My Top 17 Business Books Of All Time & Service Manager Challenge Jeep Update

Sam.

Bacon. The Jeep's done, bro. The Jeep is done. I'm really excited to see how it turned out and how close the orange is to what we intended. Also, you know, to be successful in business. Like a lot of you watching this, are you read a lot of books and people often ask me like, hey, did you go to Harvard or Stanford? And they assume I went to an Ivy League school. But the truth is I'm self taught. And most of what I've learned I either learned hands on or from reading books or taking courses. And so today I've put together my 17 top business books that have impacted me and I've got the most from. One of them really isn't a business book. It actually probably isn't even a book you want your spouse to know you're reading. So maybe a little controversial, but I'm sharing everything with you and the book had a huge impact on me. So I'm going to kind of tell you all about that. So let's get started and let's go check it out.

Take a right on Brickell. This one up here, we. We're lost. We're not going to be able to. I don't think today you're going to be able to see the Jeep because we can't find the place. Gator Wraps is hidd.

They're sneaky gainers. So we just basically went in a big circle, basically. It's about the spin though, because this.

Way it's more exclusive.

Oh, it's exclusive. Okay.

We're pulling up to Gator Wraps. I hope that the orange is as orange as orange should be, but not shiny. But we'll see what Gator Wraps is doing for us here.

Hey, Jeremy, Nice to meet you, man.

How's it going?

Pretty good. How's it going today?

Good. So nice. Beautiful blue wrap. Blue.

I don't know about blue. Maybe green might work out.

That's cool. You guys do those kind of graphics?

Yeah, you know, we do anything from storefronts to, you know, billboards. Pretty much anything you can wrap. We do it a lot of our half of our business advertising and the other half is, you know, nice custom stuff like we like to do every once in a while and be able to do some fun projects as well.

So what is all. What is all this?

So these are all of our wide format printers. These are all 1638 X printing on another. This is actually for the slingshot. So we're printing on a special material here. This is a metallic. So you can still see the metallic through the print out.

So.

So we do a lot of special material prints like that.

What's that for?

This is for a manhunt. This is a wall wrap that we're doing similar to something like this for inside of an office.

Oh yeah. So what percentage of your business is that?

You know, probably on the lower end, maybe 10% or so. It's, you know, a lot more vehicles than Wallace. But it varies. I mean, but it could be, you know, we're doing outside of, you know, the Bray Improv or you know, the inside of Mannheim so, you know, storefronts like you see our storefront. So a lot of people like, you know, to brand their area as well. If people come to our facility and we're just like, wow, I mean, you guys wrap everything. People don't even realize it. So you know that it's possible. Yeah. So I mean, we just kind of got to get the word out. You know, we build brands and brands build us, you know. So I've been here eight years and I've gone back to where, you know, I did one vehicle and now, you know, there's 20 of them. And I've seen these businesses grow with us and in turn we want to make sure that they're taken care of and build their brand and in turn that bring us more business. So it's really a reciprocating relationship with us, with our clients. You know, you got a lot of little shops here and there that, you know, they'll lowball and maybe use a cheap laminate. People can't always tell the difference, but where it really comes down to it is, yeah, it's just, are you going to be taken care of? Are you going to have a good product? Those kinds of things that we stand by.

So that's great. Well, thanks, man.

But if we get tired of the orange, we're gonna go pink next. So today we're picking the color of the gladiator for the service manager challenge. We're gonna have it wrapped in vinyl. My idea was that we would try to match the irreplaceable service manager book, which is orange, which is one of our favorite colors around here. But Stefan here, that's his God given Spanish name, went to Home Depot.

These are the swatches.

You gotta do what you can.

So I want to match this because I think the book kind of matches this Lambo, the flat. But none of these are really close to it.

Right.

Okay, we can tell we want that one.

People ask me all the time how many people work for you and I'm like about half of them.

Can you see it?

They're gonna bring it around.

Oh, that looks great.

That's amazing.

That looks so great.

I love.

Great job, man. Looks great.

Okay, so now we're gonna go over the 17 business books I would recommend everybody to read. And we're gonna drop this off to actually get the lift kit put on next. So come on, let's go.

