I’m Investing $100M and Buying 12 Companies in 2024 (here’s how I’ll do it)

Way of the Wolf explains sales trainer Jordan Belfort’s Straight Line method of selling, which is designed to efficiently move a prospect from doubt to certainty about buying. It provides a conceptual framework plus a collection of principles, techniques, and psychology that he says anyone can use to sell anything in any industry.

Belfort is best known as The Wolf of Wall Street—the name of his first memoir and of a Scorcese movie depicting his high-flying life as a broker before pleading guilty in 1999 to securities fraud and money laundering. He served 22 months, then became a motivational speaker and sales trainer. Belfort rethought his ethics and refined his selling method, which he says will shorten sales cycles, dramatically increase closes, and lead to referrals and long-term customer relationships—all while bringing the seller success and wealth.

In our guide, we compare his method to other iconic sales programs like SPIN Selling and The Challenger Sale.

The purpose of a business is to make money and grow—and for a small business, the surest way to make money is to have a simple, clear marketing plan defining who you’re targeting as prospects and customers and how you’ll reach them. However, many small businesses fail to market effectively.

In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, business coach and entrepreneur Allan Dib tells small business owners how to create a marketing plan using a simple template that guides you through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. The plan defines a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They’ll start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans who will drive your business growth. This guide explores Dib’s method and compares it to other templates and marketing strategies.

In The Personal MBA, bestselling author and entrepreneur Josh Kaufman offers a comprehensive overview of how businesses work. He argues that there are five key processes underpinning every business and suggests ways to optimize them for successful results. You’ll come away knowing how to identify profitable opportunities and make informed decisions to ensure business success.

In this guide, we’ll discuss these five key processes and present Kaufman’s advice for managing them to create business success. Additionally, we’ll clarify his ideas with complementary research from management professionals and we’ll suggest actionable strategies to help you apply these concepts to your business.

In Built to Sell, entrepreneur and small business expert John Warrillow teaches you how to build a business you can sell. As someone with first-hand experience creating and selling a small business, Warrillow claims that a sellable business is one that can function without the owner. To create such a company, he provides a step-by-step process any business owner can follow.

In this guide, we’ll explain why a self-sufficient business is more attractive to potential buyers and why you should strive to build such a business regardless of whether you intend to sell it. We’ll also explore each step of Warrillow’s process, including how to find and market a unique product or service, find the right salespeople, incentivize upper management, and finalize a sale of your business. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Warrillow’s strategies with those of other business experts.

Ben Horowitz was a public CEO through the dotcom bubble and burst. He learned a lot of hard lessons about how to build a company and get it to survive. Now co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he shares his advice to other founders and senior executives on getting through your company’s inevitable hard times.

The book covers a wide span of topics, including handling the psychology of a failing company, building a good place to work, scaling a company, and being a good CEO. It’s targeted to startup founders and CEOs, but there’s good advice here for anyone who wants to help build a better company.

The failure of Enron in the early 2000’s is one of the largest bankruptcies in US history. Shareholders were wiped out, and tens of thousands of employees left with worthless retirement accounts. This book recounts the rise and fall of Enron, and how the company constructed a massively complex accounting scandal that was doomed to failure.

Enron’s downfall is the predictable mixture of human greed, poorly structured incentives, and lack of sanity checks when everyone has their fingers in the pie. In smaller ways, we too are subject to the same pulls as Enron managers and employees. The warning - if we were put into the same situation, we might not have behaved any differently.

If you’ve ever asked yourself why you aren’t making as much progress in your business career as you’d like, business and marketing expert Donald Miller says he knows the answer: You’re not adding enough value to your company. Businesses always have the bottom line in mind, and they’re much more likely to notice and promote people who quantifiably bring more money into the company than people who simply do what’s in their job description and nothing more. Therefore, Miller argues that you should see yourself not as a mere employee, but as an investment of your organization, and he provides 11 steps that can help you become an investment that provides an excellent return.

We’ll examine these steps, and we’ll also supplement Miller’s recommendations with advice from other business thinkers, psychological background on some of his ideas, and ideas from his other works.

Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you? W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest that the answer to competitive problems is to create a blue ocean: a brand-new market for an innovative idea, allowing your company to avoid competing with rivals—because it has no direct rivals.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne discuss how you can create such a market by focusing on your product’s characteristics that customers really care about while discarding the characteristics they don’t. This creates a new product offering that doesn’t currently exist, in a space without direct competitors.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to develop a blue ocean strategy, how to execute it, and how to anticipate potential problems. We’ll also look at how a blue ocean strategy aligns with other business strategy frameworks, and where it differs.

Zero to One is entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s unconventional advice for technology startups. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, argues that technology has stagnated. Most new companies improve incrementally on existing products, but Thiel argues that the most valuable and game-changing startups create something new. They move the world from zero to one. Creating new things is not only the best path to profits—it’s also the only path for human progress. In this guide, we’ll compare Thiel’s perspective with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Geoffrey Moore’s strategy for high-tech startups, and the insights of other innovation experts.