10 Books to Read To Change Your Business For the better

In this podcast I am going to share with you the top 10 books that will change your business forever. So my name is Mike Simpson. I give hosts all over the world the tools, the tactics and the training and the confidence to increase your direct bookings. And let's get started. This is a freestyle going off the dumb.

Ready for my close up good looking let me tell you. Get more bookings. Oh that'd be nice. Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah you're gonna get em hun. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson. Whoa. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you'll better butt direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Alright. Hello everybody. I hope you are doing well as you are tuning into this. If you're on the video version on YouTube or wherever, leave a little hashtag live or hashtag replay and also let me know where you are tuning in from and give your business a bit of a promote website in there. Tell us where you are in the world, why someone should stay with you. You never know, your next booking may be in the comment section. So go and do that for me. I wanted to do this video for a while. I'm an avid reader of books and listener of audiobooks and I have been for a long time now. It has really helped Boostly. So get to the level where it is and it's going to help me get to the next level. And there's 10 specific books that I have not only sort of read or listened to but loved and purchased and kept. And these are the ones that I gift as well. So I wanted to share with you what they are because it's coming up more and more now about you know, what books do you read and what where do you get your inspiration from? Podcasts that I've been on. So I wanted to do this so I can point people to this in the future. Also as well I wanted to let you know that we have very recently started up a Boostly Book club. It is totally free, it's a Facebook group, we have monthly calls, we do monthly books. It's, it's hosted by the amazing Miranda Bracket and you can go to Boostly Book Club on Facebook, request to join. It's totally free. We're doing some awesome things in there. The response and the learnings and the community aspect and the accountability of it is great. I love it and I know a lot of people do it as well. We're close to a thousand members, so please do. And we, we do our best to try and reach out to the author of the book that we're doing in the, in the monthly thing and we try and get them onto a zoom call as well. So it's totally free. I would love as many people to come and join as possible because I feel that when it comes to education, being able to read and always be improving is a massive sign and I would love for you all to, to take care and take advantage of it as well. So like I said in this video, in this podcast, we're going to dig into the my top 10. Now my top 10 will be totally different to your top 10. There's other books that I've loved, but these are the ten that stood out. And it's and as you will see as we go on, it's, it's different books for different phases in the business because everybody who is tuning into this will be at different stages of their, of their business career. You're either at the startup stage, you may be pivoting, or you maybe been doing it for a while. There's always something you can take and different books help you along that journey. So I'm going to start off with one of my favorite authors, one of my favorite humans. I'm a massive fanboy, very much looking forward to meeting him at an upcoming event we're going to be speaking at together, which I'm very excited for. And it is Mike Michalowicz. So those of you that have been tuning in for a while, you'll know that I'm a big Mike Michalowicz fan. I talk about him a lot of my Instagram stories. I share, you know, the books and I've been very privileged to have a one on one. He's been on the podcast several times. He's looked at Boostly and done like a marketing overview for Boostie. So I'm a massive fan and the first book that I'm going to recommend for everybody to read. Probably every stage of business is Profit first. So this is probably the book that Mike is most known for. He's a serial author. He has written many books from the Pumpkin Plan to one of the other books I'm going to talk about, which is Clockwork and Get Different. And he's got a new book coming up over the course of the next year or two years called all in and this is the one that I started with, and this is the one I think everyone should start with, because when you're getting your business going, and particularly for me, until I discovered the amazing Laura Powner, who has come on board to do all the financials at Boostly, is I just buried my head in the sand when it came to finances. The money of it was in the bank, and it was just there. And, you know, it wasn't really until I properly dug into this that I realized how to properly look after it so that you're never panicking when a big tax bill comes in, or, you know, if there's an unexpected bill that you don't. That you aren't planning for, and all the different pots and how to do all of that. And as Boothly has grown, and it's not just me now, we've got, you know, nearly 40 members of staff spread all around the world. That's, you