I'm a individual contractor and currently make just over 100k a year and I'm looking to switch into a completely different field but I want to be able to scale it up to at least a 500k/year personal profit business. I have zero business starting experience. The only resource I have is these books that everyone keeps recommending ($100 startup, E Myth etc). I read them and they're inspiring and give you some advice but it feels like there's not much practical steps to actually do this, especially in 2025 (some of these books are so old)
I don't know any manufacturers, I don't know the first steps of designing a product, I don't know how to do research, I don't know how test product desirability. Where does this info come from, more books? googling? Everything?
Does anyone with a significant business income ($500k+) contribute their success majority to reading business books?
byu/ssstar inEntrepreneur
Posted by ssstar
22 Comments
If you want practical steps “startup owners manual” is a good book.
Before I sold my business we were doing 8 million per year. I never read one book about business but would google or research how to do something and then read as much as I could and take bits from each one to apply to my business as each business is unique. While I never read a specific book I would read quite a bit. Some people learn better by videos and some by reading. I hate videos and would much rather read but you might be the opposite. Find what works best for you but just jumping in and gaining experience is going to matter more than anything.
Make sure you’re solving someone’s problem. Make sure you’re providing value. Research the knowledge vs efficiency gap. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, literally everywhere you look are profitable businesses.
I like the mindset in $100 startup, getting a minimum viable product to market as fast as possible to get feedback. Don’t be the cliche first time businessperson who works on their perfect product in secret for 6 months-year spending all their capital without every showing it to customers.
Ha Ha Ha Ha….. no
but i mean I have an executive MBA so i guess i did read lots of business books along the way however building a successful business was all about problem solving and making it repeatable and scalable. That and a few failures before to learn along the way.
I haven’t read a book since the 4th grade. You can learn so much from googling and youtube videos. I feel AI likely is the best way to learn now but haven’t done much with that side of things.
I typically FF a lot through youtube videos and only watch the middle so I skip all the BS parts. The youtube premium is worth every penny.
Honestly I’m not sure what there is that doesn’t have 1000 how to videos on youtube. Look for anything, skip to the middle then just arrow forward or back through the talking to get the actual info. Most time I can watch a 30 minute video in a minute
Nah. Sometimes I’ll pick up something here and there and read it for ideas, but I’d primarily attribute my success to the amount of time and effort I spent building the business.
“Fanatical Prospecting” helped me, mainly because it said if you’re not hitting your number go look in a mirror and you’ll find the only person who can solve your problems.
1.2m a year profit (2m top line). Zero business books – just winged it for a decade. I do love listening to interviews with entrepreneurs and all sorts of economics, engineering, and science people though. Some of our decisions were guided by what I learned from interviews of very good marketers and business people.
We do after school and weekend classes for kids before anyone asks
Books are inspirational, but none are a manual for how to build a business in whatever specific market niche you’re targeting.
You’ll have better results working in your desired industry and learning experientially how and why money flows through the business model.
From the sounds of it, you want to design and manufacture a product? Is it a product that already exists that you’re improving upon or are you designing something entirely new? Each path will have very different requirements for what you need to learn, how you’ll learn about your potential customers, and how you’ll have it manufactured and marketed.
The more you can dial in what you intend to accomplish the easier it will be to find your answers. Saying, “I want to build a $500k+ business” is about as helpful to yourself and anybody trying to help you as saying “I want to be famous”.
I’d say 99% of my success is due to reading good books on business, investing, mindset. Never went to school, and had a business making 300k a year, then another that did low 8 figures net income in it’s first year.
Not sure how either would have been possible without reading books related to their niche.
NO
This is crazy!
All these people saying they don’t read books. I find it unbelievable, but common.
I think reading books is helpful, not needed but helpful. Why make the same mistakes as others if they can be avoided.
I’ve learned a ton from books. More tactical and little tips and tricks. They don’t make me profitable, but they make me think different. I try to avoid the very popular ones that are pushed on social media. Some of the books I’ve read/ listened to could have been an email but still helped.
Some books like “the wealthy gardener” are not tactical books or business books but motivational in a way. It just helps you realize the small seeds planted today, grow into large trees later. I like to listen to it annually to ground myself.
I like the dan Kennedy books. Some are repetitive but the points are good. Gap and the gain is a good one from a mindset point.
Books are the liberal arts education of business. Googling and fire fighting is the actual tactical thing you need to master.
I think the best of us have a lot of both – an insatiable curiosity about lessons and wisdom that can be gleaned from others (whether from books, talks, 1:1 convos or whatever) – and a willingness to just figure shit out and have faith in yourself.
Sometimes the books can show you inspiring stories about how someone just figured it out
For me 4 hour workweek was extremely inspiring a decade ago. When I was younger, it was books about real estate or richest man in Babylon. But I also read the entire “how to program PHP” book in the cafe at Barnes and noble when I was a teenage (for free). So a combination of theory and practice..
The amount of people here who are proud to never read is… depressing.
Absolutely not.
Business books can be one of the primary knowledge. But these days social media, Youtubes are also giving out good content value for business success.
Okay, first off, I take it that you want to have a physical product.
Correct?
If so, you need to narrow that down to an industry.
First off you’re not an inventor. Do you even know anyone that is an inventor that lives off the money they make from inventing shit?Have you ever met anyone?
Okay, so let’s focus on things that already exist.You don’t have to come up with a unicorn idea.You have to find value to bring to the marketplace.