So we're going to go over the books right now, but I want to kind of tell you about what the Service Manager Challenge is and why this Jeep is so significant is we're running a contest for managers that can take our systems and implement them and increase the profitability of their department and really kind of document their journey a little bit in an essay of how they got tools to get them kind of unstuck or get them to perform at a higher level. It doesn't matter if you're. If you're lost and you're having a hard time figuring out how to get ahead in your department, how to lead, or if you're doing a great job and you're just looking for that law of the slight edge. Either way, that's what I'm trying to motivate you to take a leap and become better than what you are right now, to perform at a higher level and achieve more. Because I know that there's more in you. I know you can do more, and you can have the freedom and the quality of life and fun. A lot of people say, like, hey, I didn't know that I could have fun, but you can have fun in your department as a leader. So that's the motivation, and that's what the Service Manager Challenge is all about. Okay, so now let's go over my top 17 business books that I think you should read.

I'm just gonna randomly pull these out. Book number one is the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Two big takeaways from this book.

One was that.

He learned time management from dealing with his billionaire boss. It's a fascinating story how he talks about how he, you know, he had to have everything down on one piece of paper. It had to make sense. It had to be concise. And he had 20 minutes with them, and that was it. And how he learned to make people do that to him and also how he hires salespeople is genius in there. So the ultimate sales machine.

The Culture Code by Clotaire Papale. That's my French. So the culture code is genius because this guy, Clotaire was a marketing guy, but he started off doing.

He was a doctor, and he started off helping kids with autism, and he learned how to kind of get deep into the subconscious. And he ended up getting hired by different brands to figure out the motivator for people. There's a fascinating story in there about Chrysler coming to him and saying, hey, we want you to help us design a car. And we know what our clients want. They want safety, reliability, and gas mileage. And he ended up helping him develop the Prowler as, like, an Al Capone getaway car. Because deep in the subconscious of mostly my generation, I don't think millennials are the same, but cars represented to us freedom from our parents. It was freedom. And so he designed the car like an Al Capone getaway car, and it sold great. And he says in there that it wasn't safe, reliable, and it didn't get good gas mileage. So it's a great marketing book at the end of the day, that one.

Ooh, the Game. Okay, so this is a dangerous one. So the Game is a book by Neil Strauss, who. He's an amazing writer, but it's about how he learned how to pick up girls. So he's a short, nerdy, bald guy, and he learned how to pick up girls. And I'm not suggesting this book as a way to pick up girls. It isn't about that at all. So if you're going to read this book, you have to understand something is you need to come to it from the perspective of sales. I think this is the greatest sales book ever written. Because what you learn in here is his process for learning how to attract the opposite sex was trial and error and practicing and paying attention to the details and how you looked, how you talked, what you said, everything mattered, and you could create an outcome that you originally didn't think you could create. And also, you know, just getting past the. The fear of approaching. And I think sometimes in sales, there's a fear of cold calling, approaching, and things like that. So if you read this book, take it as the idea of how can you sell more, how can you be a better salesperson? Not how can you pick up girls? That's not really the best use of the book. I don't think at the end of the day that part of it's a little shallow. But he's a great writer and it's really well written. A lot of wives don't like me recommending that book, but I don't think that I've. I think that everybody has been able to. To take that in Context. Oh, this is good. Okay. So the great pain deception. I, I, I had somebody that worked for me that had had back surgery a few times and he always had back pain. And I asked in this master mine I was in, I was like, hey, what, what do I do? And they said, oh, have him go see Dr. Sarno at NYU. And he ended up reading a couple Dr. Sarno books and going through the process. And I read the books. But what I learned in the process is that a lot of our illnesses, back pain, come from stress in our mindset and how we, our body is actually at the end of the day, trying to protect us because we're stressed. We don't know how to cope with things in our subconscious will put us down. And what I mean by put us down is it'll create back pain or some sort of illness to keep us from having to face those things. And, you know, the pain or the back pain ends up being bigger than the stress that we're facing. And it just, it really represents how mental a lot of things are and how powerful our mind is. And so this isn't by Sarno, this is by this guy, Stephen Ray Oznik. But Sarno retired. And this is a great book and it's the same lesson. But I used to every couple years I would get, you know, back pain and I couldn't move, you know, literally couldn't get off the floor sometimes. And ever since going through this, I haven't had any back pain since.

