10 Best business and marketing books recommendations

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Never miss an episode and subscribe and listen at dawnmcgruer.com. Welcome to Dawn of a New Era, episode 42, where I'm going to share my top 10 business and marketing books to read right now. Now, these are all books that I've got on the go and I'm reading, and the reason I've chosen these books is twofold.

Some of them are people that I've met and interviewed for the podcast and who have shared some of the most inspiring stories. But how I met them in the first place was I found their books, I started reading, and I got hooked. So I wanted to know more. I wanted to see the author behind the book.

So as we delve into the books, I'm going to share not just the book, the recommendation, but a little bit about the author too and why I've chosen the book, what it's going to do for you, and I hope that you go out and check some of them out, even buy them or have a look at some of them online. So number one is a guy called Joe Paranto, and I interviewed him on my podcast, and actually he invited me to endorse his book. His book is called Billion Dollar Sales Secrets. Really interesting book because it takes in a lot of the concepts that I believe in.

So I believe the three core pillars of success are marketing, motivation, and mindset. Now, sales is something that a lot of marketers struggle with. You know, we're very creative, we're great entrepreneurs, we love what we do, and we're experts in our own field. But as soon as you mention sort of sales, it's not necessarily something that we compute that we do every day.

I love the angle of this book because it talks about actually selling in a way that is human, in a tone that you can just buy into. So this book is honestly something that I think you would get loads out of from a performance point of view and just how you address your customers' needs and the way that you present your business. So as much as it's talking about billion-dollar sales, this is kind of his background. He works for Microsoft, et cetera, and he's in charge of a huge amount of sales targets.

But the way it's written is kind of really, really down to earth, and it's got a nice feel to it. So by the end of it, I think you will have got quite a few changes in the way that you deal with your sales within business. Now, the next one is Jordan Babineau, and he is an ex-NFL player. He was into sports, and what I like about his book, which is called How to Pivot to Win, is he's taken the concepts of being a sportsman, the disciplines, the nature, and the psyche of winning, and he's turned it into a business book and how he relates that into his entrepreneurial journey.

Now, he's like a filmmaker. He is still a presenter and host on a lot of sports shows and the voice of the Seattle Seahawks, et cetera. But he's got businesses. He is very honest about failure and challenges and how to adapt into a winning situation.

So there's loads of tips in there in terms of things that you can instantly apply. Now, that kind of brings me on to another one of my favourites. This is something that I keep picking up, and I keep going back to it. It's from a gentleman called Jürgen Ingels, and he is basically behind loads of startups and loads of scale-ups.

He is a founder of a company called Smartfin Fund, which basically finances and supports growing technology companies. But he was also, like, the driving force behind Clear2Pay. So that was a massive, massive company with, like, thousands, I think like 1,200 employees in 20 locations, and he sold it in 2014 for, like, 500 million. I mean, amazing story.

But again, this one goes back to starting, growing, and selling. And the way he's positioned this book is all about the 50 lessons that an entrepreneur can sort of learn, and it's broken down into all these, like, bite-sized nuggets. And you can go through each of them and take away an actionable insight. This is what I like: implementation, not just kind of reading and consuming, but actually doing something with it.

Now, my next book is kind of a follow-on from this. It's from a gentleman called Patrick Flesner. Now, all of these authors I'm talking about, you will find on DawnMcGruer.com, and you can dig a little bit deeper and find out a bit more about their human psyche and who they are, and you can actually see them in a video interview.

I love that correlation of reading a book, right, and meeting the person, and this is why I always kind of find my podcast guests this way. So Patrick, he is a growth capital investor, like 15 years' experience, and he is also a partner in an investment firm. He has like an inside knowledge into why businesses that scale are successful. And this book is all about fast scaling.

That's the title, Fast Scaling. And what he's looking into this book and sharing about information is all about enabling you to become a successful growth leader, so someone who is a strong leader who is pursuing this smart growth strategy and how to execute it. So it's like a step-by-step, like a path to building a valuable business. It's got a really nice tone to it.

And again, in the interview, he shared how difficult it was to write. And also, many of these authors during the pandemic had to re-gear some of the writing because they didn't want to miss out on concepts that were important in business. And with the changing evolution of, obviously, the fact that we're driven online, we can't go out, we're in a pandemic, and so on. Now, a colleague of mine and friend who is also on the podcast, and you may have heard of before, is Shar Wasmund MBE.

She was the best-selling author of Stop Talking and Start Doing. That was the first book I read. And then this one is How to Fix Your Shit. It is basically a straightforward guide for a better life, and it's a really short, simple, quick-fix book.

And you can pick the book up, read it, consume it, like, you know, in a few hours. But there's lots of actionable insights, but lots of check-in moments of things you go, Ah, do you know what? This is me, kind of like epiphany moments where you're like, This is where I am, actually, and if I just changed this a little bit, it would be a bit different. Now, there was a gentleman who was on the podcast quite early on called H.

J. Chamus, and I have a property company, and this is kind of where it sparked my interest because— He focuses on the fact that you don't have to kind of leave your job, and this is something that I really am passionate about. You hear all these people in the online space talking about, you've got to leave your job, you've got to commit, you've got to put all in. He talks about the fact that you can actually have your job, and the book he's written is called Employee Millionaire.

So how you can build a property portfolio whilst in a job with little money in. So he's really realistic. I mean, he talks about on the interview on the podcast about how he started his business, and he only had a small, small amount of money to get his first property, and he talks about signing for it. So you buy into it, you really feel it from his point of view, and it's sort of, as much as it's aspirational to think about being a million-dollar sort of property owner, etc.

, it feels really truly achievable in the way that he presents it. So that's why I like that book. One of the funniest podcast interviews I had with Joel Primus. He is a Canadian guy that I literally just liked his style online and the way that he presented himself, because he was on the podcast interview just talking about his business in just such a lovely manner, because he's been very successful.