know, a lot of people that we are responsible for, I am responsible for. So it's really important that I got this in play. And this book, what I love about it, because there's lots of books on finances, right? There's tons of them. But this book is easy to understand because finances is very hard to sort of get your head around a lot of the times. But what it is good as well is that it's very implementable. You know, there's things that you can be doing, and there's loads of aha moments. Now I'll give full context. I listen to this book on Audible, but. And later on, thanks to the book club, we recently did this. I've been rereading it, reading different chapters and whatnot. It's. It's definitely one that I could dig into, and it's one that I will revisit for sure. Just to give you a bit of a context before I move into the next book, how I discover books and how I dig into them. Because there are a lot of books out there. There's books that if you commit to and you commit to the full of it, you can, you know, you can take up hours, weeks of your time. And if you nail. If you get involved with a bad book, you always feel like you got to finish it. One of the things that I've learned over the last six years is if it's a bad book, just put it down. Just not. You don't have to finish a book just because you start if it's not very good. And so what I've done is I've built in A system. And I wanted to share this with you because I put it into a slack group that I'm part of about how I pick a book. And a couple of people said, oh, that's quite interesting. So I wanted to share with you on the podcast. So the way that if I come across a book, somebody recommends it, what I'll do first and foremost is I will look for it on, on Blinkist. And if you don't know what Blinkist is, let me just pull up on the screen here. Let me share my screen. Allow cookies. Right, so this is Blinkist B L I n k I-S-T.com now with Blinkist it takes all of the big business books and it condenses it down into 15 minute read or a 15 minute audio. Now I love to listen to Blinkist when I'm in the car on the Carplay or if I'm you know, walking or you know, wherever, some, somewhere that is just something that you're doing on autopilot because I have so many books lined up as you can see here. And it condenses it down into 14, 15 minutes. So if somebody recommends a book to me, for example, I'm currently going for a bit of training or on hiring and somebody recommended this book. So I listened to it over 15 minutes and if I really, really enjoy it, like really enjoy it, I feel like, wow. I, you know, I'm, I'm taking notes. I've had so many aha moments in those 15 minutes as it delves into the book and it condenses it down and gives the best parts of it. Then, then what I'll do is I'll take it to the next step because the next step will be I'll go on to YouTube and when I go onto YouTube I'll put in the name of the book and I'll put in the name of the author. So for example, who. Jeff Smart. So who Jeff Smart. And then what you'll see is that there are summaries. So there's book summaries, book reviews. And also as well, if the author has, you know, is pretty famous, they'll also will have been doing keynote speaks and, and whatnot. So I did the book, did the blinkist for it. I want to take this a bit further. So I went onto YouTube and found this video and a couple of decent book summaries. You can even filter it to the most popular. So view count. So this has had 14,000 views. So it's very popular and it is a really good video. Lasted for an hour and he broke down the who method. And if after that point, if I still feel like I need to dig in deeper, then I will get the book and I'll read the book. So for example, if the book will have something that the videos or the Blinkist won't like, could be behind the scenes access, it could be some courses or some templates etc that, that you don't get with the YouTube or here. But that's when I'll dig into that. Now for me, with the who, I did the Blinkist and I did this and I felt that after that I got everything that I needed and I didn't need to dig any more into the book. The book didn't give anything else more from what I saw with that, so I didn't need to. But with a book that I'm going to show you in a second, it massively was the case. So. So I don't like waste time because time is a big thing for me. That's how I pick a book. So that's my little method. So number one, if someone recommends it, I go to Blinkist, check out that 15 minutes and then I'll go look at a YouTube video on it and see any interviews with the authors go down that rabbit hole. And if I still feel like it's worthwhile, I'll then go and purchase the book. Probably, probably on Audible and if not on Audible, I'll. I'll get it for, for here for when early morning readings. So the first One was profit first, number one. Number two is same author Mike McCallowitz, Clockwork. So this is his revised version of the book. The, the first book I think out of. I'm gonna say this a lot, but I feel like out of all the books this has been the one that's most prevalent to me in the last year because as I mentioned, Boost Lee has gone to a stage where now it's nearly 40 members of staff. A year ago is probably half that, maybe about 2015, something like that. So the problem, what we were doing a year