From individual to empire by Laura Bull

Laura Bull worked for Sony Music Entertainment where she was one of the youngest executives in charge of artist development and marketing. She wrote this book to help anyone (literally anyone!) to change the way they think about their ‘brand’ and future. With so many examples from Taylor Swift to Hillary Clinton, this didn’t really feel like a business book but more like a very informative chapter of people trying to find their branding voice and what they did to get there.

influencer by Brittany Hennesy

First of all, Brittany is a force. I never laughed so much in my life. Brittany shares some behind-the-scenes stories of what happened while she was working for an agency connecting brands and influencers. She also calls out some of the entitlement of influencers (oh so you think you can fly first class because you have 10k followers?). This book helps you in guiding you through the core influencer principles and shares some nitty-gritty details of the influencer marketing industry. Brittany also just launched a podcast which I’ve been loving!

One million followers by Brendan Kane

This was my latest read and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. It gives a fantastic insight into growth hacks for paid ads, etc. But the reality is, not every brand, especially small businesses have a paid ads budget that is $$$$. Sure, I’d love to work with $$$$ for my clients but their ad budget doesn’t reflect that (yet). I think the biggest lesson was that LinkedIn is highly underrated (which I keep telling my clients! I love to strategize their LinkedIn presence, one of the things I’m really good at!) which I don’t read that often. Also interesting to learn how Snapchat didn’t really invest a lot of money into their own platform hence Instagram stories took over.

Hook point by Brendan Kane

I didn’t even notice I bought two books from the same author first – hah! I liked this one more than ‘one million followers’. Why that? This was great in terms of how to stand out in a three-second world. We are constantly bombarded with information and love to scroll all day. Finding the hook point for services and products is necessary in order to be able to correctly market them so this was pretty eye-opening.

The third door by Alex Banayan

This is a story behind how some of the world’s most successful people launched their careers. Alex had the idea of interviewing leaders like Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and Jessica Alba to learn more about their secrets in order to write this book about them. He found out that life and business are just like a nightclub, there are three doors to get in.

What are some of your recent reads around all things business?