking in Bets are numerical. They are data books, whereas Rocket Fuel, based on how you’ve described it, I have to admit, I’ve never read Rocket Fuel, but it sounds almost more of a validation book. Validating that it is okay to be a really good number 2 but every number 1 needs a number 2 to truly be a successful number 1.
Yeah. The place where I see I’ll say the theme or the thread is all of this is very much about the operational piece of the business as opposed to I’ll say the visionary creative piece of the business. Profit First is very much about the finance, the accounting, which of course is a very operational piece of it. Particularly, what it really is about is the cashflow. It’s not just the accounting and bookkeeping, it’s really about the cashflow, which is a key element in operations.
Thinking in Bets to me is about the data, but it also is about the decision-making process, which to me is also a very operational thing. It is an aspect that I think is missed a lot in early-stage entrepreneurial visionary businesses because they don’t want to choose, they don’t want to decide. They want all the options open and because they’re afraid that they’re going to get a bad result. Bad result doesn’t necessarily mean bad decision. Good result doesn’t necessarily mean good decision.
Of course, Rocket Fuel really is about saying operations has a really strong element in the success of the visionary business. I would say my theme really, and back to like who’s surprised, no one, is operations. This is why when you said like Nic’s book, when you mentioned, “I’m going to do Bumpers,” it was like, yeah, because I also think of Nic’s book totally as operations. That’s where I see my piece of these are fundamental foundational elements of operations.
First of all, if you can’t already tell, we like books. We really love talking about books. I have all these things I want to talk about. One thing that I think happens a lot is all the books we read run together for a lot of people. It feels like you’re addicted to reading business books, but nothing ever changes. I’m curious how you go about how you approach reading books, especially business books, because for me, I actually start the process with a plan to implement.
I open every book with the idea of, okay, what is it from this book? What am I going to learn that I don’t already know? How am I going to apply what I learn? As I’m going through the book, I’m looking for those things versus passively reading the book and waiting for inspiration to strike. How do you go about it?
My mine is closer to the latter really. Most of the time I’m looking at it and saying, “I bet there’s a nugget in here that I haven’t thought of before.” I’m more in the I’m mining for gold. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally it’s like, “And there was nothing.”
That actually happens a lot for me.
I’m really looking for the nugget, and the nugget doesn’t have to be the nugget. The nugget can be super tiny. I almost always find something. It’s not necessarily something I’m going to implement. Sometimes it’s a way to say something, think about something that I can then use with my clients. Where it’s like, “I tried saying it this way, that didn’t work, so I’m going to try saying this.” When I say that, you can say like, “That made sense.” It’s like, “Great.”
I’m looking for what I’m going to call the little tiny nugget or the giant nugget. Sometimes, things are just chock full of nuggets and that’s fabulous. I don’t always plan on implementing. I really am often looking for, is this something that’s either going to be useful for me or for my client or a way of saying it. All of those things.
Final Thoughts: Applying Book Insights Now
Part of it is also what my role is. It is because of what my role is, it’s appropriate for me to gather knowledge just for knowledge’s sake. I wouldn’t say that’s always true for everybody else. Tell us more about your approach because you have a great approach and when we shared it with our Small Biz Book Club people. They were very excited about that.
It’s not actually mine. It’s called the Blank Sheet method. Actually where I got it from, they didn’t create it either, but it’s the idea that you, before you start reading a book, you just have a blank sheet of paper or a note card. We’ve got a member of our Small Biz Book Club. She just uses a 3 by 5 card. You write down everything you know about the book or subject you’re about to read. It’s like a mind map. On Profit First, for instance, you might put Profit First in the middle and you’ll say, “I know it’s a book about cashflow. I’m assuming it’s a book about paying myself first because it says Profit First.
You write all of that. Every time you sit down to read it, once you close it, you just spend a few minutes adding to your mind map. By the time you get to the end of the book, you have all the little nuggets that were meaningful. Some people like to take it a step further and then write a summary. That’s what they take is like, “This is my Bible. Anytime the book comes up, this is what I remember.”
I actually just leave the messy mind map. I have a particular notebook that I use and I just do it all in there. What I have found is, first of all, it helps me better remember where I got that idea. All the books that I’ve read don’t all start to blend together. Before I started doing this, I could tell you, “That’s a Mike Michalowicz idea, but I couldn’t tell you if it was in Clockwork, The Pumpkin Plan or Profit First. Now I know which ideas came from which individual book. It makes it easier personally for me to implement, but also to make suggestions to other people. It just, it works for me. Have you ever tried it? I’m assuming you have not.
I have not. Part of it is because my technique is listening. I’m not often at my desk. I’m often in other environments. The after action, which is an important piece of it, I’m usually not in the right space place.
Not going to pull over on the side of the freeway to jot some notes down. That makes total sense. What I want to do is I just want to invite everybody reading join the Small Biz Book Club. It’s free. We only meet once a month. We’re like the lowest pressure, nicest, most generous, I don’t know, relaxed book club you could ever join.
The first thing is you don’t actually have to read the book.
Yes. We mean it. It’s so funny. Tell the story of our member. Do you remember?
We’ve had multiple.
Yeah. We have one member. She didn’t come for three months and found out that’s because she hadn’t read the book or she hadn’t finished the book. Some of them she had started, but she hadn’t finished them. I was like, “You don’t have to finish the book. You don’t even have to read it. You’re welcome.” “I know you say that, but I don’t want to get there and be embarrassed.” I’m like, “No, we mean it. We’re not going to embarrass you.” Now she comes every month and she tells us, “I didn’t read the book, and I know you won’t embarrass me,” and we don’t because we’re not like that. We’re not mean.
We’re really talking about our insights. Even if you haven’t read the book, as you hear our insights about the book, you still may have insights about our insights.
I find so often the conversation isn’t five people going, “On page 32 it says,” and then somebody else says, “On page 44.” Oftentimes we have somebody say, “You know what I liked,” or sometimes it’s what I didn’t like is this and this and that becomes the whole conversation. The concept of the Small Biz Book Club is how do you take big ideas from books like we did in this episode and apply them to small business realities?
If that’s your jam, it’s one book a month. We don’t give you a reading plan, we don’t give you homework. We check in with you about 2 weeks, 1 week before we meet just to remind you that we’re meeting and we meet the third Wednesday of each month. If that sounds like your thing, head over to SmallBizBookClub.com. You’ll see what our schedule is for the remainder of the year. There’s a link there to register for the next discussion, and you’ll have the opportunity to turn reading into results if you so choose or just connect with some of the most amazing women you could ever imagine. Gwen, this brings us to the end of this episode. We will see you next time.
Mentioned in This Episode
Like books as much as Tonya and Gwen? Check out the Small Biz Book Club, where women gather together to apply big book ideas to small business realities.
Gwen’s favorite books from the episode:
- Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
- Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Tonya’s favorite books from the episode:
- Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski
- Free Time by Jenny Blake
- Bumpers by Nic Peterson (Nic has a free PDF version of his book available as well)
- Traction by Gino Wickman
- Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz
- The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
