MBA1763 Must Read: The 100-Page Book by Mike Capuzzi

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel.

Core Ultra processors will help you do.

More faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Practical business lessons delivered on a silver platter every single day with their daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a must read episode on our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me, has helped me. I share with you its insights, its takeaways and why you should read it too. Today's Must Read is the hundred page book by Mike Capuzzi. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon in the Business section. The subtitle of the book is what grabbed my attention. The Business Owner's Guide to Self Publishing. A customer attraction book that sounded really interesting to me. Writing a book with a specific purpose to attract more customers. Many people think that successful authors are ones that aspire to be on the New York Times Best Sellers list, Wall Street Journals list, or to be in the windows of major book retailers. This book says you don't need all that to have a successful book. You can actually write a short book that can help you get more clients. Despite the fact it didn't hit any best selling lists in today's Must Read Episode, I'll give you my takeaways from this book why you would want to consider reading it and possibly producing your own short 100 page book to promote your business, your services, your products, and what are some of the advantages of going down that route. I was intrigued by this book. I read it and I wasn't disappointed. Can't wait to share with you all that I learned. But let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

When the flu is keeping you up at night, don't try to tough it out. Knock out your flu symptoms with nyquil Intense Flu. You got this. It provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep well through the night. Nyquil Intense Flu the nighttime Sniffling Aching aching fever. Best sleep with a flu medicine. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.

I want to start today's Must Read episode with a little tidbit. When I read the reviews of this book, I was actually really curious because a lot of interesting reviews. There weren't thousands of reviews, about 90 reviews on Amazon, but I had a total of 4.5 stars. And everything that people said in those reviews were really unique. Everybody got a different perspective from the book, different takeaways. And I really love books that actually have different angles and can teach different people different, different things depending on their needs. This book at its core really demystifies the whole process of running a book or becoming an author. It also simplifies it. It actually just kind of tones things down and says, hold up. You don't need to be Stephen King to be an author to have a successful book that can serve your business. But he's very upfront in the book about the purpose of this book. He actually says in the book at the start, warning, this book is not for everyone. This book is not here to convince you to write a book or show you how to make money selling books. Instead, this book is about how to create a strategic sales tool for your business in the form of a book. So you're writing the book with the purpose of allowing it to help you sell more of whatever you sell. Your products, your service, your coaching, your courses, whatever it is, it's a vehicle. It's a way for you to sell more of what you do. And immediately I thought this is gonna be an interesting book because I'm a big fan of educating your customers to sell. I really believe that teaching is a new selling. And whether you do that through content marketing, with a blog or a podcast, or through Webinars or through a book. It's a surefire way to build trust with your audience and make more sales, at least in my experience. So going down this road, going down this avenue of hey, why about writing a book to sell your products and services was really intriguing. Let me share with you some of the things that I really loved about this book. First of all, the author, Mike Capuzzi, he drinks his own Kool Aid, right? He eats his own dog food, meaning he has published several small books or what he calls Shooks short books that are around 100 pages long. His arguments are proven through his own experience. His arguments for why you should write a Shook he says, first of all, writing a hundred page book is faster and less effort for you to get real big results. And it's true. Writing a hundred page book is not that daunting. I've written blog posts that are longer than that. Number two, a hundred page book is a faster and easier read for your potential customers. They're able to consume your information and get a win quickly. Number three, he says that, you know, a hundred page books are short and sweet and, and perfect for our daily commutes. For busy people in this world, in today's day and age, 100 pages can really be consumed quite quickly, maybe in two or three commutes. And lastly, what I thought was really interesting is that because it's a short book, because it's a purposeful book, it has a very narrow focus. You're writing this book to be able to educate your potential customer so they can take the next steps to take on your product or service. It's very, very easy for you to be able to accomplish this goal of writing this book when it's focused, when you're not trying to cover a huge topic, when you're not trying to do too many things. It's not your memoirs here. You are on a mission here and it's a lot easier for you to complete the mission when you have a narrow scope, a narrow focus. So some big takeaways I found from this book is he really just boils down what it takes to write this book, right? And just gives you what you need to hear. This is what you need to focus on. This is the purpose of the book. Don't worry about xyz, all these other things, these distractions, all the other things that people are doing in the book world, authors that are trying to hit lists, try to get on TV shows, all that kind of stuff, these are distractions. Just focus on this. I really love how focused this book is and the strategy behind it. What I also liked about this book and the concept of a shook a hundred page book is that you're not over promising with a small short book. People are not expecting too much. So it's kind of easy for you to over deliver. It's a way for your potential customer, for your reader to be introduced to your market, to your topic, to your subject. For example, if I wrote a hundred page book on webinars, it would be an introduction to webinars and how you can run more efficient webinars. If people want to learn more on how to do that and implement what I talked about, I don't need to jam that into the book and make this a 500 page book. I can just tell them, hey, learn more on my website. We got free courses, we have a great software for you to use, we got member webinars, all that kind of stuff. So it's a good way for somebody to get started and you hand them over to your business to take on the next steps. If people choose to go deeper on the topic you explore, they have a way to do that. You're not leaving them high and dry and they're not going to expect you to cover every single thing under the sun in your topic in a short book. He does get into in the book some technical aspects of how you can self publish your own short book. And it's pretty easy to follow. I felt very much ready to get started after the book. I was ready to kind of say, okay, I think I can write a hundred page book. Let me narrow in on my focus. I have all the steps that were outlined to me. I know how to kind of publish it, how to price it, all that kind of stuff. That was another thing, the pricing. When you have a short hundred page book, you don't necessarily have to price it that expensively. Remember, this is a marketing tool. This is a sales tool. You're not trying to make money with this book, okay? In fact, if you make any money with this, that's gravy. With a short 100 page book, I can easily price it at 399 for the Kindle version. Pretty inexpensive for a book. And I'll be able to move more units, get my message out there to more people, get more reviews, get more feedback and it's justified. It's not seen as a cheap book. This is a short book versus if I wrote a traditionally published book that's 300 plus pages that has a hardcover version and all the bells and whistles. Typically, I wouldn't be able to price that book less than $15. So what he talks about, it's actually quite easy to be an Amazon bestseller in your niche because you're selling so many books because of the low price and you're getting good reviews because it's well written and it's really focused and you're under promising and over delivering. So even though we're not after any kind of list rankings, a possible side benefit of running this type of book and selling this type of book is that you can sell more units and become an Amazon best seller with some pretty minimal effort if you market the book properly. He talks a little bit about how you can market the book to be able to do that. Now, what I found really interesting is that I constantly would see examples of what he was teaching in the book, in his own career, in his own life as an author. When I finished this book, I immediately went to Amazon and searched, what other books does Mike have? And he's got like half a dozen short books you can buy. And it's funny because I always heard from other authors like Ryan Holiday say that the best way to sell a book is to write another book. And that's a lot easier to do when they're short. So one book's success will help the next book success.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good?

Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money, like by switching to Geico. You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one?

Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico to wrap up today's a must read episode. The 100 page book by Mike Capuzzi. If you always felt like you want to write a book but you're not ready to write your masterpiece, you don't need to wait for that masterpiece to be ready to be written. You can start now. You can start with a marketing book, with a sales tool. Like I mentioned, this is a great book to kind of just dip your toe into being an author. Heck, I was one of those people, you know, I thought, hey, I want to write a book. It's going to be amazing. And maybe that's true. Maybe I will write an amazing book in the future and I'll dedicate the time and the focus to do that. But it doesn't mean I have to wait until I'm ready for that book to write my first book. I can write different books for different purposes, and if it's quality, it doesn't really matter how long or short it is. In fact, if it impacts many people and it's short, it's even more impressive. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. I highly recommend you pick up the hundred page book by Mike Capuzzi. Make sure you smash that subscribe button so you don't miss our next episode. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free to subscribe on any podcast app you like. Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya. We're on them all. Go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I actually discovered this book through Kindle Unlimited. Now, Kindle's not a sponsor of today's show or anything like that, but it's a subscription. You pay 10 bucks a month and there's a whole library of books you can borrow. You can borrow 10 books at a time. And there's a lot of great best selling books, useful books that are in Kindle Unlimited. I highly recommend you just try them out. I think they have a free trial for two months that you can check out. And I wrote a lot of great books through Kindle Unlimited. It's really well worth it. As friend of the show Ramit Sethi says, you'll rarely regret paying for a book, right? It's always going to be a good investment. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Introducing Fidelity Trader plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web and mobile for faster trades anywhere you go. Try the all new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet@fidelity.com TraderPlus investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member nyse, SIPC.