3 books to read before you hit $2M

I've grown over 20 businesses in my 27 years of entrepreneurship, and these are 3 books worth reading if your business is between $500,000 and $2 million in revenue. First, Profits First, Mike Michalowicz. Most founders between $500K and $2 million focus only on growth, but if your growth isn't profitable, your sales will stall. This is the playbook for small business profitability. Absolute must-read before you hit $2 million in revenue. Second, Buy Back Your Time, my buddy Dan Martell. Most 7 and 6-figure founders, they try to scale by being more productive, by hiring helpers, and they end up creating more complicated and chaotic versions of the same trap. Buyback Principle is the cleanest articulation I've seen of impact-based delegation. It's one of those few books on delegation that actually works in the real world. Third, we have— there it is— Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. This stage is all about growth, and at this point, you should probably read what I consider to be the best marketing book ever written, Breakthrough Advertising. This is the Bible, teaches you market awareness, sophistication, how to write copy that actually gets people to buy stuff. It's been out of print for years, hard to find, pretty expensive, but if you can get a copy— if you can't find a copy of that, if you get your hands on that, a decent substitute is— there it is, Ultimate Sales Letter, Dan Kennedy. Different book, same DNA. If you understand the structure of a sales pitch, you can basically sell anything in any industry. Bonus, Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's not a business book, but it's a book about how small consistent behaviors really compounded outsized results, and that matters at this stage because the $500K to $2 million is the phase where most founders blow themselves up by changing strategy every 6 weeks.