ago is that too many people were being spread thin and having to do too many jobs, were trying to be the Swiss army knife and there was many, many bottlenecks. A year ago is when I discovered this book. And you know, there's so many different things you can point is like the kickoff point to the next level of growth. But this is definitely one of the things that I can point back to. It is so easy to read, so easy to listen to and there's what I love about the books that Mike does is he doesn't just take it based on his findings. He interviews other people as well that have used this method in this model and there's training on the back of it. So there's an online course, there's an online thing that you can go on and there's templates and all that cool things. But there's some really, you know, aha moments and you know, all you have to do is go check out the podcast interviews that Mike has done about Clockwork with, with me. And he talks about the queen bee role, he talks about, you know, the 4Ds and, and all of that. And if anybody has done Clockwork and I know so many people have, everybody has those same sort of aha moments on the, on, on the back of it. So Clockwork by Mike McCallowicz. Now Michalowitz is, is a long name, very hard to spell. It's a Ukrainian name I believe. So it's, I'll spell it for you. M I, C H A L O, W I C Z, Zed. But to be honest, if you just go on to Google and type in Clockwork, Mike, Mike M, it will, it will come up. So first two books, Mike McCallowitz, Clockwork and Profit First. So I'll throw this over to you. People are tuning in live and we've got many people tuning in. So hi everybody. Let me know if you've read those books. Let me know what books you would add to the list as well. Let us know what your recommendations are. Right, let's move on to the next one. And this next one is a book that's become very popular in the last year. The author has become very, very, very, very popular in the last year. He's literally everywhere where you go on online and I discovered him through a YouTube video I was about to do a four hour round trip in Spain is when we're living in Spain. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go get the audible version and it's a hundred million dollar offer by Alex Homozy. Now I don't normally discover an offer before he goes very mainstream and but this is one of the times when I did and I got the book, listened to it in one go. You know, I'm somebody who listens to books on speed. 1.5, 1.75 and it was, it was a fantastic, fantastic read. By the time I got back the next week I tweaked an offer that we did at Boostly and the results were fantastic because it, it really breaks down, you know, the, the science behind putting together an offer and there was something that I was doing that there was just a blatant bottleneck. There was a blatant thing that I could have done to make it better, moved it together and it, it worked massively because it was more appealable to yourself. So you know, you may have, you may have been somebody that has purchased that, that new offer. Well, it came on the, on the back of here and doesn't matter what industry you're in, whether it is, you know, he's obviously got a fitness background, but if it's fitness or hospitality, short term rentals, there's definitely things that you can be doing with your, with your offer and this book will help you dig into that. It is, you know, it is very good sales book. So if you're struggling with sales, you don't feel too confident when it comes to selling. That is a, is a really good book. So if you've listened to that one, if you've read this one, please let me know in the comments on any of the books. Mike McCallow, it's clockwork profit first or Alex Homo, the $100 million offer. Now the next book is behind me, so I'm gonna have to turn around quickly to grab it. All right, the next book. So remember when I said to you about Blinkist and how this is how I go and pick a book and if I like it then I dig into a little bit further. Well, this one is definitely the case. The title is Never Lose a Customer Again. Now, members of Team Boostly, you will know that I have talked about this quite a bit because when it comes to it, hospitality, short term rentals, whatever you want to call it, boils down to being hospitable. It boils down to the guest experience. It boils down to the reviews that you get. Because we live and die by our reviews. If you give a guest a fantastic experience, they're going to give you great reviews and they're going to talk about you time and time again. And that's how you get repeat guests and that how you get friends of friends making reservations. This book really nails down some of the key aspects of that. For example, what can you do from the point of booking to the point of arrival? How can you never lose a customer? So you know, it says never lose a customer again. It should be never have a cancellation again. The principles and the tactics that you will learn in this book are insane. And again, it's things that I'VE put into place at Boost, Lee. Because, you know, as. As we, as we grew up, it wasn't so much that everybody was dealing directly with me or Tom. Tom, who's our cto. It was where we're bringing in team members. And so, you know, a lot of the times it could be a little bit nervous, I guess is a