Okay, Thursday speeches by coach Don James. So I grew up in, in Seattle and Washington, and Don James was, you know, arguably the best coach that Washington State ever had. But what's genius about this is how he came into a culture of losing. And it documents how he turned it around, how he changed the way that the players behave, acted. And I just think it's a great leadership book. It really, it's an easy read, it's short, but it shows how somebody comes in to a bad culture and then turns it, turns it around. Phil Jackson, 11 rings. So Phil Jackson has a few books. This one is my favorite of all of his books. It really just goes into the inside of how he managed Michael Jordan and Kobe and Shaq, you know, really high performing athletes. And I think a lot of time in our industry, guys will say, well, you know, the high performers are the biggest pain in the butt and they're the hardest to manage. And I think that there's some lessons in here and then just leadership lessons on practice and how you, how you approach teams. There's a lot of Zen in there, meditation, things like that, that, that I believe in and I've had success with. It's interesting. He used to make the, his teams practice in the dark, which is crazy. So amazing book. 11 rings.

The little stuff matters most, which is so, so True by Bernie Brillstein. Great book. Lots of nuggets in there. It's kind of broken up into 50 chapters and it's, it's an easy read.

Principles by Ray Dalio. So this is a meaty book. The audiobook actually is really good. That's how, that's how I ingested this was audiobook.

There's a quote here on the front by Bill Gates. Ray Dalio's provided me with invaluable guidance, insights that are now available to you in principals. So there's so many things in this book. Ray Dalio is, you know, arguably ran, I think the biggest.

Investment company fund that there is and he created a system for it. And you know, literally at one point he lost everything and he, he created this system that is infamous to this day. And a lot of people didn't like working in the system because he, he recorded every meeting. There were no politics whatsoever in his company. Everything was out in the open. And he, he had like this way of.

Measuring people's success against their opinion and their value. And so everybody's opinion was tracked and measured, but it gave the biggest weight to the, to the people that had a track record of results. And it's genius. His philosophies, his approach are just genius.

That's, I think that should be a must read for anybody. Oh, winning through intimidation. I love this book. I read this book on the beach in Cabo on vacation once. I know a lot of people when they go on vacation, go like scuba diving and fishing and rock climbing. Not me. I lay by the pool and read books. So winning by intimidation. Couple things you should know about this one is I would buy an old one. So if you buy the really old ones, the original printing of them, they're expensive, like, I don't know, they can be 120 bucks. But I would buy those. The new ones that have been rewritten and reprinted in paperback lose a little something to me. So I, I love these old ones. I love how they, they smell like old books, like an old library. But basically what he's talking about in this book is he, he was in real estate investing and he was buying apartment buildings and different things and he just kept getting his butt kicked in business. Like people were, you Know, telling him one thing and doing something else. And he. He really was struggling. And so he created a system how to deal without. How to hedge his bets, how to. How to have an impact on the. The opposition or the. The seller when he was buying apartments, by the way he looked. By the way he showed up. I learned a lot about lawyers in here. Like, I've. Honestly, since I read this book, I've never lost a lawsuit by using his strategies in here and understanding that lawyers in private have their own language. And.

It really helped me manage lawyers and understand that when they go into the judge's chambers or when they're talking to each other, they're feeling each other out. And where's your client at? Where's mine at? And they're not always representing us in the way that we want. And it helped me be a lot more aggressive in business dealings and things like that to coach lawyers and, you know, kind of control that outcome in business. So that. It's a great book, but like I said, buy the old one, not the. Not the new one.

Oh, Wooden. This is a must read. This one, too. There's a lot of books by Wooden, but this one is. Is my favorite one. It's a snack. It's really easy to read. But there's a few things in here that.

You. You take away. One is that new players coming to play at ucla.

You. He couldn't take for granted that they even knew their shoe size. Like you would say, a lot of players would come to UCLA and they. They didn't actually know how to fit shoes or what their shoe size was. And so just those attention to detail, how you onboard people into your company or into your sports team, how he handled difficult players like Bill Russell came back after a break and showed up with a beard and long hair, and he was the star of the team. And he was like, bill, I love you, but we're gonna miss you because you can't play on the team with a beard and long hair. Then Bill went and cut his hair. It's kind of funny. Oh, psycho cybernetics. Amazing.

