Sage Book Club: 5 books to help you boss it in 2021

At Sage, we help business owners and accountants alike to boss their finances.

We've teamed up with small business expert Carl Reader so he can share his top five books that will help you boss it in 2021 (and beyond).

One way Carl suggests you can boss it is by letting someone else do the jobs you don't know how to do, such ashiring an accountantto do your accounting or automating your processes.

Business can be tough, so let these books be your guide…

​1. How to Win Friends and Influence People

2. The 4-Hour Work Week

3. Who Not How

4. Rocket Fuel

5. Boss It

​1. How to Win Friends and Influence People By Dale Carnegie

This book is all about personal relationships.

Whether you're a sole trader or you're running a PLC dealing with international businesses, the reality is, all relationships are from one human to another, whether it's customer supplier relationships or dealing with team members and management.

This book is a really good playbook about the fundamentals of human relationships.

There are some really simple learnings within it. One that stuck with me is the fact that the most important word in the English Language for anybody is their own name, so it's so important to make sure you use it and spell/say it correctly.

It's an old book, but the lessons still stand and are valuable lessons for any business owner looking to improve their relationships either with their team or customers.

Learn more about How to Win Friends and Influence People

2. The 4-Hour Work Week By Timothy Ferriss

This book was transformative at shattering my paradigms around what 'work' means and the notion of a 9-5, Monday to Friday work life.

Tim Ferriss is a bit of a hacker, and tries to hack various aspects of his life, but the key essence of the book is that you don't need to turn up to a job at 9am and finish at 5pm. Instead, it's all about efficiency.

It's quite a scattergun book, but a really useful scattergun. It gives loads of thinking points and loads of stuff that I still use in my business now.

Learn more about The 4-Hour Work Week

3. Who Not How By Dan Sullivan

This is a really simple book at its core.

It's about finding the right people to do what it is that you want to do, rather than wasting time trying to work out how to do it yourself.

Pre-pandemic I had seen so many business owners fall into the trap of wasting time trying to build their own websites, create their own logos, do their own admin, keep their own bookkeeping, even though the value of that time could be far better spent elsewhere.

This book was a really powerful reminder to me of the challenge that I saw across thousands of business owners over the years, but also a challenge I saw within myself during the pandemic.

This book helped me shake my head a little bit, and get me in the zone of a business owner, rather than just having a very stressful job that I'm not qualified for!

Learn more about Who Not How

4. Rocket Fuel By Gino Wickman

This is a phenomenal book, and it's all about the powerful partnership that drives any major business.

Within the book there's loads of case studies of Apple and Disney, etc, where Wickman talks about the need for every strong business to have both a visionary and an integrator.

What I love about this book is it gives practical hints and tips, as well as tools that can be used to manage the relationship between a visionary and an integrator.

This book was recommended to me about 10 years ago and I decided to integrate it in my own business.

Learn more about Rocket Fuel

5. Boss It By Carl Reader

Lastly, my own book, Boss It.

This book for me is the textbook that simply isn't given at schools. It's a combination between checklists and cheerleading.

One of the challenges of many business books is that they're either full of heavy management terms or they're very motivational and fluffy.

Boss It tries to bridge that gap, and is a nuts and bolts guide to be able to start, grow and scale a business using the models that I've built along the way as well as observing the lessons of thousands of business owners along the way, all in an entertaining format.

It's obviously been transformative for me for different reasons, that I hope the reader will find.

Learn more about Boss It

7 ways to take control of your business

Want to know how you can boss it at your business? Read this guide for top tips to help you master your business admin and truly take control.

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