word you could use for when somebody then signs up and they're starting to speak to somebody else. It's not Tom and I. So what we wanted to do, we wanted to make sure that every single step of the process was, listen, you're now speaking to here, this is part of the build, etc. Etc. And you know, this was a big part of it and we were clear with it. And yes, we've made mistakes, yes, we've improved, and this book has been a massive one behind it. Another. Another book that I haven't bought. It's not gonna be part of the list, but I wanted to give a little shout out is talk triggers. So talk triggers. So talk triggers. What I love about this book is that it has a lot of hospitality examples. So it has a ton of hospitality examples in this book. And. And again, it's. It, it's. It's all about word of mouth, which, you know, everything that we teach at Boostly, everything that we talk about taught triggers is one. Um, actually, I'm gonna go and add that to the basket because it is. It is such a. It is such a big book. I loved it and I need to revisit it again. Right. So talk triggers, little shout out to that one. That's like a little 10.5 in there, but never lose a customer again. By. By. By Joey Coleman. Joey Coleman and Jay Bear. You know, they, they look alike, they sound alike, and they. They could easily be confused for one another, but two fantastic books. Next one. So let me know if you've read either of them. I know there's quite a few boosted people who have, which is a big one. Now, this next book is called UN Marketing. I'll be amazed if there's people in here who have read it or listened to it. And this is another one of those books that I discovered on Blinkist. And I remember exactly where I was when I was listening to this book. And this is what I love about books and music and movies is that when you consume a really good book or if you listen to a really good song or you watch a really good movie, you will remember it and you remember where you are when you listen to it or Watched it or read it. And I remember clearly where I was when we were, when I discovered this book. So we were. It was June and July 2020. So we had just got back into. Into Spain after the lockdowns in, in the UK and Spain and our house wasn't ready in. In Javier. And an amazing person, part of the community had a property down near, near Mallorca near Malaga. And we, we were able to take their property off them because it was a summer rental and no one was going to that part of the world. So we're in the hills down near Malaga and literally every day, I think Frankie was two at the time. He needed to. He needed to have his nap, otherwise he was grouchy. But it was so hot in the daytime, so I couldn't push him around in the boogie. So instead I would jump in the car and I would drive him around and as I was driving him around trying to get him to sleep on these mountains near Malaga, I would have this book on. And it is amazing. It gets you to rethink about how you market your business, how you market your brand. Everything that you feel like, you know, it gets you to sort of rethink it. And it's. It's definitely something that I've put into play with, with Bruce Lee and again, it's one of those books that the author doesn't take himself too seriously. He has a laugh as a joke and. But it is, it is really, really good. Now he's got loads of other unbrands, he's got unbranding on all those things. But unmarketing is one for me that's definitely the best one. It's by an author called Scott Stratton and his. And his wife Alison Stratton as well. And this is the revised version. I really recommend that you pick this up and again put it into practice because there's so many good takeaways, takeaways from that. So you can see there's a theme develop, developing here. The first one was all about finances. The second one was all about team and getting time and time back in your day and building a team. Then we've got a sales book in $100 million offer. Then we've got customer satisfaction. We've never lose a customer again. And then we've got marketing with. We've unmarked. The. The next book is one that I think that this year in 2022, it's the one that I have gifted the most to most people and also told the most people about because it's Been released for a while now, but I still think it's very unheard of. It's one of those books that's getting a lot of social media, not social media traction, but word of mouth traction. And it's a similar vein to Clockwork, but it's who not how. Now this is a type of book where who not how the, the phrase of it will sit with you more than a lot of the words in here, which is a bit bizarre. But Clockwork is actionable ways to implement and growing a team and how to do it. This is more the sort of the thinking and the philosophy behind it, but it is, it makes you rethink everything. It makes you. There's one example, and I won't spoil it, but there's one example in the book that makes you rethink everything and how you do it. And the main principle is when you've got a problem of something that you need to fix, whether it's in your business or whatever, the question is that we always sort of divert to is how are we going to do this? How are we going to do this? And the way that they get you to rethink everything is who can I bring in to help me fix this? Now