5 Must Reads For The New Concierge Business Owner
Owning your own small business requires a skill set not usually developed in school or even through experience. Here are 5 books I recommend for your reading list:
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It by Michael E. Gerber. This book tells you how to make sure your concierge business doesn’t just survive, but thrives. Gerber’s premise is that business owners need to create systems and put them in place so your concierge business can run without you. Inc. Magazine calls Gerber “The World’s #1 Small Business Guru.” After reading this you’ll understand why The Instant Concierge Success Package is so important to your company’s longevity.
Selling The Invisible: A Field Guide To Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith. Selling our services as concierges is very different from selling a product. Beckwith gives hundreds of practical strategies we can put to work in an easy-to-read format. Keep this at your bedside and read a couple of pages each night. [By the way, he agrees with me about the dangers of discounting.]
Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics To Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, and Jill Lublin. Who wouldn’t want ‘hundreds of sure-fire tactics to get maximum sales’? There’s a whole series of books in the “guerrilla” series, including books on marketing and social media, but this is my favorite by a long shot. It gives you some basic steps to building media kits, getting interviewed on the radio, and writing a good press release. Free publicity done well can be way more effective than paid advertising–read this and you’ll know how to do it.
How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I know this book has been around f-o-r-e-v-e-r, but it’s a classic and will really help you develop your people skills. There’s a reason this book has more than 1200 reviews on Amazon, and nearly 165,000 Facebook likes.
Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh. Hsieh is the wildly success founder and CEO of Zappos. Even if it’s not your goal to be a bazillionaire like Hsieh, it’s well worth your time to read how he put customer service on steroids to build his empire. This is a fun and light read with a deeper meaning that will have you pondering its implications for months.
Of course, if you haven’t already downloaded and read our own At Your Service: Shortcuts To Success As A Personal Concierge you’ll want to put that at the top of your reading list–it’s just been named a must-read by Top Books Worth Reading.
Have more book suggestions? Let us know and we’ll add them to the list.