Archive for category: Book Club

Derek Sivers sold his company, CD Baby, for $22M. For years he’d made tens of millions of dollars for independent musicians by giving them a platform by which they could sell to their fans.

Some time after, he wrote a very short book about the experience, Anything You Want, which is packed with lessons and maxims. We can’t share all of them in this article, so we’ve picked a few for you to consider.

Not another boring order confirmation email

Derek took a lot of pride in serving both artists and their fans. He always wanted the experience to be something that would keep people coming back. He says in the book  “…it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.”

The order confirmation email he and his team composed became viral:

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

We miss you already. We’ll be right here at store.cdbaby.com patiently awaiting your return.

Was the product you received defective or damaged? Check out our Return Policy.

Don’t focus on growth

Sivers notes in the book that he never worried about growth. He wanted to focus on delighting customers and figured that the growth would come naturally. Here’s how he put it:

“None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.”

It’s either “Hell Yes” or “No.”

Some time after the sale of his company Derek was being asked to speak in many different places. He often said “Yes,” because he saw all of them as opportunities. At one point he was scheduled to speak at three different conferences, one of them in Australia.

But he realized he wasn’t really interested or excited about any of them. However, he did have a project he was passionate about and wanted to get working on, something that was a “Hell Yes,” when he thought about it.  

To reconcile this dissonance, he created a new rule, which has been written about in hundreds of articles since, the “Hell Yes or No” rule. Sivers dedicates an entire chapter to this topic in the book, though you can find a short version of it on his personal site.  It’s quite simple: if you’re considering a project or commitment that is only a “Yes,” then it’s a “No.”  Give yourself time and bandwidth to take on the “Hell Yes” projects when they come along.

The book isn’t even 90 pages long, so it’s a quick and easy read. You’ll enjoy learning the history of CD Baby alongside the lessons that Derek learned from building it.

Disruption seems to be a constant in the “you economy” of today.  Taxis and even public transport are being disrupted by Uber and Lyft. Hotels and motels are being disrupted by Airbnb.

Billboards are being disrupted by the one device most people are likely to be looking at when they aren’t driving a car (and even if they are): their mobile phones.

Eric Ries and the movement he kicked off when he authored The Lean Startup is disrupting a very old idea: that you need a business plan to build a successful business.

Why the traditional business plan helped

If you talk to most business owners and asked to see their business plan, they might go to some corner of their office or filing cabinet, dust it off, and hand it to you. It hasn’t seen their eyes or hands since it was first written ages ago. Others will tell you they never had one.

We know that business plans aren’t necessary for success, but it was the process of building a business plan that could help crystallize ideas about what kind of business you were building and how you would do it. More importantly, for bank financing, the buyer will be required to furnish their  business plan.

Why a business plan is often irrelevant today

In one word?  The internet.

In a world in which you can start a business in 60 seconds…through a crowdfunding project…or by turning your car or spare room into a revenue stream…or by using instant broadcast capabilities that can be monetized through something like YouTube…a business plan is, at best, a starting point, and one that’s going to use significant time and energy to, at best, guess at the market.

The MVP

Ries advocates for the MVP: the minimum viable product.  What can I get out there as quickly as possible to find out if the market even remotely cares about my product and/or service?  Once you’ve validated your business idea via customers willing to give you money for what you’re offering, you can poll them to find out what features they liked/disliked in order to “pivot” and make your offering better.

This makes business much less like opening a restaurant and much more like making one dish well over and over until you can start to build a series of dishes, which may in time lead to opening a restaurant. Or not. What matters is a relentless laser-like focus on viability and profitability from the jump, which makes starting a business a lot less intimidating and a lot more craft-oriented.

A hybrid approach

At Apex we advocate a hybrid approach. Obviously if you’re bootstrapping and starting a new business from scratch, Ries’s approach is both affordable and logical.  But as any business grows into maturity, you will need to create a business plan built on all your pivots and iterations. This should be done not just as a way to track your progress, but also to have a document for traditional funding should you ever want it to grow your business, or to give to a potential buyer to make their path to financing easier.

