10 Books That Scaled My Business to $44M

**John Wilson** (0:00)
I'm John Wilson, and over the last 10 years of my life, I have scaled our family's business from 1 million to 44 Today, what we're going to be talking about is some of the books that helped to change my life and helped teach me how to build the business as it is today. I was not a start from nothing, pull yourself up from bootstraps. I did start with a foundation. Business was around six or seven employees. It was around a million of revenue, but today we're 200 employees in mid 40 millions. And that wouldn't have been possible without these books that we talk about today and the lessons that I took away from each one of them. Before we dive in, if you could make sure to like and sub, it really helps other people find our content.
All right, let's kick it off with number one. This is one of my personal favorites. It's Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. What I like about Outliers is it's a story of, I think, eight different CEOs, and it walks through how each one of them is an outlier. I know that when I was growing up inside the business and I had this perception of what a CEO was supposed to be, this rah rah CEO who could drive culture and sales and pop champagne in the office every day, like maybe Wolf of Wall Street type of CEO. I think that's what we're trained to think. That's what we should be doing. But Outliers really helped to bring perspective to me that we can only lead as our authentic self. Like we can only bring whoever we actually are to the table every day. And the best version of an authentic leader is just whoever you are. So I loved Outliers because it showed that there wasn't just one path and one way to lead. The best way to lead is whatever you bring to the table. What are the next ones? And this was really early inside our business and it's E-Myth Revisited. The book is basically a story of a baker and they have what the author calls an entrepreneurial seizure. So they decide, hey, I love baking. I'm going to go open a bakery. Suddenly, the office is a mess and there's bills and invoices and things do and money. Baking is only one very small part of running a bakery. Just like in my business, plumbing is only one very small part of running a plumbing company. The trade is important, but you also have to get paid. You have to pay your vendors. You have to have rent. You have to run marketing. You have to have HR to hire people. What it helps you to get into the mindset of is, are you working inside your business as the baker or are you running the bakery? This was a really formative book for me in my early 20s as I stepped into entrepreneurship. The third one that made a really big impact on our business is Traction. Traction is the basis for a system called EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. What it is, is it's a way to communicate, scorecard, set meetings, and communicate vision. They have a weekly meeting that they call their L10. They have accountability charts, so you can organize your company by who's doing what. They give you some clear paths on how to measure the progress of your company on a weekly cadence. I call Traction the business tastes like chicken. What does a bakery and a plumbing company have in common? Both of them need a scorecard. Both of them need accountability charts. Every business needs these fundamentals. It tastes like chicken. And Traction helps build that foundation for you.
Number four is the goal. It was a book and it was a narrative on a manufacturing business. And he's trying to discover, like, what do we do here? What is the goal? Like, what are we here to do? And every department he goes to, he gets kind of a slightly different answer on what the goal is, which was a red flag for the author. But the second point was, the goal is to build a profitable business. Like, that is the goal. It's so easy for everything else to get in the way of the goal. How do you measure the least amount of things? How do you communicate in the most succinct way possible? And how do you keep your eyes on the prize, the goal, which is building a big profitable business?
My next one I have been using for literally 15 years is called Profit First. It's easy to imagine we're here to fix pipes, we're here to bake muffins, we're here to draft legal whatever. We are in business to make a profit. That's the goal. Profit First is a mentality and an operating system that keeps that in the forefront, so that way you can maximize the cash that flows from your business. So the way it works is every week or every month, you divide your checking account into a few different checking accounts. And as money flows into your business, it gets separated by percentage for however you're allocated. It works, it's effective, it's how I paid for acquisitions, it's how we buy vehicles and cash. It is an effective tool, and this book can help you get you there in like 60 minutes. The next one is frequently cited, and this one is Extreme Ownership by Jaco. The mentality that we all have to have is that the buck stops here. Buck stops with me. Whatever you are in your position, if you're the owner, if you're a team leader, a manager, an individual contributor, Extreme Ownership is I'm going to take ownership over the scope of control that I have been given. It is helpful as building a business to look for people that have extreme ownership. They take extreme accountability for their team, and you want people inside your business that have that ownership mentality. It's one of the hardest things to find as you are recruiting more and more people into your business, and you want to be able to replicate that mindset through the rest of your business.