This is the mind shift podcast where we share real stories, real strategies that will help you find real success. This is the place to hear from people just like you who've taken their ideas, goals and dreams from a point of inspiration to realization, or when life knock them down from a point of break down to break through. I'm your host Darrell Evans. Let's get started with today's episode.
If you want to succeed faster as a service based entrepreneur, here are my five best books for service based entrepreneurs that were written over 15 years ago that are still relevant today. If this is your first time here, welcome to the mind shift Business Show. My name is Darrell Evans, I am your host, I am the co founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency called yoka. Local and over the last 11 or 12 years now we've been helping companies grow to the tune of over 300 million in
revenue. But I've also been an entrepreneur since the age of 20. And I've started six successful service based businesses. I was on a podcast recently and someone asked me what what one of the best investments I've ever made in my business over the last 30 years. My answer was my own personal development. What do I mean by that? But one thing no one will ever take away from you as an entrepreneur is what you put in
your mind. And so my answer to him was very simply the best investment not the most money. But the best investment I've ever put into myself as a as a business owner, is what I've done in my own personal development and today I want to talk to you about the five best books I would read if I were you as a service based entrepreneur today. So let's dive in. The first book is Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki. Some of you are familiar with the Rich Dad Poor Dad series. And of course,
Kiyosaki is legendary. But we learned in rich dad poor dad that the quote, the four quadrants that he broke down are the E quadrant, the S quadrant, the B quadrant and the AI quadrant. One of the things when I read this book back in 2001, I remember being in the S quadrant, and I had a definition because of Kiyosaki, I got a definition for what I was
experiencing at that point. But I also got a vision for the future as to what it looked like to transition to the other quadrant called the B quadrant, and eventually the investor quadrant, which is where I try to live most of my life today.
That being said, when you're starting a business and anyone can, but one thing I learned back then especially as a service based entrepreneur, was that I was often trapped in the business, I didn't have systems, if it was going to get done, it had to get done by me, maybe even I had one or two or three people on my team or my company. But it seemed like we were still just working harder and harder and harder to serve our clients.
What I learned about the B quadrant, which I'll summarize here, and again, I recommend you pick this book up links will be in the description below. So you can get an easy access to it. And that was to create a business that had systems to be run by people, not me as the entrepreneur. And what's interesting about that is when you're a service based entrepreneur, a lot of times you're working face to face with
those clients. And so you're really close to the acquisition of the customer, you're close to the fulfillment of the service of the customer, and the post level of service, or what we call delighting the customer for lifetime value. Well, you've got to change your mindset about being in the S quadrant, because
it just means you own a job. And in many cases, you can make a lot of money, owning the job, but we want to talk about and what I loved about this book was it helped my framework over the last 22 years now since I read this book, to make sure I was constantly evaluating my actions to get into the B quadrant. Number two, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I mean, there couldn't possibly have been a better name for a book and why you should read it. If you're an entrepreneur, don't
you want to be effective? Well, there's seven habits, right? What two of the habits that I'll talk about here, you should pick up the book to go through all
seven of them. One of them was beginning with the end in mind, begin with the end in mind, you know, if you hang around the mind shift business environment for any any length of time, you'll know that we are always talking about how to go from inspiration to realization and when life knocks us down, from break down to break through, beginning with the end in mind is very much this idea of being able to see something in advance of its real existence. That's my
takeaway from it. from a spiritual standpoint, even it's like, do you have the vision for something that wasn't even there? I remember hearing many years ago, Jim Rohn, saying, When should you start construction on the home? And he said as soon as it's built, and I was like, What are you talking about? And it was really a concept that I think came out of this book by Stephen Covey. In that you must begin with the end
in mind. In order for us to build something we have to actually see the finished product, we have to be seeing how our business is going to grow. We have to see the future of our of our organization. You can't just do it after you see it. Right. And so when I think about this book and a number of the great principles that come out of this book that begin with the end in mind I sharpening the
saw, right? I mean, look, if you're not constantly getting better at yourself, getting yourself better as an entrepreneur, as a parent, as a friend, as a colleague, as a leader, you are going to end up having that erosion of pressure on your shoulders, that's going to erode away at your passion. And so a number of great things came out of the book, very powerful lessons, it's all about
that personal development. For yourself as an entrepreneur, as a leader, I would highly recommend, as a book number two, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Book number three, Good to Great by Jim Collins, when I, when I came across this book,
2004 2005, maybe 2006. The subtitle is Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and others don't, you know, I've been now in the I've been blessed to now work with hundreds and hundreds, close to probably 1000 companies now, whether consulting, running, marketing and sales as their agency of record, or just teaching them through our coaching and consulting and educational program. And the interesting thing about what I hear is people are stuck in
being a good company. But there's a couple of critical things that are keeping them from taking the leap. One of the key things you'll pick up out of this book that I learned and I stick it sticks in my mind, and I say it on a regular basis. That is as you think about even
going to the B quadrant. Going back to Cashflow Quadrant, you've got to make sure that when you start building a team, you've got to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right butts in the right seats. One of the things that I learned out of that book was just this, how bigger companies and by the way, many of these companies, you can look at the book and say, Oh, those companies aren't relevant today. Or, you know, maybe something's changed, it
doesn't matter. The principles are the same. Right? People on the bus wrong people off the bus, right butts in the right seat. So often, I remember back in the early 2000s, when I first was hiring, I remember just needing to get someone on the team to help me out, I needed to get people on the team to do some of the things to take the load off myself. Well, that's the wrong way to go about it if you don't have a clear path of what you need that person to do.
