Table of Contents
Top Books for Million $+ Business
Here is a comprehensive list of the greatest books you must read if you run a business that generates at least $1 million or more in annual revenue.
These books will help you:
- Grow your business
- Identify the next big move
- Hire the right people
- Create Systems and Processes
- Scale your business
- Replace yourself as the primary value creator in your business
- Sell your business
- Get through the toughest challenges in the current phase of your business
9. Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson
The subtitle of the book is 0 to $100 million in no time flat. 
Michael Masterson is a serial entrepreneur who has built multiple information product-based businesses, one of which generates over $300 million in annual revenue.
The key learning from the book is that you need to become a business builder and not a hustler who is just trying to make enough money to live a certain kind of lifestyle.
You need to figure out a way to get other people to do the hard work so you are free to do the work you truly enjoy.
This book will show you the path to grow your business through the 4 stages of business growth – from Infancy to Adulthood
- Infancy – From 0 to $1 million – In this phase, you need to maximize sales by identifying your Optimum Sales Strategy. You need to develop, work and improvise on one simple Marketing and Sales System rather than trying to figure out a variety of different marketing and sales strategies.
- Childhood – From $1 million to $10 million – The key in this stage is innovation. The biggest challenge during this phase is to increase your cash flow.
- Adolescence -From $10 million to $50 million – The main problem in this phase is that your systems are strained and you need to turn chaos into order.
- Adulthood- From $50 million to $100 million and beyond – Michael Masterson offers several great strategies to grow the business through this stage.
8. Built to Sell by John Warrillow
It is entirely possible that you are making the biggest mistake as an entrepreneur – You are building a business that relies on you all the way. Ask yourself:
- Do you want to run this business for the rest of your life?
- Or, do you want to sell this business for a high multiple of revenue and move on to do other things?
- Or do you want to structure your business so that it can run without you having to be fully involved all the time?
Built to Sell offers a system for making your business sellable by using these 3 keys.
- Make it Teachable – Create products and services that you can teach your employees to deliver to the world
- Make it Valuable – Create value by specializing in the marketplace
- Make it Repeatable – To generate recurring revenue by creating products and services that people buy repeatedly
The key is to understand that any business can be designed to be sellable by following these processes and systems. Especially so if you think you are the expert and your business for some reason cannot work without you.
7. Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Under Andy Grove’s leadership, Intel became the world’s largest chipmaker and one of the most admired technology companies in the world.
In this book, Grove talks about his strategy for managing the nightmare that every leader/ entrepreneur dreads – when there are massive changes and the company must figure out how to adapt to these changes.
Grove calls these moments Strategic Inflection Points, which can be set off by different things like:
- Changes in Competition
- Changes in Regulations
- Changes in Technology
When there’s a strategic inflection point, the ordinary rules of business go out of the window. A strategic inflection point can either be the biggest threat or the biggest opportunity when handled the right way.
Grove talks about one of the biggest inflection points in the history of Intel and how Intel transformed itself from a memory chip vendor to becoming the biggest microprocessor company in the world as a result of it.
6. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker is hailed by many as one of the greatest management gurus of all time. 
As your business grows, you probably feel that your attention is being pulled in many different directions and your personal productivity has suffered as a result.
This book teaches you how to:
- Manage your time and attention as an executive so that you can perform at the highest levels possible
- Get yourself and your team to focus on results and not the effort
- Make effective decisions
The book also reveals the biggest secret to effectiveness – Concentration.
You require big chunks of continuous time to make meaningful contributions. The more you can concentrate your time, effort and resources, the greater the number and diversity of tasks you can actually perform.
The key to doing great things is focusing single-mindedly on one thing and not multitasking.
5. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish is the founder of Entrepreneurs Organization, also called EO and this book, Scaling Up is a field manual on how to scale up a business. 
It gives you a complete framework and many great tools on how to scale up your business. Verne says that you need to focus on the 4 key areas in order to scale your business:
- People
- Strategy
- Execution
- Cash
When it comes to people, you need to be able to create processes and systems so that your people are held accountable. The book has several tools to create accountability systems and to lead your team.
When it comes to strategy, one of the highly recommended tools in the book is “The one-page strategic plan” which helps you stay focused on what matters most in the business at the moment. Verne talks about ways to incorporate your values, purpose, goals, key initiatives, key metrics into this one-page strategic plan.