you'll be reading this book and you'll be the person that maybe needs to find the who or you'll be the person who reads the book and you are the who. And this is what I love about it. It's, it's not a big book. You can easily get it done in a few hours. And again it's the one that I listened to on a longer car journey this summer and yeah, I love it and I gifted it to so many people and so many people, now that I talk about it, I'm saying, yeah, I've recently dug into it. I can see it on social media, people talking about it, which is, which is awesome. This was recommended to me by the amazing Dr. Rachel Gainsborough. So thank you very much. And yeah, I, I picked it up and I absolutely love it and I started gifted to a lot of people now as, as well. So let me know in the comments if you have read who, not how and let me know what, what you think about it. And again, a little reminder, every month we have a book that we cover in the Boostly Book Club. It's totally free. Just come on to Facebook and type in Boostly Book Club. B O O S T L Y Book Club. Come and join in. Doesn't matter what month you join, if you, if you're too late for this month. You can always join in on the next one. And we also try and go above and beyond and try and get the offers in to do special zoom calls with us, et cetera. E It is lovely. It's one of my favorite things that I think I've ever created and I I love coming together, reading books and discovering books with others and, and then having a zoom call at the end of it. So amazing. So next book is one that I guarantee that a lot of you will not have heard of, but it's one that I feel like you need to have in your, in your arsenal. And again, this is another one that I discovered on Blinkist. Checked out a couple of the videos and I've come on board on the back of it and it is John Rowland's gift Ology. If those of you that have been part of Boostie for a while, you know that I love to send a gift. I love to send a gift in the post. I love to give prizes and awards. I don't spend any money on Facebook ads or Google Ads or TikTok ads or anything like that because I would much rather put that budget into saying thank you to those that recommend Boostly or being part of Boostly for a while. And this book caught the eye because it was all about gifting and it really did sort of change a few things in, in, in how we do it and how we do it and why you do it and you know the best way to go about it. And again, this book I feel with hospitality, it's a really good read. It's one of the things that I talk about is that a lot of you do pack off your guests with maybe a postcard or a fridge magnet, etc. By reading this, you may, you may think a bit differently. And again, when you think about giftology and you think about DIA bookings, people think, oh well, that sounds a bit expensive spending, you know, maybe $50 or $100 on that. But if you, if you're somebody that is paying commission costs to verbo booking.com Airbnb Sometimes your commission cost could be about 1,000, 2,000. You know, it could be about over a course, a quarterly basis. So if you paired a comparison of paying 15%, 20% to maybe a 50 pound, 100 whatever, it pales in significance because it will, it will mean so much more to the person on the other end, which means you could get huge referrals and you know, who knows what on the back of it. So gift olo by John Rulin. And again, it's a very unknown book and the, the author found him on LinkedIn, you know, really responsive, really chatty and it's, and it's amazing to see when you can read something, reach out to the author and they, and they get back to you, which is, which is great. So, yeah, do go check that out. Right, next one. And we're coming into the, to the final three now. There's no other books that I can think of. So this, this book is Story Brand. Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. And I'm not even joking to say once I read this book, we changed everything in our copy on our website also as well, little disclaimer. When you read this book, it will spoil every Hollywood movie for you forever. There's no Hollywood movie. But you'll be able to watch that. You'll be able to not know what's going to happen because of this book. And the reason why it's so important is stories sell. I mean, it's a thing that gets banded around a load and, and I know all of that. But when you read this book, it will rephrase how you talk about your, your business. It will rephrase how you talk to your customers, your guests, your clients. And it will, it will really give you a ton of clarity. I know it has me. And again, I consumed this book several times in 2020. Soon as I read it, I sent it over to Tom, our cto and he read it and he delved into more. Because Donald Miller has got a huge business behind the scenes. Marketing made simple. Business made simple. But Story Brand is the one that kicked it all off. And I know a lot of people in my world have, because I've been talking about it now for the last two years. They are discovering it and they are putting it into practice. A really good book, one that I would definitely recommend. And again, Donald has got such this lovely American accent. I think it's from Tennessee. It's a lovely Southern American accent. So you can get it on the audible and it is, is a perfect listen. Okay. One