He started a company called Naked Underwear, and he shares how this basically company had some epic fails and some major wins. So he raised like $17 million for the company, and it was sold through major department stores, so epically successful. But he also shared a story on the podcast interview about when he got his first sort of order in. He placed an order with the manufacturer for like 10,000 pairs of boxer shorts, and one of the investors got in touch with him and he said, Well, I can understand why you have named it Naked.

And he said, Oh, really? And he said, Yeah, because they don't stay on. And he tells the story, and you know what? It's so funny, but so inspiring in the fact that, you know, he nearly lost his business over this, but it shows that entrepreneurs...

Who are authentic will rock up and tell you about their fails because everybody has failed at some point. And it would not be true to say that everybody has floated through life, started a business, and it was absolutely mega. It's not. There's some hard points.

You know, there's been tears in my life. There's been real exhaustion and desperation in my journey. And again, on my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing, it's a 400-page hardback book, but it took me a lot to get that out. And I got my publishing contract in, like, 2019, and I was just so elated.

I was so, so excited. But then writing the book was such a challenge.

Kind of feel like I was giving the value, giving the knowledge, and then when I handed in the manuscript, wow, did I get imposter syndrome, you know. And honestly, I really started, like, panicking about, you know, people are going to read this, what they're going to think. And you know what? When it came out and it was a bestseller before it even actually was available for purchase, then that was a bit of a game changer.

And then it got an award, well, finalist in the Business Book of the Year Awards. So it started to dissipate, but I still always felt it, and probably still will in the background, that just kind of that anxiety of putting yourself out there in just such a visual way. Now, the last book that I'm going to, well, last couple of books I'm going to talk about are about businesses, but on two different angles. So, for instance, there was a lady called Michelle Seiler Tucker, really vivacious lady, really straight-talking, totally out there in terms of she is very, very insightful and factual about what she does, but very honest, right?

So she's straight-talking down the line. She talks about scaling businesses and how to get rich, basically, fast, and it's all about valuing a business and how you build a business that's actually sellable. So I think it was really interesting when I was talking to her because her book was something that I kind of, I accidentally came across, and I was just kind of searching online, and I saw it come up in the Amazon New Books, and I was like, not sure if this for me. So I went and had a look at it.

It's called Exit Rich, and Michelle Seiler Tucker includes the six P method to sell your business for huge profit. Do you know what? I started getting really into it. I really started looking at the structure behind my businesses, and I found it really fascinating.

And the way that she kind of breaks it down, it just makes total sense as you're reading. And then another very inspiring gentleman, and this is my last book on the list. This is Adam Myron. I got in touch with him, and I was a bit apprehensive because I was thinking, will he even come on my podcast?

Will he even want to do this? I have no idea. And I reached out, took a little bit of a punt, and messaged him on LinkedIn, and he had written a book called Billion Dollar Startups, like billion dollar, okay? So this wasn't just millions; this was billions.

And what really kind of got me was that by 29, he was one of the only 100 Canadians ever in history to still be alive while his company was actually a billion-dollar company. So his demeanor in the interview was just so calm and just so unassuming that sometimes, you know, I'll be honest, when I'm looking for podcast guests, you start thinking, are they going to be a bit arrogant and a bit full of themselves? Am I going to feel like, you know, completely inadequate? And he just actually had this way that he told his story about where he came from.

He told his story about trying to fund the business and the heartache and things he went through. And even the fact that he's a billionaire, he was just really, really down to earth. I mean, I know that you can probably say that, you know, we could all be lovely people if we were billionaires because it's a nice thing to be, isn't it? But he was.

He's definitely one to go and have a look at. And the concept of his business is even more out there because it was all to do with cannabis, right? So that, again, really kind of spiked my interest because I was thinking, like, well, how did he manage to kind of grow it to get the CBD oil and, you know, how do you get a license for that? And he charts the story.

So a really interesting guy and one to follow. Now, there's loads of other books that I love, and I always get asked if there was one book that I read when I was younger that made an impact, and it was Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind. I loved it because it just charted out and plotted out in my mind, like sensibly, the differences between men and women, but also how the mind works. Like, why do we think things?

How are we feeling things? Why is the mind making us do this? And it was a fascinating book. So there's loads more books I've read in my life.

I mean, from things like Ann Wilson's The Wealth Chef. I love that. It was about financial freedom. I've read all the Profit First books by Mike Michalowicz, if I can pronounce that correctly.

So yeah, I mean, loads of different things. I mean, I like learning anything to do with psychology and about how we learn. So Benedict Carey created a book all about how we learn. Really interesting read.

But the ones I've covered in today's episode are kind of like my top 10, the ones that I'm reading at the moment, I'm taking action from. So final reminder and final recap. Number one is Joe Parenteau, Billion Dollar Sales Secrets. Number two is Jordan Babineau, How to Pivot to Win.

Number three, Patrick Flesner, Fast Scaling. And number four, Adam Myron, Billion Dollar Startups. Number five was Joel Primus, Getting Naked. Number six was Shah Wasmund with her book How to Fix Your Shit.

And so number seven was Michelle Seiler Tucker, and hers was all about call to exit rich. Number eight was H.J. Chammas, Employee Millionaire.

And number nine, Jürgen Ingels. And of course, I couldn't do book recommendations without including a cheeky little feature of my own book, Dynamic Digital Marketing, which is all about mastering the art of online marketing to scale and grow your business. So I hope this episode was helpful for you. Let me know how you get on with the books, and let me know if you take action and what happens, you know, any defining moments that you've taken from these.

And yeah, I'd love to hear feedback. So take care, and I'll see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era podcast, and for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit, and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.