A good friend left a voicemail this morning to let me know he was looking at the WHSmith Business Book Of The Month at Heathrow Airport.

He sent a photo from his iphone – Double Your Business getting top billing next to Richard Branson’s book.

The book is getting great reviews on Amazon in the UK and I’m hearing directly back from readers how they are enjoying it, too.

Here’s what one reader, Leesa Robinson, wrote on my business blog, www.leeduncan.com:

I have recently purchased your book and I am enjoying reading and working through it applying your techniques to my business which I am currently expanding.
I like the fact there is no jargon, it gets to the point in a way that I fully understand and can easily follow.
I have already recommended to some friends of mine in business!

My aim in writing the book was really simple – practical business advice to help ordinary businesses achieve fast growth.  It seems to have hit the spot.

Have you spotted the book anywhere in the wild?

 

I was surprised (and delighted) when author Heather Townsend congratulated me via Skype on having an Amazon bestselling book…

I looked right away and discovered that it was at #1 for Small Business Sales and Marketing – here’s the screenshot I captured to prove it!

Thanks to all those who’ve bought it already.

My goal for Double Your Business is to share a method to help you become even more successful in business.

I was told by the publisher that the book needed to be around 50,000 words, which seems a lot when you start writing.

But a chapter of around 5,000 words to cover a topic as vast as marketing, or sales, or customer service, is barely going to scratch the surface if done in any conventional way.

Instead of watering down the content, I decided to do something differently.  You’ll find that each Growth Blueprint in Double Your Business is designed as a framework for you to build upon.

For example, the marketing chapter is called The Double Your Business Marketing Plan and it outlines precisely the marketing methodology that my clients put into practice.

Simply following the instructions in the chapter and methodically introducing the same approach to your business will produce better results for you.

But it was just as important that the methods outlined in Double Your Business are simple enough for anybody in business to follow.

There’s no point creating a system for success if you need to have a brain the size of the planet to be able to use it.

So it’s written in plain English and I’ve avoided using anything that’s overly complicated or confusing.

My goal is very straightforward:

To simplify business success for you.

To make it easier to grow and take a better income from your business.

To make it more rewarding and more fun.

Use it exactly as it’s written in the book and you’ll improve things no end.

Then as you grow in confidence, or perhaps seek further help to push things faster or further, you are building on a solid foundation, rather than starting from scratch.

Keep these frameworks in mind as you develop your business and you will be rewarded with less stress, less hassle and a more straightforward business journey to success.

My books arrived today in a box – it was a great feeling to see them for the first time.

The books is available to buy from Amazon from 20th March, or you can just pre-order it if you’re impatient and want to get a copy yourself.

WH Smith’s travel outlets (motorway services, railway stations, airports) will be featuring it throughout April as their business book of the month.  That means you’ve got no excuse not to pick up a copy!

 

Recently a client asked me “what inspired you to write the book?”

I answered that it was a result of an email from Liz Gooster, then a commissioning editor for Pearson (the owners of Financial Times Publishing), who asked if I’d ever considered writing a book, based on my methods and results of working with small business clients.

But that wasn’t really the inspiration; it was the trigger.

Liz told me that she would love to publish a book called Double Your Business, an offer I would have been daft to turn down.

One of my biggest desires is to “spread the word” about my methods to help many thousands of businesses, rather than the few I can reach working 1-1 with them.

So I scratched my head for a couple of months to plan what it should contain.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was what to leave out.  The publisher wanted about 50,000 words, enough for 220 pages.  The finished manuscript was 55,000 words, although they managed to squeeze it into less than 220 pages – the alchemy of publishing at work, no doubt.

But anyway, back to the problem at hand.  Doubling your business is not simply a case of doing better with your marketing and sales.

They are often hurdles that must be overcome, but they alone will make little real difference to your results.

Having worked with over 200 businesses in a professional capacity, I see patterns and behaviours repeated time and time again.

Like one client who is putting lots of effort into winning new orders, but is not paying attention his finances.  He’s not making enough money on the work he’s doing.

Doubling his business will not make him more money, it will just put him more at risk of cashflow and profitability problems. Before we get into growth, we need to make sure all the work he does is consistently highly profitable (a work in progress right now).

Or the client that is in permanent chaos, his office resembling the primodial stew that originally spawned life on earth billions of years ago (ok, a slight exaggeration, I admit).

The point, though, is that your business can be held back for so many reasons.  I call these reasons your Barriers to Growth, and it’s these that inspired me to write the book.  Because if you can eliminate these Barriers, your business will fly again.

By understanding what makes an ambitious business owner suddenly feel like they are wading through treacle, or that they’ve hit a brick wall, it’s possible to devise simple plans to overcome these obstacles and get back into the fast-lane.  These simple plans are the Growth Blueprints.

The book features an effective diagnostic tool to help you pinpoint the biggest Barrier to Growth you face, and 22 Growth Blueprints are laid out in detail so that you have the clarity to be able to transform your business.

So the inspiration to write the book was a combination of wanting to help lots of people to achieve more in business.  Simple really.

I was delighted to discover last week that Double Your Business has been selected by WH Smith Travel, their chain of shops serving railway stations and airports, as their Business Book of the Month for April.

This means it will be featured throughout their stores at travel locations, making it a really convenient place to pick up your copy.

Of course, it’s also the ideal companion for your rail or air journey.

But that may be a biased opinion, of course!