that's one that I've read recently and it's sort of come into my world. And again, one of those books that I guarantee most of you won't have heard of, but it's Scale for Success by Jan Cavell. John is based in the uk. Uk. Very unknown author compared to other people. But this book is really good and it's something that is prevalent for me right now. So as Bruce Lee is growing ton of responsibility, you know, things that I'm doing now that I never thought I would have to do it. So it's not so much, you know, figuring out how to do X, Y or Z. It's about doing much bigger stuff that, again, no one ever gets taught. And this book was great because they interviewed, or Jan interviewed hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs, people that have scaled their business, grown their business. So it's like a. So it's one that is not only surviving, but thriving. And this is a really, really good one. And it. You may be in the position where your business is growing, you may be, you know, going, getting tons of properties on board very, very quickly. You may have gone from maybe five to 20 properties and you're thinking, wow, you know, this is a lot of responsibility. Now you're going from 20 to 30 or maybe north of 100, and you're thinking, well, I don't know what to do. I need to put things into place like X, Y and Z. This is why I love a book like this, because it's not just based on one person's opinion. It's based on many people of what they've done in many different niches. And also as well, they dig into people that are doing it. Now, this book was, Was. Was only published, I think, in the last year. So it's very revelant and prevalent and you can get a lot of. Lot of information from it. And from this book, I've discovered other authors and people that have put books together as well that I'm looking forward to dig, to dig it into next. So that is that one Scale for Success by Yankervelle. And I think it's only fair to probably finish on the. On the book that has probably influenced me the most, not just in this last sort of couple of years, but since 2016. That is tools of titans by Tim Ferriss now is a beast of a book. Me for years now. It's got so many doodles and sketches and stuff in it, it's massive. Now, if you don't know who Tim Ferriss is, I'm a very big Tim Ferriss fanboy. I discovered his podcast before I discovered Bruce Lee off. Even knew that Booster was going to be a thing. And this book is 200 of his episodes of all the people that he's interviewed, the best interviews and the takeaways from it. And it deals in everything from health to wealth to everything. And the people in here are huge. And it's one of those books. And it was a big inspiration for the Playbook for the book that I play book, the book that I put out this year, there's a massive influence of that because it was a book that, you know, you don't just read it from page one to page 500. You can go in and find a chapter. So Kevin Kelly, for example, who. Somebody that I, you know, again, a blog that he put together is, is massive. And I've read that blog many, many times and it's helped me, but I can go in and read that chapter and then I can put it down and come back to it a month later or a year later, which I do do. So, yeah, those edit books, tools of title. So this is why I pass it over to you. What books have influenced you, which books have helped your business? Is there any of these on here or is there other books that I need to be checking out now? I know there's going to be loads of people that are dropping so many different books that have influenced them. And you more than welcome to put them into the comments. The good thing about Blinkist is that, you know, I think I've done about 500 books on there and there are tons and tons of amazing ones. So many ones that are coming to my mind now that are good ones, but these are the ones that, that will benefit your business for the, for the better in so many ways. Mark's putting in Jim Rowan, the ultimate collection. Yeah, there's hundreds and there's thousands of books that you could put in. These are ones that have benefited me. And if you were to check them out, I know that your business will be for the better. For it doesn't matter whether you're, whether you're tuning in and you do hospitality, short term rentals or whatever you do, these books will help you massively. I'm going to leave it there. As always, my name is Mark Simpson. I give you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence. Thank you so much for stopping by. We do podcasts. We have free podcasts going out every week. We've got daily videos on all of the social medias. And my goal is to help 1 million hosts cut down on their over reliance on, on Airbnb, booking.com and VRBO. This is the first time checking out. Good luck. You've got 500 episodes to get caught up on. So please dig into it, go delve into all of the, you know, the, the back catalog and I shall see you again very, very soon for another episode of the Bruce Lee podcast, please do go and check out the Brucely Book Club. Just go into Facebook. Bruce Lee Book Club is totally free to take part in and every month we're going to feature a new book. So I'd love to see you part of it for now. Take care. Bye bye and see you very soon.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.