Best Entrepreneur books are full of wisdom and experiences from hundreds of entrepreneurs. Use their experience to get the most out of your business.
“Books are the quietest most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers” – Charles William Eliot
This quote is one of the favorites of every book lover, and most people can actually relate to it. Books are the best teachers, then why limit them to the acquisition of formal or academic knowledge only. You can use them in every field of life, including entrepreneurial ventures, to gain knowledge from the experts and to learn from the experiences of the people who have already done something similar.
From an entrepreneurial point of view, many books provide suggestions and insights into the practical aspect of doing business. However, the 10 books that we are discussing here are the most comprehensive containing some of the best pieces of advice to transform your business venture from an idea to reality.
10 Best Entrepreneur Books:
Let us have a look at some of the best entrepreneur books that give you the guiding light for your new venture.
1. Think and Grow Rich: Buy Now
Authored by Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich is a phenomenal book that guides the new entrepreneurs and the people who have an urge to start a business, but they aren’t sure where to start their journey.
In this book, the ideas about the conversion of imagination into reality, the need to create the desires, and shaping up the destiny with your own hands have been discussed in the light of achievement of your entrepreneurial goal.
As the title suggests, the author believes that the main ingredient of success lies in your mind. If you have it strong enough, you can use it and grow rich. As one of the chapters from the book indicates: “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice.
Additionally, this piece is a wonderful piece of inspiration that does not only provide knowledge about where to extract ideas but also provides you with an inspiration to do it now. Another quote from the book says, “The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”
We expect that by reading this book, you’ll be able to extract some beautiful gems of knowledge and a path that you should follow to become successful and rich, of course.
2. The Personal MBA: Buy Now
If you are looking to have the theoretical knowledge (not exactly theoretical) about the business, then “The Personal MBA” is a must-read.
It specifically covers the different processes and functions of business, so that the people who don’t have an academic background in business can also learn about them and use some of the prominent strategies for profit-making. Some of the domains that this book covers are topics related to finance, sales, management, marketing, psychology, and the value addition for the customers.
An associated resource that you can utilize with this book is the website that the author of the book, Josh Kaufman, has founded. This website contains a summarized version of all the key learning along with the quotes and key points extracted from some of the other professional books.
In this book and the associated website, you can actually find all the resources that you would need to know some of the basic to advanced level techniques of running and managing a business venture.
3. Do More Faster: Buy Now
One of the realities of life is that more than half of the ventures that start can’t survive for long. In most of the cases, the mistakes made by first-time entrepreneurs become the reasons for the failure. If you want to avoid such mistakes as a first-timer or want to rectify them for your next venture that this book is the best entrepreneur book that you can find in the market.
It is written by David Cohen and Brad Feld, the found of TechStars. It is a company that works with the new entrepreneurs and helps them in creating their dream turn into reality. So, the piece of advice coming from such people who have the daily interaction with the new startups for around 25 years, can actually help you in fixing up the possible errors that could be the result of your failure.
Idea and Vision, People, Execution, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work and Life Balance are the seven themes that this best entrepreneur book discusses for you. The glimpse of these theme highlights that the authors of the book have covered every dimension in it to make it sure that neither professional nor personal issue of your life should come in the way of your success.
One of the quotes from this book that can actually help you in gauging your interest in entrepreneurship is, “Starting a company is extremely hard and requires a commitment on many levels. Ultimately, you don’t really “try to start a company”—you either do it, or you don’t.”
With this book, you can explore entrepreneurship from a completely different dimension. Give this book reading and find it out what it has in it for you.
4. The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence: Buy Now
Entrepreneurship is all about adding value. This value could be in the form of customer value addition or the value addition in the internal processes of a business. The overall result of the value addition that entrepreneurs look for is the achievement of excellence.
If you are a business owner who wants to achieve this excellence but isn’t really sure where to start it from, then this great entrepreneurship book is going to help you with that. This book, written by Tom Peters, highlights some of the simple things that businesses often ignore. By using these little things, a state of perfection can be achieved, and the author tries to explain those things and the techniques through which you can actually make better.
Some of the major things that this book discusses include customer contentment, employee engagement, and business profitability. Additionally, the treatment with the angry customers, ways to make customers contended and happy along with the importance of cleanliness in the business environment are some of the simple yet important things that are the part of this book.
Amazingly, these seemingly non-important things have actually yielded results for different owners, so by giving this entrepreneurship book a reading, you’ll be able to extract some good amount of information.
Another feature of this book that would be compelling for you is it is a small book with a feature of browseability, thus making it easier to take some time out of your busy routine and reading it.
5. Unmarketing: Buy Now
In the world where everyone is focusing on marketing, this book is going to provide you with a different version of the story to ensure the success of your entrepreneurship venture.
Scott Stratton is off the view that when the traditional forms of marketing (and here traditional means all the forms of marketing that the businesses are utilizing even the digital ones) aren’t yielding any results, then the business owners must look for something unique and better rather than using those same channels of communication and product selling again and again.
According to him, you should focus your business on the “Unmarketing” technique. Adopting this technique will actually help you in finding some unique ways through which you can attract customers for your business. Additionally, his main focus in the entire book is on providing tips regarding the business-customer relationship.
