Book Tracking 7
Business Made Simple
By Donald Miller
If you need an introduction to how business can work this is a great read. It gives clear, simple, and easy to follow explanations on various ways on how a business works. One of my biggest take aways from this read was Miller’s comparisons between a business and an airplane. His analogy of a business being like an airplane is very powerful and allows you to easily form a picture in your mind on how various aspects of a business work together.
For example, you have the body of the plane, wings, engines, fuel, passengers, and the pilot. The body of the plane is analogous to the overhead of the company (expenses the company has to operate). Then there’s the wings which give the plane lift which is analogous to the company’s products/services. Through in the engines of the plane which are the marketing and sales arms of a business. Sometimes you can have one engine where sales and marketing are under one umbrella, sometimes it’s better to have them as two separate engines working together. Then you have the fuel which is essentially the cashflow of the business, the passengers (customers), and the pilot who flies the plane (the business leadership directing the company where to go).
You can easily see how each one of these components are critical to success. Miller takes you through the entire breakdown of a business and simple ways to implement sales funnels, marketing strategies, product development, etc.
For me, I did get some out of this book, but much of it is stuff I’ve been learning through other books and through learning from businesspeople in my life and through my own experiences. I do enjoy a different way to think about a business though. I’m always interested to see how people compare things, such as a business to an airplane. To me this gives me more tools to my toolbox to think differently.
This book is full of many business and motivational cliches, but what business book isn’t these days.