So I like this one. There's a couple versions of psycho cybernetics, too. This is the one when Dan Kennedy bought the rights to it and kind of redid it. He has a. He added some things to it. But the thing with, with Maltz, Dr. Maltz was he was a plastic surgeon and he couldn't understand that patients would come to him and they would. They would think like, hey, if I fix this scar on my face, or you Know, I fix my nose, my life will get better. I'll have more calm confidence. And they, they felt like whatever it was in their looks that they needed to fix would fix their life. And oftentimes, not only would it not fix their life, when they got their nose done or the scar removed, it actually got worse. And so this is about your internal dialogue. And you'll see tons of pro golfers, NFL players, will attribute this as being, you know, one of their favorite books in a professional performance book. And, you know, kind of what you learn is how. How to approach your subconscious and your conscious mind and your self image and the inner dialogue that's going on. This is literally a book that you can pick up and just open up anywhere and read it and you'll get something valuable out of it. It's amazing. Psycho cybernetics. The Dan Kennedy one. Oh, shut up. Stop whining and get a life. So I went through a period where I lost my business, my dog died, and I was going through a divorce. And I don't know why I picked up this book, why, why I was attracted to it. I've since hung out and kind of became friends with Larry. He also has a bulldog. But it's great, his. His affirmations in here, his approach.

You know, I don't know. I guess at the time, even though I could have felt sorry for myself, what I took away from this book is not to feel sorry for myself and, you know, to get after it. I wasn't a victim. An opportunity was still there. And it, you know, it's an amazing book. My favorite Larry Wingett book. Shut up, Stop Whining and get a Life.

Influence. The Psychology of Influence by Cialdini. This is. This is an amazing book. I know a lot of. A lot of people in the automotive industry have read this book, but.

It'S just about, you know, how you can influence people, how, you know, by reciprocation and different things, you can influence the outcome of a sale, of a transaction, of, you know, raising money for a charity. It's a classic genius, you know, book influence.

Tim Larkin, our buddy Tim Larkin. Amazing guy. When Violence is the Answer. I know it's kind of a controversial title, but really my biggest takeaway is not assuming a social contract. And I think we want to assume a social contract that isn't there. But amazing book. Can't recommend it enough. Get past the title and read it. There's a lot of lessons in there.

Pete Carroll, win forever. Great book. A lot like the wooden book. He. He kind of borrows a lot from Wooden and the, the pyramid that Wooden has in his. He has his own. I like some of the things on Pete's because it's like if you're on time, you're late. There's a bunch of good lessons in here about culture and how to find the things that are special about the people on your team and then amplify those things. It's a great book. And also take into consideration I'm a huge Seahawks fan and he fixed our team for sure.

Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. So Jordan Peterson has a another book that came out, I think last year called 12 Rules for Life. It's amazing.

But this is a book that I carry around and read all the time. And his Harvard.

Classes that he did on this or lectures on maps of meaning are up online on his YouTube channel. And I watch those and read the book. I've never highlighted and written in a book as much as in this one. Like, it's just unbelievable.

The things in here. But really the, the, the takeaways from this book are how behaviors and context and why people do things. What's, you know, what's ingrained in us. Behaviors and approaches to things. I think for any leader or anybody in marketing or business, which we all are, this, this is a must read. It's heady, like you can only take like a couple pages at a time and then you got to stop and think about it. But I love a book like that. That's, that's work that you really.

Get challenged in your thinking and your approach and you have to try to understand it because there's layers in here. And it does, like I said, it does help to watch his lectures at Harvard also along with it, but can't say enough great things about Maps of Meaning. And Jordan Peterson, who I think should be the Prime Minister in Canada, but I don't know.

He'S not. So then here's the last one. This is number 17, teaching excellence the defining guide to NLP for teaching and learning. So the story behind this book is Kate Benson took NLP class from Bandler. So Bandler is one of the founders of nlp. And she said at a break to Bandler, she said, hey, you're using NLP to teach us nlp. And he said, yeah, of course. That's the quickest way for you to learn it. And she's like, well, why doesn't anybody teach teachers how to use nlp? And he said, that's a great idea. So they co wrote this book. So there's two things.

That I think you'll get from this book and why you should read it. One is you're going to learn how to train your people, how to teach your people and understand how they learn because people learn in different ways. And then the second one is you actually learn nlp. She does a great job of explaining nlp. I think maybe I learned more about NLP from, from this book in the context of how to use it to teach other people then I've ever, you know, learned. And I'm actually, I want to go to a bandler workshop and kind of learn it from him himself. But it's, it's amazing if you don't know what NLP is. It's neuro linguistic programming. But it's, you know, there's certain ways you can phrase things, approach things, do things that make people understand you and retain things you know better than they would without it. So look it up, maybe watch some videos online about it. But, but that's the last book. So there you go. There's my 17 business books that I think everybody should read.