And what I've learned so many years now later, is that there's a way to align that person's skill set in their gift with the job at hand that's needed to be done in your company. Right. So another big key component out of Good to Great was a concept called the hedgehog concept. Now, I'm not going to explain that all here. But it's literally the the synergy of finding out what you're best in the world at. And just focusing
on that. So often we get so pulled left and right with all the different things going on in the world in the marketplace, that we try to do too much for people in our quest to serve them and build a business. The hedgehog concept is one of those concepts that make you get laser focused on what you can be best in the world at your look in my in my world, my methodologies, my models for business growth and customer acquisition and sales. And they fit on a lot of
different industries. But what we have made a committed decision about is to make sure we stay laser focus with companies that have service based business models. Now, service Software as a Service is a service, but it is software. But so that falls under my umbrella. But what we are not great at is we're not the biggest product agency, we don't have a ton of E commerce companies that come to work with
us. A lot of them are coaches are professional service providers or local business owners who provide professional services, engineers, doctors, you can name it, coaches, speakers, authors, those people who provide some sort of service to their customer or their
client. And that's a concept of being laser focused one of the concepts I picked up out of the book, which is why I recommended his book number three, on my five best books to read as a service based entrepreneur, book number four, getting things done
by David Allen. And I can remember so well back in the day when I was struggling with working from about 767 in the morning, until like 1011 12 o'clock at night, this book helped give me a framework, a model for how to work through productivity through my day, at
that time. And as you probably are as well, you're probably inundated with all sorts of requests, you've got marketing to do you got sales to do you got fulfillment to do, you've got customers you got to deal with, you've got employees payroll, all the things right.
How do you process through your day, one of the things I learned about productivity and getting things done, and I'll just share with you really quick, the whole, the whole concept of the book is can literally put on one PDF, one of the best things I thought about and what I learned was, if a task can be done in two minutes or less, get it done now, don't schedule that for the future. So in other words, one of the filters is, is can this be done in two minutes or less?
The thing that I need to do can it be done in two minutes or less? That's the one of the first filters that was one thing that just still sticks to me to stay I still talk to my team about it on a regular basis. Another key concept that I got out of the process as the book was this idea of is this actionable or not actionable being the key word with this thing that's coming in as David Allen describes it, these are inputs right Day, we've got no
shortage of input. We've got email we've got in mail on LinkedIn, we've got text messages, we've got voicemails, we've got phone calls. In some cases, some of us still have paper documents coming into our office. We have DMS on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter and everything right? There's more inputs, as David Allen would describe it than any time in history probably right. But is the input actionable or not,
it's a split down the line. The next piece to it that was so fascinating for me, which I still think about to this day, is if it is actionable, do I need to do it? Or can someone else do it right, you start to really pick up on is this something that I must do. So there's a number of things that go along with this, I still share the one pager with all my team, I don't make my team use David Allen's formula. There are other formulas out there, though, people you might be
studying. If you're doing something well, and successfully, you don't feel overwhelmed with your daily productivity, great. But if not, I would recommend picking up a copy of getting things done, I still send it to my team who want some help with productivity
and time management. That's why it's number four, Book number five, simple idea, told extremely elegantly with amazing case studies of how companies and industries have been disrupted by choosing to position your product in the market or your service in the market, in a blue ocean versus a red ocean, right? Let's just
keep it simple. A red ocean is a competitive marketplace full of sharks, literally, you know, eating eating at your your pocketbook, they're taken away the clients, you're really just in a competitive market. And let's be clear, if you're going to be successful in business, today, there's a good chance you have competition. Now, there's some rare occasions where you're gonna start in a marketplace
that has no competition. But let's be clear, if you're in a market that has no competition, you probably have a long road ahead of you. And you've probably invented something completely game changing. But that's not the vast majority of you. The vast majority of you are in industries that have been decades if not hundreds of years old, and have lots of competition. So how do you go into a blue ocean and start to compete where your competitors are? How do you up in the