This book also contains many great worksheets and exercises to help you deploy this framework into your business.
4. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
The story of Jeff Bezos and Amazon will challenge you to think and dream bigger and to take massive action. 
Some great lessons from the book are:
- Have a long term vision – Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world today.
When Jeff Bezos started the company, he said, “We are building this company for decades. We’re building this for the long haul. We’re not building this company to make a quick buck and get out of the whole internet flash-in-the-pan thing. This company should last decades.”
He started the business by selling books online and today Amazon sells everything. This only happened as a result of Jeff Bezos’ long term vision of what he wanted to build this business into.
- As an entrepreneur, you need to be a missionary, not a mercenary
Jeff Bezos believes that in business you can either be a missionary or a mercenary. As a missionary, you’re out to help and to serve. You are on a mission to do great things.
On the other hand, as a mercenary, you’re out to take, to kill, and to make a quick buck. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of businesses function these days.
Let’s understand Jeff Bezos’ mission. He is obsessed with customer satisfaction and he wants to make Amazon’s customer experience so good that people keep coming back to Amazon.
What Jeff Bezos is saying here is a very interesting paradox. In the short term, if you’re a missionary, you don’t really make much money, but if you’re a mercenary, you make a lot of money.
The paradox is that in the long term it’s the missionaries who end up making a whole lot of money while the mercenaries do not survive. This idea connects with the idea of having a long term vision.
When you have a long term vision, you can give and serve, but when you have a short term vision, you are a mercenary, and you take as much as you can.
Be a missionary, not a mercenary.
3. Build a business, not a job by David Finkel
Ask yourself:
- Have you built a business or a glorified high paying job for yourself?
- Does your business work only as long as you do?
Well, this book will teach you how to build a business that:
- Is independent of you
- Will work without you
- Can grow beyond your personal contribution
- Can be sold for high multiples of revenue if needed
He shares strategies to go from Level 1 to Level 3 business owner.
- Level 1 is a startup. There’s no control and no freedom for the entrepreneur.
- Level 2 is an “owner reliant company.” There’s a lot of control, but there is no freedom.
- Level 3, the highest level of business is an “owner independent company.” You have total control and total freedom.
David Finkel says the critical mindset shift for going from level 1 to level 3 business is to go from seeing yourself as the ultimate producer and creator of value in the business, to seeing yourself as the builder of business- a business that will create value without you.
You see yourself as the temporary producer of the product or service until you can build business depth that can replace you. David identifies 8 key building blocks of building a Level 3 business.
2. Built to Last by Jim Collins
If you want to build a business that will last for a very long time- for decades or even a century, this book is a must-read. 
This book is the conclusion of a 6-year research project at Stanford business school by Stanford professor Jim Collins and his team. During the research, they compared truly exceptional companies that have lasted decades such as Johnson & Johnson, Nordstroms, HP, Walmart.
They compared those companies with their competitors who perished way sooner and tried to understand:
- What makes these exceptional companies different?
- What allowed them to endure?
- What allowed them to last for such a long time?
At the end of their research, they came up with a blueprint for building businesses that can last for decades, and not for a few months or years.
The key to the blueprint is 2 pillars:
- Preserving the core
- Stimulating progress
1. Elon Musk’s biography by Ashley Vance
Elon Musk’s story will force you to think bigger. His story exemplifies the power of a mission and vision much greater than oneself. 
Why is Elon such a beloved entrepreneur?
- Is it because he’s worth $20 billion and is one of the richest men in America?
- Or is it because his vision for humanity is much bigger than anyone else?
He wants electric cars to save the environment; solar energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. He wants to save humanity by colonizing Mars because he’s worried that the earth could be destroyed by warmongering leaders or by environmental issues or by Asteroids from space.
He is obsessively working on SpaceX and Tesla not to make money or for his business to win but because he wants humanity to win which is extremely inspiring.
In one interview, Musk said, “The goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. So if any other company comes up with a great electric car, we would applaud them.” That’s why Elon Musk has made Tesla’s patents public. Musk said that “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who in good faith wants to use our technology.”
What he’s doing is making sure that as humans we all grow together. That is a mission much larger than what any other car or rocket company might be on.
If you want to achieve great things, you need to inspire others with your vision and mission and your vision can only be as inspiring as the number of people it impacts.