 In this video, I'm going to show you seven books that helped me build my business to its first million about eight years ago. And I think they're going to help you get there, too, if you're interested in building that. My name is Jonathan. I run a company called AJ and Smart. We've worked with some of your favorite companies in the world. We're a consulting business. Now, these books are not necessarily in order of which one is great and which one is not great. I think it's just going to be an order of when I actually read them and how they affected me when I was on my business building journey 10 years ago. OK, so the first book I read actually that made me quit my job and start a business was and it's a cliche. It's the four hour work week from Tim Ferriss. This book really changed my brain. That's the only way I can describe it is actually I think the first like self help or nonfiction book that I ever read. And I looked at it and I thought it was kind of cheesy, but I wanted to learn how to make more money with less effort. By the way, that's not what running a consulting business is. It's actually a lot of effort. But this book really showed me how to use my time to make money wisely rather than and the book is not about how to just work four hours per week. But it's about how to make those four hours if you were just working four hours extremely effective. And essentially this book is one of the first books that also talked about passive income and building a passive income business where you're running a business, but you're not doing all the stuff. And so it talks a lot about hiring your first people, automating processes. And in general, I think this is really great book to read on the mindset of just building a business and not building sort of a freelance situation where it's all about you and you're always the center of it. And I think that always happens when people are building consultancies, they become the consultancy rather than it being a business. So this is not about you and then people helping you. This is about building a business and you potentially being able to lay on a beach in a hammock. I don't lay on a beach in a hammock. I love running my business. I worked a lot, but I could lay on a beach in a hammock. So this is really one of the best books I ever read on building a business and starting a business from scratch. So I think it's really, really well worth to read. And if you're not reading it just because it looks scammy, then you won't like the rest of the books here. The second book that was really helpful for me to read when I was trying to get to the first million with AJ and Smart was Million Dollar Consulting. Now, this is the Bible of making money as a consultant. If you haven't read it and you are a consultant and you're trying to get to seven figures, you actually have to stop this video now. I don't care about the engagement, stop everything you're doing, buy this book. We don't do affiliate links, so we're not making any money out of it. By the way, none of these books are affiliate links. It's just we're just telling you about them. This book is how to become a seven figure, meaning making more than a million consultant just by yourself, which I think is kind of a cool concept. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to build a business, but the things I learned in this book were, you know, how to set my pricing, how to get clients on retainers, how to actually... Yeah, it's just how to grow a consulting practice, even how to send invoices, how to send emails. I think this is really one of the best books ever written on making money as a consultant or even if you're going consulting business, you have to read it. Right after this one, I read a very important book, which I actually don't have here because it's at my apartment and it's called Built to Sell. You can just put a fake book over it. When I was building AJ and Smart, I wasn't building it to sell it. So I wasn't reading this book on, hey, how do I sell my business? I was reading this book because there was a lot of things in here. I heard there was a lot of things in here about automating business processes and standardizing business processes so that I, as the founder, can step out a little bit like the four hour work week, but actually a lot more detail. Like, how do you actually, as an agency owner specifically, so Built to Sell is actually about an agency owner, a design agency owner, who builds a business and then steps out of it. And that was like very appealing to me. I wanted to be able to step out of it even though I didn't want to step out of it. And that's the beauty of AJ and Smart today. I could just not work anymore and the business would run just as good without me. I just need something to do or I get bored. But Built to Sell showed me how to do that. It showed me how to build the teams. It showed me how to standardize processes and it showed me how to turn like a one person consulting show with some people helping me into an actual team an actual company that makes money without my involvement. I don't even do much client work anymore. I probably only do like four or five days per year of client work all the rest of the time. I'm just being the CEO, thinking about how to make more money for the business. And a lot of that I can tell you came from reading, came from the mindset changes that came from Reading Built to Sell. Great book. The next book I read that I thought was extremely valuable and this is more around building products, building a team, company culture was reworked from Jason Freed and David Heinemeyer Hansen. This is just a really great no BS book on. Is this like the Polish version of it? I don't know why we have the Polish version of this in the office right now. This book really is just a fantastic company culture book. It's no BS. It's a look behind the scenes of how a successful company works. And for me, it's always