The thesis of the book is not a simplistic assertion. It’s backed up by case studies, examples, and evidence.  You can find a copy of it here.

We review books you should read in preparation to buy or sell a business, as well as how to build a company to sell one day. You can see other books we’ve reviewed in our archive.  

What’s the premise?

Bo Burlingham, who is one of the editors-at-large for Inc. Magazine, wrote a book in 2006 about 14 different companies that chose to be “great instead of big.”  He called such companies “Small Giants.”

What are characteristics of these companies?

Well, the book itself is not long at just over 200 pages, but the characteristics of these firms all revolve around intentionality.  For example, Small Giants tend to have leaders who have a burning passion for their industry and/or business in general.  They also have close, personal ties to suppliers and customers.

Small Giants tend to be deeply rooted in the community in which they do business and have cultures that look at the totality of employees’ lives.  One of the companies featured in the book was Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, based in New York City.

One of the ways Meyer has recently innovated in the employee space was by pioneering “Hospitality Included” pricing (i.e. no tipping at his restaurants).  Because the laws governing tipping mandated what he could pay the back-of-the-house staff, Meyer simply changed the rules.  By changing the way his restaurants operated, not only did the back-of-the-house staff see a significant increase in pay, but the front-of-the-house staff didn’t feel obliged to take the weekend shifts anymore, as their pay was now salaried rather than tip-based.  Some parents went to a softball game of their children for the first time ever.

Why should you care?

A lot of people have called this book the Good to Great of the small business world, and that makes a lot of sense.  Sometimes small business owners are busy putting one foot in front of the other and don’t really identify with the stories told in Fast Company and Forbes.  A book like this tells the stories of smaller firms that are carving out their own identity and can provide inspiration and a template to be great instead of big.

You can find a copy of Small Giants here and Bo Burlingham on Twitter here.

If you want to hear more about Danny Meyer and “H.I.” pricing, take a listen here.

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at or 913-433-2303.

We review books you should read in preparation to buy or sell a business, as well as how to build a company to sell one day. 

About the Authors

Jason and David created a company which was originally called 37Signals and was later rebranded as BaseCamp. It’s a project management tool which was also the origin of the code language known as Ruby on Rails.

Why should you read this?

Because it’s not just another business book. We’ve all read plenty of those tired titles, and sometimes you need a book you’re going to flat out disagree with at times.

The authors are opinionated and that’s good because it allows you to take the best of what you agree with into your business. It’s more of a series of reflections than a game-changing formula revolving around a single concept.

Three Takeaways

“Let’s say you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you invite ten people to attend. That’s actually a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You’re trading ten hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time.”

When you examine meetings through this lens, it’s hard not to sit back in a bit of horror. While it may be difficult to implement the “no meetings” policy that they use at Basecamp, you would do well to take a serious look at the reasons and necessities for meetings in your business, and see if Slack, reports or a combination of the two or others couldn’t obliterate some meetings from your schedule and restore some productivity to your schedule.

“How should you keep track of what customers want? Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously…The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over.”

Unlike the quote about meetings, which may take some business owners a minute or two to wrap their minds around, this one feels right at a gut level. Don’t run after each suggestion. Many of the throwaway comments from your customers are best characterized as exactly that: to be thrown away.

“Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again.”

The authors don’t want you fiddling about with throw away internal policies either. Just because something bad happened one time doesn’t necessarily mean you have to fire up a whole policy about it. It’s a big drain on your productivity and time. Obviously, if there’s legal exposure that you need to address, do so. But otherwise, resist the temptation to created a bloated book of policies that reads more like a series of “One time at a company Christmas party, X happened, and now we can’t have nice things anymore.”

You won’t agree with everything in Rework. But you don’t need to. You’ll really treasure the quotables and concepts that resonate with you.

You can find a copy of Rework here.  Jason Fried is also on Twitter.

Building a business is a lot of sweat and hard work. But a fair bit of it is learning as well. If you need book recommendations on building, buying, or selling, we have plenty to give you. Just ask!

Apex is actively looking for Advisors to join our team. If you or someone you know would like to learn more, contact Doug Hubler at or 913-433-2303.