The pumpkin plan

This book is essentially an argument for niching down (grow one prize-winning “pumpkin”), with a focus on streamlining your processes and delivering great customer experience. It’s a high level approach with very doable action steps at the end of each chapter, written in the author’s colorful, I’ve-been-there, slightly zany way.

Read this if you’re an established business/stuck in the grind/trying to get past that initial plateau of growth. I agree with his assessment of stages; that not every business owner is ready to make the hard choice to niche down, or the scary choice to fire the bad clients. If you’re ready to do what it takes and you like informal, actionable writing, pick this one up.

If you want to dive more into the process side of things, pick up his book Clockwork. I feel like that is a natural follow-up to The Pumpkin Plan.

"I tried to become Frank's definition of an entrepreneur, which, I later learned, is the only definition of an entrepreneur: "You're not an entrepreneur yet, Mike. Entrepreneurs don't do most of the work. Entrepreneurs identify the problems, discover the opportunities and then build processes to allow other people and other things to do the work."" (Mike Michalowicz, The Pumpkin Plan)

Thoughtful, inspirational, engaging. Contains actual insights and not too much fluff. Specialize your business according to the requests solicited from the most profitable 20% of customers/clients. Drop the big annoying low-profit clients. Find something unique to offer compared to others in your market. Grow the company by putting a ton of effort into it, systematize/delegate everything piecemeal, then sell it in maintenance mode. Interesting way to look at entrepreneurship.