Summertime reading for business owners and would-be entrepreneurs sometimes differs from the mysteries and romances tucked into other vacationers’ beach bags. If you find business ideas as interesting as the latest whodunit, this summer reading list is for you.
"8 Unbreakable Rules for Business Start-up Success," by Sean C. Castrina, 2013, $14.87. This is light reading, but not "lite." Just perfectly composed for consuming in short bites along with your picnic lunches this summer.
Author Sean Castrina, a successful serial entrepreneur with more than a dozen businesses to his credit, has constructed his book of advice in one-page chapters organized into eight sections (“Plan for Success,” “Know Your Numbers,” etc.) That was a risk: Such an arrangement could have easily devolved into simplistic aphorisms. Instead, he manages to find the crux of each topic and deliver it with no unnecessary or distracting gimmicks, graphs or adages. Just straightforward advice for starting and running a business.
"The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting & Running a Business," by Steve Mariotti, 2014, $23. Here's a nice companion book to pair with the title above. Where Castrina finds the essential nugget in each topic he broaches, Mariotti provides the operational detail needed to proceed.
This is not, however, a book only for the young, despite the title and Mariotti’s background as the founder of a nonprofit teaching youth to start businesses (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship). Indeed, Mariotti’s engaging tone and clear examples make it more usable by all audiences, not less.
Among my favorite features are the super-simple explanations of financial points, the short scripts demonstrating customer interactions and the frequent references to classic works in economics and literature. A good all-around title for anyone contemplating business startup.
"Hiring the Best: Proven Tactics for Successful Employee Selection," by Martin Yate, 2014, $14.99. If you want to grow your business, at some point you'll be considering hiring employees. In this title, Martin Yate, creator of the Knock 'em Dead series of books for job seekers, provides particularly useful ideas for interpreting candidate resumes and conducting interviews. In the latter topic, he gives nearly step-by-step instruction for phone interviews as well as first, second and third interviews conducted in person.
Individual chapters on hiring for entry-level, administrative, sales, management and executive employees are also quite helpful. For business owners with no HR department, this book is a great way to master the intricacies of choosing good employees.
"Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry," by David C. Robertson, 2013, $15. Once you've read all the tips for starting your own business, it's time to learn from stories of other businesses. I recommend starting with the amazing tale of LEGOs, those ubiquitous little plastic blocks that can be used to build anything from a miniature car to a full-sized home with a working bathroom (that takes 3.3 million bricks, in case you're wondering).
I like this book partly for what it isn’t about: It isn’t about a gee-whiz technology company, and it doesn’t feature teen savants. Those are great stories too, but it’s nice to go a little retro now and then. In this version of business success, the product is nothing more than a little plastic brick, ingeniously re-imagined over and over.
You’ll learn more facts about LEGOs than you can shake a Lincoln Log at but more importantly, you’ll see how a company could survive and thrive from extremely humble roots to the point of growing profits faster than Apple, which Lego did from 2008 to 2010. If you’re looking for a business book to inspire you, this would be my recommendation.
"Roadside MBA," by Michael Mazzeo, Paul Oyer, and Scott Schaefer, 2014, $27. Here's another book about business successes to tuck into your beach bag. This is a lighter read than the LEGO story, partly because it covers a number of different businesses in short chapters, and partly because the authors take a goofy approach to the whole topic.
As business professors teaching MBA classes for prestigious universities, these writers had the type of epiphany that only professors can have: There’s a lot of business happening outside of large corporations. Well, yeah.
To their credit, they didn’t take a survey or otherwise try to study the entrepreneurs embedded in small towns across America. Instead, they saw the golden opportunity for a road trip and went out to talk with them in person. The result is readable, informative and frequently amusing. I learned a lot from this book about tricks of the trade for businesses without deep pockets or consultants, and I laughed a lot too. In my book, that’s just about perfect for a summer read.
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