5 Oct, 2026
The Best Books for Entrepreneurs: Eight That Changed How I Run My Business
Reading a business book is like a lumberjack stepping away from the trees to sharpen his axe. It looks like time away from the work, and then he comes back and chops through the trees far faster than before.
That’s the argument for working on your business rather than in it, and it’s why I keep coming back to the best books for entrepreneurs rather than trying to think my way out of every problem alone.
Whatever you’re building, somebody has already walked the path you’re on and had incredible success doing it, which makes learning from them the cheap option. Reading, courses and consultants are how I’ve got ahead in my own career, and the eight books below are the ones that changed how I run Rocket SaaS.
I go through all eight on episode 114 of SaaS Marketing Weekly.
How to get value from a business book
Before the list, two rules that matter more than which book you pick.
Firstly, implement one book before you start the next. Plenty of people are serial readers who finish a book, feel great about it, move straight on to the following one, and change nothing in their business.
When a book speaks to you, work hard at putting it into practice, and if that means rereading it two or three times, reread it. I’ve done exactly that with several on this list, because you only get what’s out of a book by implementing what’s in it.
Secondly, a trick Alex Hormozi taught me: read the physical book with the audiobook playing in your headphones at double speed. The audio sets the pace and stops you from drifting, and taking the same words in through your eyes and ears at once makes them stick.
The eight best business books for founders and marketers
Most lists of the best books on entrepreneurship are assembled out of other lists. These are the best business books I’ve read in the sense that matters to me, which is what changed in the business afterwards.
Profit First, Mike Michalowicz
Profit First is a philosophy about cash. Normally, profit is whatever happens to be left in the pot at the end of the year, after money has come in and gone out and nobody has watched it closely. Profit First inverts that. Every fortnight you take a fixed percentage out of the main account into a separate one for profit, another for tax, and another for your own pay, and the profit account is untouchable outside an emergency.
You then review your P&L every fortnight and adjust the percentages, pushing operational costs down and profit up. That grip on the financials tells you early in the year whether to raise your pricing or stop over-delivering for clients. The side effect I rate most is that the tax bill stops being frightening, because the money is already sitting in its own account waiting for it.
I ran this model in the business for around ten years and stopped only recently, when Rocket SaaS outgrew it. For a small business, it’s hard to beat.
The Pumpkin Plan, Mike Michalowicz
Another one from Mike Michalowicz, and The Pumpkin Plan opens with a pumpkin farmer. He plants a thousand pumpkin seeds, waters them, and waits. Some grow into big prize-winning pumpkins, and others come up small and start to rot. Instead of nursing the rotting ones back to health, he rips them out and takes the seeds from his prize winners to plant again.
The pumpkins are your clients. If some of them drain your time and your team’s energy, creep the scope every month, and leave you with nothing much at the end, the revenue attached to them is not worth what they cost you. Getting rid of them frees you up to look after your best clients properly and to win more like them.
If you read that and immediately pictured one particular client, this is the book to start with. It’s also useful for marketers, because the same logic decides which accounts are worth building campaigns around.
They Ask, You Answer, Marcus Sheridan
They Ask, You Answer is one of the best marketing books I’ve read, and it taught me the principles of demand generation before I even knew the term.
The argument is in the title. Buyers ask questions, so answer them. Old-school sales thinking hides the information people want most, whether that’s your pricing or an honest comparison with a competitor, and holds it back for the sales call or gates it behind a form. Sheridan’s position is to give people what they want: publish the pricing, explain where you’re better than the alternatives, show the product properly.
The reasoning behind it is the part that stuck with me. Buyers come to you when they’re ready, and aggressive tactics and form-gating will never push somebody in market before they have the budget and the need. All the gating does is make you harder to buy from when they get there.
Deep Work, Cal Newport
Deep Work is about focused, undistracted work on one demanding task, and my view is that it’s the only kind of work that moves your career or your business forward. Busy work, back-to-back meetings, and a day spent inside your inbox keep the business running and take you nowhere.
The problem is that deep work never happens by accident, so you have to build a ritual around it. Mine is to block the time in my calendar, tell the team I’m unavailable unless something is on fire, close Slack, put my phone in another room, turn off notifications, and give myself one task. Do that daily, and you’ll be well ahead of people who are just as capable and never protect the time.
Key Person of Influence, Daniel Priestley
Daniel Priestley is my favourite business guru, and Key Person of Influence is my favourite of his books. I also did the accompanying course, and I’m not sure the business would exist without it. At the time we were turning over around £100,000, I was running a website design company, and I didn’t understand sales or marketing.