competition? One of the examples I remember from the book had to do with Cirque du Soleil and how they came in. Pardon me if I said that wrong, could be served to so I'm not familiar with exactly the way you process it, although I see the shows you're in Vegas all the time. But how did they come in and disrupt what had been the circus model in industry for decades upon decades, and before you knew it,
PT Barnum is gone, right? And Cirque du Soleil is the way we love to see circus today in the way we'd love to see acrobatics and the show put together. It's just fantastic. One thing I've thought about in service business models is from a red ocean standpoint, and a blue ocean standpoint is what can we do? And by the way, at that time, when I'm reading this book, I'm in the mortgage industry, right? If you are in mortgage real estate industry,
it's it. It's pretty red ocean, it's just red ocean, it is what it is, how do you figure out how to carve out your blue ocean. There are some things we talked about inside of my ship Business Academy, which I won't get into here. But one of the concepts that really served us well was a concept I created called the
iceberg concept. And the iceberg concept simply meant is if you think about the iceberg and the thought process of an iceberg 85 or 90% of the iceberg science says is is underneath the water, you can't see it 10 or 15% is
above the water. Again, this is just a generality, right, what I started looking at in my marketplace was what if the red ocean in my marketplace was all of the customers meaning all of my competitors, and we were all competing for that 10 to 15% above the water that who had already raised their hand, who were interested in our product
or service. And I started saying it's really competitive up here, when the person has already indicated they wanted to buy a home, they've already indicated that they wanted to get a mortgage, they'd already filled out a loan app on whatever online website. And now we're all competing for that same customer. That to me was what I associated with a red ocean. And I said well, where are those people beneath the water? Where's the part of the iceberg
beneath the water? In my case, the iceberg our customers prospective customers, and how could I reach them before they raised their hand up out of the water and became known to all of my competitors, which was the red ocean that became the difference maker and how I shifted my marketing, my sales, my nurturing of my database and a concept that I thought of called Return on relationship and I started really focusing on the growth of my database and
not the sales number. Again, we talk a lot more about the iceberg concept inside the mind shift, Business Academy mind shift community and if you haven't come into our world or if you'd like to take a peek, just head over to mind shift community.com You can come in there for free and then if you want to take a look at the Academy, we can get you information on how to do that.
But this idea of red ocean and blue ocean came out Out of the Blue Ocean Strategy is so much more, by the way so much more in this book. That's just fantastic. But if you're in a competitive market, how can you create a blue ocean where you have less competition in an uncontested market space, and as a service based entrepreneur, chances are, again, you're competing in a red ocean already, it's going to be easier if you find your blue ocean. So
there you have it. Those are my five best books for service based entrepreneurs that were written over 15 years ago, and I still think they're relevant. Today. Listen, what I've learned along my journey is that if one good idea, one big idea comes out of any book that you read at the price of that book, it is worth
it, it is worth your time. And one thing I would recommend for entrepreneurs listening this right now is you must, at the very minimum, keep building on your own personal development, keep getting the information. Sure, I'm not saying you shouldn't join a mastermind. I'm not saying you shouldn't hire a coach, I'm not saying you shouldn't join an academy or community or buying online
training. What I would tell you is at the very bare minimum, you've got to pick up books that are relevant to what you're working on and what you're struggling through, and get the one or two or three breakthrough ideas that could be talked about in your world 15 or 20 years later, notice, I read these books 20 years ago, practically, they all still have relevance today. Even though we transition from an offline world to an online world, the principles are the same. But let's be clear,
books are just not enough. And you know that right? So I would invite you once again to come take a look at what we're doing with our live master classes. To help service based entrepreneurs grow each and every month, head over to mind shift community.com and join there for free. And if you're not ready to come into the community right now, that's perfectly fine. If you've enjoyed today's content, hit that subscribe button and turn on the notification bell so you
never miss an episode. And if you're up to it, send this to a friend who might need one of these books and what they're going through in their business right now. I'm Darryl Evans and I'll see you next time