If you are thinking that your current marketing strategies are doing that well or your concern is to know the ways to build customer relationships, then this book is for you, and you are definitely going to find some great entrepreneurial tips from this book.
6. The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself: Buy Now
Another engaging title for the best entrepreneur book is Teaching Your Business to Market Itself. As the title suggests, the content of the book focuses on providing the long-term mechanism for the business owners to make their venture a successful one.
The focus of the author, John Jantsch, is on the customers completely. For him, creating satisfied customers is the basic way to ensure the constant success of the business. The main three strategies on which his entire book is based include “Talk with your customers, not at them, the sales team is the most important part of your marketing team and Educate your customers,”, Jantsch. By following these points, a referral cycle would be created, and your business will be able to generate customers on its own, paving the way for the long-term continuation and success of the business.
By reading this entrepreneurship book, you’ll be able to get some best advice about customer relationship building and the extent to make the customer satisfied so that the referral cycle can actually be generated.
7. The Greatest Salesman in the World: Buy Now
This book was written by Og Mandino. For the entrepreneurs, this title could actually be interesting because not occupationally, but literally each of the entrepreneurs wants to be such a salesman who can sell his/her product to the customer within no time. So, this book would provide some important pieces of suggestions that you won’t be able to learn without years of experience.
Persistence and the belief in yourself and your abilities are the two main key points that this book will guide you about. However, no matter how many books have you read on this topic, this particular book is going to provide you with some valuable insights into the topic with a different writing style that would engage you towards it.
Mandino states that, “I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy. ”
Discussing everything about the business as a fable and the metaphoric style of writing are the two things that make this different from the others, providing one of the reasons that you’ll be more engaged to it and thus draw better conclusions from it.
8. The Magic of Thinking Big: Buy Now
The Magic of Thinking Big is focused on having dreams and expecting that the dreams that you have will come true one day. Obviously, sitting and dreaming are not going to make you big or profitable. You need an urge or motivation for bringing your dreams into reality too.
If you are just stepping into the business world, then this book can actually change your life. It highlights some of the examples of the people who have dreamt big and have achieved what they wanted. Similarly, the people who have been scared of thinking big have been discussed, and a comparison has been drawn between the two mindsets.
As one of the quotes from the book highlights, “Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to a solution.”
By reading this best entrepreneurship book, you’ll be able to realize that your decisions are purely your choices rather than the destiny as we often claim them to be. As said in one of the lines: “the thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have.”
Thus, you’ll get enough motivation by reading this book that you would be able to think about starting your own business. However, this book is not actually going to start your business. It would be you who is going to put in the effort in the venture and make it a success. This book can be used as a guiding stone, and we would call it a perfect one for that purpose.
“The point is clear. People who get things done in this world don’t wait for the spirit to move them; they move the spirit.”
9. The 4-Hour Work Week: Buy Now
Impressed by the name of the book? Who doesn’t want such a life? So, know what’s in this fascinating entrepreneur book, you’ll have to give it a reading. The author of this book is Timothy Ferris.
One thing that we must tell you before you make your mind for reading it is that you would need a concentrated effort to extract valuable things from it. Because it contains so many important lessons that most people tend to miss half of them.
Some of the most inspirational lines written by Ferris from the book are, “For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align, and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you, and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.”
That is true. The people who wait for the perfect timing aren’t able to find that perfect time ever. You’ll have to believe that now is perfect, and you’ll see the wonders happening around you in no time so, if you are looking for more of these inspirational lines that you should be reading this book right away, as it is full of such lines.
Additionally, the guidance about how to do things differently is also there, so if you’ll go by the pieces of advice shared in the book, you should be able to generate a 4-hour workweek.
10. The Lean Startup: Buy Now
Eric Ries, a staunch supporter of entrepreneurship and innovation, has written this book, “The Lean Startup.” It is the best entrepreneur book for the people who believe that the traditional setup is no more viable, considering the expectation of the customers and the excessive competition that the current market has.
Ries indicates one of the major concerns by stating, “The big question of our time is not Can it be built? But should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.”
So, with this thing in mind, he supports moving away from the traditional setup and including as much innovation and flexibility as you can bring in to fulfill the demand of the customers. To find what do the customers want, how would you know that, and how would you actually serve them, you’ll have to go through this book. According to the author, “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
Another thing that you’ll find in this book is that it doesn’t provide you with ingredients and recipe to achieve growth for a single time but the focus of this book is to make it easy for the readers (the potential business owners) to keep growing and learn the basic art that would help them in improving the business over time.
Conclusion:
These best entrepreneur books have been written by experienced entrepreneurs who had no or very little roadmap when they started off their businesses. With these books in your hand, you don’t have to repeat those same mistakes.
We would suggest you to read all of these books as each one of them contains some valuable lessons and advise that you’ll miss if won’t be reading it. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to go through all of them at once. You can add these books in your collection and read them one by one, implementing the lessons that you learn from each of these books. With each of the implementations, you can expect to move one step closer to the success of your business.
We’ll be waiting to know which of these has been your favorite entrepreneur book. You can mention it and one of the best things that you like about that book in the comments below.
