Beyond Book Solid: Your Business, Your Life, Your Way is Michael Port’s excellent follow on to
Book Yourself Solid.
If you provide a service, let’s say you’re a consultant, a dentist, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a whatever, it’s hard to imagine doing much better than being booked solid. Hey, you’re really selling time anyways, and time is finite – you only have so much to sell. You can get more enjoyable clients perhaps and better paying clients, but that’s about it
This book is about innovation; about growing your business. Growing does not necessarily meaning hiring people and getting bigger, although that’s one option. Growing means changing the scope of your business, so you do more of what you like, less of what you don’t like, and make more money. You’re changing the scope so you are not limited to trading your time on a one-to-one basis for money.
Yogi Bera said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I’ve been doing that and I’ve decided he was joking. Chapter 5 of Beyond Booked Solid talks about building blocks for a business, and although there was nothing entirely new to me, there was a new way of looking at my speaking and consulting business. Instead of taking all the forks when I get to them, I can plan and have options ready. Chapter 5 is a very useful chapter to me
Chapter 8 is on defining and measuring objectives, something I haven’t been going since my objectives have been constantly changing (at every ‘fork in the road’ they’ve been multiplying). I also found this chapter very useful.
Chapter 10 on systems was a slap in the head for me. Sometimes I need a headslap. I need systems, defined ways of doing things. Just today I wasted 45 minutes figuring out how to do something in Microsoft Access. I also wasted 45 minutes in January on the same task. Had I systematized it, basically just documented what I had learned in January, I wouldn’t have lost that 45 minutes of my life, and better still, I could get someone else, perhaps a student intern, to do it for me in the future.
“Read once and absorb, then read again and take action” is what Michael recommends in the preface. That’s exactly what I’m doing.
This is a book I’ll read more than once, and one that I highly recommend.
Labels: Beyond Booked Solid, Michael Port
, by Jimmy Hexler and Jonathan Woetzel. I've got a pre-release copy, but it will be generally available soon and you can pre-order from Amazon now.