I own a company in commercial truck parts manufacturing and sales. I found a niche of parts, and sub divided it into a sub niche of 7 items with 28 configurations. I don’t know shit about trucks or truck parts or any of that stuff, but I know all the stuff that you don’t know. I just like that stuff, and I like business. You could say that i’m really good at it.
The truck parts just happen to be the industry I worked in at the time. I find that if you seek your niche in the industry that you’re currently working in, you have a higher possibility of finding it within months to a couple years of searching and researching. When you work at a job, you have insight to the industry and the behind the scenes stuff that the average person just doesn’t whether it be in a restaurant or a law firm or a construction company. When I researched my part, I called the name on the bag. I also found out there was one other manufacturer. They are both made in america…. For every truck on the planet. They were the only two manufacturers. I worked at a diesel shop. So when I called them asking about pricing, they asked, how much a month we use, and eventually push me to a distributor. That actually gave me a list of all their distributors. I then called those distributors and got pricing. A week later, I called back the manufacturers to set up the diesel shop as a distributor. This gave us their distributor costs. So now I knew what wholesale and retail prices were. I understood.The volumes required to be a distributor from the manufacturers. And I had an idea of how many parts were sold per year.Based on all of that information. I was also able to get the purchasing people at a couple other parts distributors to call
and go through the same process to verify my information.
I double checked the manufacturing to make sure they were not importing them. Import Yeti is free to use.
I have google so I could do some basic searches to figure out how many commercial trucks are on the road. I worked in a commercial truck repair shop that did the repairs that utilized these parts so I was able to find out how often trucks have to have these repairs made. I was able to find out that this part has not changed in design since trucks were invented. I also found out that the seven that I chose out of hundreds were the universal components that fit a majority of the trucks. They’re also required. Their non safety facing, so I don’t have to worry about anyone dying. I sent some of them off to a lab to have mass spectrometer materials composition testing and made prints of each.
I utilized import yeti to identify factory clusters in China, India, and Mexico that manufacturer’s similar items.
Steel, Zinc parts with strict tolerances, stamped, machined, cast, and plated.
After researching factories, I understood what I was looking for in my own factories.
Materials, processes, in-house tooling and die making, QC testing capabilities, certifications, 3d printing, and packaging/labeling in-house.
I found three factories in china that I reached out to via email. I also found a factory in taiwan that I used for my initial orders. Over the years, i’ve expanded to 9 countries now including the USA.
I stored everything underneath my camper in a crate pallet or tupperware, totes with a blue tarp over it. Eventually I got a small self storage unit next to the rv park lived in. Eventually, we bought a home and used the two car garage as our primary warehouse with overflow, going into multiple self storage units locally. I picked packed and shipped everything until year five (2021). Then, I moved ninety percent of everything into a 3pl partner because I don’t want to run a daycare and have employees.
I didn’t do any advertising or marketing or online stuff at all.And I still don’t. I cold called every single commercial truck repair shop dealership college o e.M in america and a double digit percentage globally, solo over the last 9 (10 years in a couple months).
The hardest part about my business is not sales or any of that other stuff. It’s managing inventory to keep up with sales volumes and cash flow.Because all manufacturing turnaround is about ninety days. If you grow at five hundred percent, you’re gonna have to buy fifteen hundred percent worth of inventory.Because the timeline drag, and that’s a lot of capital to have to manage and flip with a growing business. You can’t have back orders or someone will just go to your competitors that you had to take them away from.
I’m retired from the industry as of this year, but I ran marketing/production company. It survived 15 years. I peaked between 2017-2019 where I was making low 400s net. I’m by no means educated about business, I’m sure some books could have helped. Looking back maybe I could have used some coaching. I dropped out of college and started my hustle. Just self-belief, hard work, talent for my craft, and a little luck is what got me there.
Not business books, but I think being well read is a huge advantage in all areas of life.
Never read a single business book ever, so no
You can:
-Find out through sheer trial and error, research, etc
-Find a mentor in the field/industry or with experience doing something similar and interview them or partner with them to some capacity, shadow them..
-Pay a business coach or industry related coach or consultant who can help you put it together
-Find out who else has done something similar and copy their approach or read their books, look at their offers, their marketing, their buyers etc to learn more. See what you can learn about their manufacturers, etc..
-Google, Ai, etc..
Books will give you bits and pieces amongst a ton of regurgitated fluff. Not all, but lots of the ‘popular’ ones.
Learn through trial and error…there’s no one way to get “it” right the first time around. You will fail at things along the way so don’t accept them as total failure, just as a notice to “course correct”. Willingness to course-correct is key.
What type of business is this that you are talking about? That will also contribute to what skillset(s) you might need..
nah man, the books are like 5% of it. i hit low-mid 6 figs after grinding thru two failed shops and the real teacher was just doing dumb shit and eating the L. like when i launched a fidget spinner store right as the hype died lmao, lost 8 grand but learned more about fb ads than any course ever taught me.
what helped way more was finding 2-3 people already doing what i wanted via twitter/linkedin and straight up dm’ing them “hey your stuffs fire, can i buy you coffee and pick your brain?” most ignored me but the one who replied literally walked me thru his whole supplier list over tacos. paid him back later by sending him clients but yeah, that 30 min convo > 20 books.
start with the ugly small steps. wanna make a product? grab 5 potential customers and literally ask them what pisses them off about current options. i did this with a discord community and got my first 10 sales before i even had inventory. books are nice for motivation but the map gets drawn by actually talking to humans and fucking up a few times.