7 Best Ebooks For The Budding Entrepreneur
Whether you’re a well seasoned professional, fresh out of college, enjoying your retirement, or yet to even complete your studies, you’re among the many millions of people across the world who’ve decided to take control of their working life and map out their own business model: in short, you’re a budding entrepreneur.
Setting up your own business is an exciting, exhausting and terrifying process: you may be a sole entrepreneur, but no matter how many people you are working with it’s easy to feel as though you are the only person to have ever set up their own business.
But you’re not alone.
There have been many entrepreneurs before, and lots of them have committed their experiences and advice to an ebook. Some of the texts floating out there on Amazon are good, some are bad, and some are just plain ugly; and it can be difficult to distinguish between those that will save you time and those that will cost you time.
Below we list the 7 best ebooks for the budding entrepreneurs – or, more accurately, for you.
Stop Chasing Influencers
The True Path To Building Your Business and Living Your Dream
by Kimanzi Constable and Jared Easley
This fine text by the brilliant pairing of former bread delivery driver turned global speaker, business coach and author: Kimanzi Constable, and his gifted writing cohort, Jared Easley, takes self-empowerment as its main angle.
They assert that the way to achieve your goals is not to approach your business by thinking about what others can do for you, but about what you can do for yourself. In short, become the influencer, not the influenced.
As a budding entrepreneur, you’re probably independent-minded enough to take control of your professional destiny and Constable and Easley remind you of this huge power that it gives you. Especially if you are struggling with entrepreneurial fear or insecurities — this book is an empowering and inspiring read.
Will It Fly?
How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money
by Pat Flynn
Online entrepreneurship thought leader and podcaster Pat Flynn comes armed with the authority of having been featured in Forbes Magazine and The New York Times. With credentials like that, you’ll expect a lot from his book… and that’s exactly what you’ll get.
Flynn has a writing style that’s crisp, engaging, and treats you as a grown-up. Most importantly, his book will help ease your concerns about taking the next step as an entrepreneur.
His book shows you how to map out your business model based on the way that you wish to lead your life. This is designed to ensure you approach growing your business in a way that’s sustainable to you personally, not a romanticized image of what it means to be an entrepreneur.
Follow this guidance and you’ll enhance the chances of your business succeeding.
Hack the Entrepreneur
How to Stop Procrastinating, Build a Business, and Do Work That Matters
by Jon Nastor
While Pat Flynn adopts a gentle touch, John Nastor is much more direct when speaking to you — taking the training wheels off your entrepreneurship.
Featuring quotes and valuable guidance from a number of entrepreneurs who have been there, bought the t-shirt, and then set up their own t-shirt stall to launch their business, Nastor’s ebook is a text you can dip in and out of.
However, whether you read it cover to cover, or stick to the chapters you think are of most immediate relevance to you and your business ambitions, the main thrust of the text is to simplify the process of becoming a successful entrepreneur. That alone makes it essential reading for you.
Tools of Titans
The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Similar to John Naster’s ebook, start-up adviser Timothy Ferriss’ text is designed with the sporadic reader in mind.
Taken from over 200 interviews held by Ferris on his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, this teasingly titled ebook gives you insight from a raft of sources; there are celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Foxx, alongside athletes and “black-market biochemists”.
But what will really resonate is that while you may be approaching your entrepreneurship from a different angle to the interviewees, you share a common goal with them: the desire to be as successful as you can.
You’ll come away from reading this knowing that you are the master of becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Idea to Execution
How to Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything in Your Business
by Ari Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg
You might think that the idea of outsourcing jars with the message of self-empowerment advanced by Kimanzi Constable and Jared Easley, but in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Ari Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg tell an inspirational tale of turning an idea for a business into a reality, in less time than it takes many of the most successful entrepreneurs to come up with just the idea.
It comes through having a defined vision of what you want to do with your business, what needs to be done in order to make it a reality, and then deconstructing your business model in order to establish the different tasks required to achieve success. Once you’ve done this, outsource business tasks specialists and let them deal with processes while you manage them and the overall business vision.
And that message from Constable and Easley? What could be more self-empowering than knowing you can start to execute your vision as an entrepreneur, without needing to be a multi-disciplinarian, or having access to a bottomless pit of cash to back you up? Nothing.
The Start-up of You
Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
We’re not going to make any assumptions about whether you have a LinkedIn account (though, as a budding entrepreneur we’re pretty sure that you do). However, what we’re certain of is that you’ve heard of LinkedIn.
This book is written by LinkedIn co-founder and chairman, Reid Hoffman. As such, it’s a dream text for you because you get to absorb the advice of one of the most successful current entrepreneurs in the world.
This might not make “The Start-up of You” a winning lottery ticket, but it’s not far off being shown how to pick the winning numbers. So, how do you pick those winning numbers? You’ll have to read it to find out.
The Entrepreneur Mind
100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs
by Kevin D. Johnson
We all love a list that outlines how we can achieve our goals and Kevin D. Johnson offers up a list of 100 different points to draw from the most successful entrepreneurs. These can be split into 7 sections: Strategy, Education, People, Finance, Marketing and Sales, Leadership, and Motivation.
If being able to split the 100 essential characteristics of elite entrepreneurs into 7 different sections had you rubbing your hands with glee, then this last point will make you leap through the ceiling: what’s the secret to being an elite entrepreneur? Thinking like one.
Once you’ve read Kevin D. Johnson’s ebook, you’ll know how the very best think. After that, all that will be left is for you to apply his 100 points and start thinking of yourself as an elite entrepreneur in the making.
Starting out as an entrepreneur can be a truly fearful experience, one that stops many potential success stories from even reaching the planning stage. The 7 texts above won’t guarantee that you will become an elite entrepreneur, but they will certainly give you the confidence and knowledge to allow yourself the best possible chance of making it a reality.
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Victoria Greene is an ecommerce marketer and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares some of her marketing tips as she embarks on her own entrepreneurial journey.
