Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann Some businesses only show up when they want something. Buy this. Book that. Schedule a call. They keep asking for attention, appointments and money, then wonder why people aren’t particularly excited to hear from them. Well, would you be? Imagine meeting somebody who immediately explains how important they are, tells you what they sell and asks whether you’d like to buy it. Before you’ve finished y

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Building a StoryBrand 2.0 by Donald Miller There is a strange thing that happens in marketing. A company spends years becoming good at what it does. It develops the product, improves the service, hires people, solves problems, and learns the business from the inside out. Then it tries to explain all of that to a potential customer in one paragraph. The result is often a pile of industry language, company history, clever phrases, and twelve di

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell Most business owners say they want more freedom. Then they spend their days doing work someone else could do, answering questions they have already answered, fixing the same problems again, and checking tasks they supposedly delegated three months ago. That is not freedom. That is owning a company that has learned how to use you as its most overworked employee. Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time attacks that pr

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout Most businesses have a positioning problem. They just don’t call it that. They call it a lead problem, a website problem, a social media problem, or a sales problem. Then they change the website, run more ads, post more content, and give the sales team another script. Sometimes those things help. Other times, the underlying problem is much simpler: the market doesn’t understand w

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker When something goes wrong in a company, there is a very popular management strategy: find somebody to blame. The client wasn’t followed up with. The employee dropped the ball. The project ran late. The order went out wrong. The new person “just doesn’t get it.” Sometimes a person really did make a mistake. People do that. I have even done it myself once or twice, although I am still reviewing the evidence. B

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman There was a time when writing advertising copy was difficult for a very practical reason: somebody actually had to write it. You needed a copywriter. You needed time. You needed research. You needed drafts. You needed editing. Today I can ask AI for 50 headlines while I’m drinking my coffee. That’s amazing. It’s also dangerous. Because AI has dramatically reduced the cost of producing words w

Barry’s 80/20 Five-Page Review of The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber There’s a nasty little trick that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. You start a business because you want more freedom. You want control over your time. You want to make more money. You want to build something of your own instead of spending your life building somebody else’s. Then five years later you realize something. You didn’t escape your job. You created a harder one. Your new boss works you ni