The book is built on five Ps. Pitch is how you sell. Publish is about putting content into the world, whether that’s a book, regular blogs or white papers, which is the P I’ve leaned on hardest through our own content. Product is about building an ecosystem rather than one offering, with lead magnets and free content that lead into it. Profile is your personal brand. Partnerships is working with companies who already have the audience you want.
Obviously Awesome, April Dunford
I talk about messaging on nearly every episode of the podcast, and this is the book behind most of it. Obviously Awesome is a ten-step framework for positioning, and it teaches you how to frame a product so that its value is obvious to the customer instead of buried.
I read a lot of B2B SaaS messaging, and most of it needs this. Apply the ten steps and your messaging will get significantly better, which makes it one of the best marketing books to read first, because strong positioning is the first step towards a marketing function that works at all.
Traction, Gino Wickman
I read Traction twice. The first time the company was around ten people, and most of it went over my head, so I put it down. I reread it about a year ago at around 60 people, and in terms of the results it had on the business, it’s the best book I’ve ever read.
It introduces EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, built on six components: vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction. The single thing that changed most for us is a weekly meeting with the senior leadership team, where we pull up a dashboard of the numbers we care about, colour-coded, and ask what we’re doing this week to move each one.
Anything red gets roundtabled until there are actions attached to it. Take SQLs, which are the lifeblood of the business. On your own, you see a week with no SQLs, hope next week is better, and move on to the next task. Someone goes on holiday, another fortnight disappears, and four weeks later you’re having conversations about redundancies. In the meeting, that red number gets ten minutes with the smartest people in the business, and you leave with an email going out to closed-lost today, a webinar being spun up for Friday, and a call booked with your Google Ads expert. If your growth has stalled, this is usually why.
Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson
The odd one out, because it isn’t actionable and I like my books actionable. Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk is a biography, and I can’t relate to building rocket ships.
One idea from it has changed how I work. Musk identifies the single biggest bottleneck stopping the business from scaling and goes all in on that one problem, delegating almost everything else and travelling to wherever the problem physically is.
In the book, Tesla couldn’t produce batteries fast enough to hit its vehicle production target, so he slept on the factory floor by the battery line. It took a few months, but the process was simplified enough to clear the constraint, and then he moved on to the next biggest problem.
I’ve started working the same way, and it’s made a real difference. One bottleneck, most of your attention, then the next one.
Where to start with the best books for entrepreneurs
Don’t read all eight. Pick the one that matches the problem you have right now, implement it properly, and come back to the list when the next bottleneck appears.
If cash is the worry, start with Profit First. If you have clients you wish you didn’t have, read The Pumpkin Plan. If nobody understands what you do, read Obviously Awesome. If the business has stopped moving, read Traction. If you’re early and building something from scratch, the best business books for startups on this list are Key Person of Influence and They Ask, You Answer, because they cover getting known and getting bought.
Whichever you choose, the rule from the top of this piece is the one that counts. One book properly applied beats eight skimmed, and out of all the business books to read, the right one is whichever you’ll implement this month.
If you read one of them, find me on LinkedIn and tell me what you thought. I love talking books.
Traction by Gino Wickman. It’s the highest-impact book I’ve read, and the weekly leadership meeting it produced has done more for our growth than anything else on this list. It gives you a system for running the business rather than a set of ideas to admire.
Read it when you have a team around you. At ten people it went over my head, and at 60 it changed everything.
There are eight here rather than ten, because these are the ones that changed how I run my company: Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, They Ask, You Answer, Deep Work, Key Person of Influence, Obviously Awesome, Traction, and the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson.
Padding a list out to a round number helps nobody. Eight books I’ve implemented are worth more than ten I half-remember.
The ones that solved a problem they had at the time, which is why any CEO’s list says as much about their business as about the books. Mine covers cash, clients, marketing, focus, positioning, and operations, in the order those problems arrived.
Look for the recommendation that matches your current constraint rather than the book that appears on every list.
Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Deep Work, Obviously Awesome, and Traction. Those five apply to almost any business, whatever you sell, because they deal with cash, clients, focus, positioning, and how the company is run week to week.
They are also the five I’d put on any list of the best business books of all time, because they still change what I do years after I first read them.
It depends on whether you’re starting something or running something. Key Person of Influence and They Ask, You Answer help you get known and get bought when few people have heard of you. Traction, Profit First, and The Pumpkin Plan are for a business that exists and needs to run better.
Reading the wrong one for your stage is why good books get abandoned halfway through.
In a business context, start with Profit First for cash, The Pumpkin Plan for clients, Deep Work for focus, Obviously Awesome for messaging, and Traction for running the company. Between them, they cover most of what stops a company growing.
That’s also a reasonable reading order if you want one, since cash and clients tend to be the constraints that bite first.
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