In this YouTube episode, Bradley Hamner presents his personal top‑10 list of business books that have profoundly shaped his thinking as a founder and entrepreneur. He begins by noting a longer top‑25 list available via a link to his Blueprint & West toolkit. For each of the ten books, Hamner gives a brief backstory, explains the core lesson or framework it offers, and describes how it impacted his own business practice. The books cover a range of themes: building a sellable service business (Built to Sell), financial literacy through a few critical numbers (Simple Numbers), strategic decision‑making (The Ultimate Blueprint), mindset shifts about goals (The Gap and the Gain), entrepreneurial perseverance (Shoe Dog), treating digital creations as assets (24 Assets), identifying system bottlenecks (The Goal), reclaiming personal time (Buy Back Your Time), working on the business rather than in it (The E‑Myth), and avoiding costly mistakes (The Road Less Stupid). Hamner repeatedly emphasizes the practical, actionable nature of each book and encourages viewers to access the full list and purchase links through his community site. The episode ends with a call for audience engagement about which of these books they have read.
Chapters
Hey everyone. Well, in this episode, I'm going to be going over my top 25 books. Well, specifically my top 10, but if you would like to get the list of my top 25 goated books, greatest books of all time, the link is at blueprintandwest.com/assets. You can go to the toolkit inside our toolkit. You'll see the list of our goated books. So in this episode, I'm going to go through the top 10 and give you a little bit of a backstory about how these books have had a huge impact on me. All right, first up, Built to Sell, John Warrillow. Great podcast as well, uh, that I love and listen to on a regular basis. Look, he uses a compelling narrative to show how to transform a service business into a valuable, sellable asset. It follows a business owner in kind of a novel aspect who learns how to standardize his offering, eliminate personal bottlenecks, and create a business that runs without him. I absolutely love this book. Number 2, Simple Numbers by Greg Crabtree. Funny story about this one. I actually heard about this book when I was in Toronto at Strategic Coach years ago from a couple of business owners that were, um, uh, from Mexico City building a healthy snack foods company. And at the very back, once I ordered this book, I, I saw a picture of Greg and it says he's, um, owner or partner at an accounting firm in Huntsville, Alabama. And I realized I'd actually played golf with Greg before. So it was kind of funny. I did not know his book. He often says that in Huntsville, Alabama, he's an accountant, but everywhere else he's an expert. Also, he wrote the cash section to the book Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. This book is fantastic. He really cuts through the accounting BS. To give business owners the financial literacy they actually need. He focuses on a handful of numbers, specifically critical numbers that drive profitability, things like labor efficiency ratio, uh, true profit margins, and cash flow management. I mean, this book teaches you how to run your business by the numbers without needing an MBA. If you want to understand financials, this book has had a huge impact on me. Similarly, this book, The Ultimate Blueprint for an Insanely Successful Business, by one of my favorite authors, Keith Cunningham— and we'll hear from him in a little bit— but I love his subtitle: Great operators get tired, great business owners get rich. Cunningham, who actually has been one of Warren Buffett's teachers, delivers a masterclass in strategic thinking and decision-making. This book is really centered around some incredible thinking strategies specifically around how to understand financials. Look, there's a lot of different books out there about, about money, but around business financials for small business owners, these two are it. The Ultimate Blueprint and Simple Numbers. Love those two books. All right, next, Gap in the Game by Dan Sullivan. I mentioned this earlier about going to Strategic Coach. It had a huge impact on me specifically, The Gap and the Gain, understanding, you know, how do you, as business owners, we hit a goal, but we seem to always push it out. And this idea of the horizon moving with us and stopping, turn around and looking backwards absolutely was a game changer for me. Love that book by Dan Sullivan. Next is a memoir by Phil Knight. And Shoe Dog. I love Shoe Dog. It, it sat on my bookshelf for a really long time before I actually read it, but his memoir chronicles Nike's journey from selling shoes out of his car to building a global empire. It's raw, honest, and reveals the messy reality of entrepreneurship and specifically what's needed around relentless persistence to be able to build what Nike is today. Next one is a book that you probably haven't heard of very much. It's called 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley, one of my personal business mentors. At the end of the day, the thing that stood out about this book is that income follows assets. And in a digital world, understanding that, you know, documents that you create in the business ultimately are assets, it just fundamentally shifted my idea from what I understood assets are instead of just real estate, cars, maybe not a car, but buildings, plant equipment, things of that nature as assets, but understanding that digital assets in the business are indeed assets. Absolutely love that book by Daniel Priestley. Next one, The Goal by, honestly, I can't pronounce his name and I don't want to try, Southern boy trying to pronounce his name. But look, This is presented as a manufacturing novel. I will tell you, I'm holding up the physical book, but the best way to actually read this book is to listen to it on Audible. They have one of the very best Audible books that I've ever listened to. It's great, but it's presented as a manufacturing novel. But Goldratt, he introduces the theory of constraints, which is the principle that every system has one bottleneck limiting its performance. And this book teaches you to identify that constraint and focus all of your improvement areas there, since optimizing anything else is just theater. And so this idea has really permeated into small business and entrepreneurship. That is a fantastic book. What is the thing that is standing in your way? What is your bottleneck? Next, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. Look, I mean, Dan came and spoke at our 2-day MBA. I actually heard him do this kind of as a presentation before this book came out. Look, And that idea he gave us, in that book, he gives us a framework for auditing how we spend our time and systematically buying it back. There's a lot of times that people have shared with us that we need to, you know, offload lower value tasks. But the idea of then putting a formula to it and then understanding about what we're replacing that time with, absolute game changer. So if you've not read Buy Back Your Time, we actually oftentimes give that out to business owners who come into our program. This list would not at all be appropriately put together if I did not mention The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Look, at the end of the day, his classic dismantles the myth that technicians make good business owners. Look, same thing as if a good insurance agency owner makes a good business owner. They're not the same. At the end of the day, if you become a great business owner, you get the other. It just doesn't work in the inverse. And that's the idea of working, you know, on your business and not in your business. I totally agree. It's actually why this podcast is called Above the Business. It is a nod and it is an appreciation for this book. I think you've got to work on it, not in it. I agree. I just think that there's a third dimension, which is also how do you get Above the Business. Have— if you've read that book, have you realized that book in your business? And if it's also— if it's been a while since you read it, I recommend reading that one again. And then finally, for me personally, the GOAT, The Road Less Stupid. This is a book that I read once a year. It absolutely has had the biggest impact on my thinking, on my vernacular, and it permeates everything that I think about. In business, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. A, uh, just so you know, too, if you've ever seen the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, Keith Cunningham is the rich dad. And from what I can tell, he has also been a teacher to Warren Buffett himself. I mean, what an incredible businessman. I love this book. It's called Advice from the Chairman of the board. I love the subtitle, Avoiding the Dumb Mistakes That Sabotage Growth, Growth, Profits, and Business Success. That's my top 10. The Road Less Stupid, Built to Sell, Simple Numbers, The Ultimate Blueprint for an Insanely Successful Business, The Gap in the Game by Dan Sullivan, Shoe Dog, The E-Myth, 24 Assets, The Goal, and Buy Back Your Time. Those are my top 10. But if you would like to know, back behind me is also a list, an additional group of books. In fact, 15 more books that are on this list. If you would like to know what the other top 15 are, you can get it by going to blueprintos.com/assets. You'll be able to get into our circle community and there you'll have the go-to books, the top 25, as well as a link to the Amazon store so you can add them to your cart. I would love to know how many of these books have you read? Let us know. What's your top 10? Till next time, lead well and go be great.
