Laura Benjamin

Robert Cialdini’s original book is a must-read if your goal is understanding how people make decisions and build relationships with others. His methods have helped me in everything from sales and marketing, to managing employees, to ultimately getting to a yes in my professional life when I need it the most.

Cialdini has written several books that expand on the six methods. Start with Influence, and if you like this one, read Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Let’s be honest. Starting, growing, and succeeding with a small business is brutally hard. Most don’t make it past the first five years, and even fewer make it to ten.

The Five Stages of Small Business Growth (free read/article limit) is an accurate look at journey from an operational standpoint – and from my work with hundreds of different small businesses over the years, the patterns Churchill and Lewis reveal are accurate and persistent.

I’ve leaned on this framework more times than I can count – and it’s the closest thing you’ll find to a roadmap for what’s ahead in your small business’s development.

If you want to know what’s ahead for your small business, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you read this article, print it out, and refer to it regularly.

Productivity and business geeks already know and follow Tim Ferriss, and you should too. I finally gave this one a read years after reading Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited, and this was the perfect companion. Using the lessons here helped me restructure my first business so that I could follow the path and find the freedom I’d always wanted.

Starting a business takes a lot of time, energy, passion, and commitment. The 4-Hour Work Week should be your endgame.

Feeling trapped in a job instead of like you’re running a business? The promised land of the entrepreneur is in these pages.