just useful to see, OK, what are the successful companies doing? OK, where am I at and what can I learn from this? Now, I think that they have really strong opinions on like meetings and, you know, setting agendas and building products and working with clients that I think are super valuable. I would just recommend reading this book. It's it's amazing. Next book is called Anything You Want from Derek Sivers. It's a tiny book. It takes maybe 30 to 40 minutes to read. And this is one of my favorite business books of all time. It's an entrepreneur who sold his business and it's all the life lessons he learned building the business, selling the business and post selling the business. Really, really no BS, really counterintuitive lessons in here to building a multimillion dollar business and then selling it. It's it's just so, so great. It's one of my favorite books of all time. I love it. I love it. Next book. Now, this one, you might not like it because I know that I recommend this to people often and they don't like it. But I think it's amazing. It's called Experts Secrets from Russell Brunson. And this book basically teaches you how to tell the story about what you're doing so clients understand it. That's what it is. It's about showing the client the story of why you are the expert at what you do. And it's a step like look how many post-its are in here. It's like you can't even read this book anymore. It's so full of notes. But this book really teaches you how to turn what's in your head into a teachable thing. And especially if you want your consulting business to also do training programs, which I do, this book is invaluable at showing you how to teach what you do and showing you how to tell the story of the value of what you can give. And also, you know, in a world where there's a million consultancies, this book can help you figure out how to stand out using your background story versus just some other agency that you're copying. I think it's a really, really good book. Change My Brain and How I Think About Telling Stories, Experts Secrets. And I can promise you basically no agency owner reads this because it's too scammy and I think it's a really great book. Last but not least, and this is another old school one that looks really kind of crappy, but it's really good. It's called Double Your Profits. I made all of the leaders at AJ & Smart read this a couple of years ago, actually during COVID because we were like, holy crap, what are we going to do now that there's like less clients coming in and all this kind of stuff? This book literally teaches you how to be more profitable. So in the beginning, when you're just starting out, it can happen when you're starting an agency that your profits are as low as 12% or even lower. A lot of agencies hover around 12 to 15%. The profit margin of AJ & Smart is more like 60%. A lot of that is thanks to a lot of the measures that you can learn in this book, but actually also a lot of the stuff that you learn. Whatever, it doesn't matter. Let's just say it all came from this book, but this is a really, really fantastic book on how to be profitable from the beginning of your business, but then how to keep increasing your profits over time. A lot of people focus too much on revenue. Oh, great, I'm making a million dollars revenue, but I'm basically making 100K in profit, which is, you know, it's not really great if you're the owner and you can't really pay yourself. I know because I wasn't really able to pay myself properly for like the first eight years of running AJ & Smart. And this book helped teach me how to build a more profitable business. I think it's fantastic. I think everyone should read it. If I was to choose which one of these books you should read, if you just wanna read one, if you're starting a business, I would pick the four hour work week. That would be the kind of, you know, if you only read one, read this because it's gonna teach you 80% of what you'll learn in all of the other books as well. They're just like giving you different lessons based on it. But I would recommend if you want to really build a killer business, read all of them. Now, we don't sell any business courses or any business stuff. I just wanted to make this video because I thought it would be fun. Let me know if there's anything in the comments that you'd like to ask for. Are there any other books that you've read which you think would be fantastic for building a business? Anything else you wanna know about building a consulting business or any questions you have? And if you want to behind the scenes look at what we're doing today at AJ & Smart, how we're building our facilitation business. There's a training down below. It will say free training and it will teach you how to become a top 1% facilitator. But even if you don't wanna do that, take a look at that video. You'll see what we're up to and how we're making money and how we think about things, how we think about building businesses. Thank you so much for watching this. I hope it was useful. Hit the like button if you liked it. Hit the subscribe button if you're not subscribed already. There are loads of people watching our videos who are not subscribed and it's kinda sad. I do have a question for you. What is the most embarrassing from a fashion perspective? What was the most embarrassing age for you? For me, I think it was when I was about 14. Maybe it was 13. I just watched The Matrix and I decided I wanted to dress like Neo for like a year. Pretty embarrassing. All of those photos need to be burned and I really, really need to never let that happen to my children. But I wanna ask, what was the most embarrassing year of your life fashion-wise? Let me know. Let me know how you were dressed. I wanna hear all about it. I wanna feel better about my Neo time. The team keeps saying that I looked like someone who was at the rave at Zion and The Matrix reloaded. I disagree. Goodbye everybody.