Book Review: Beyond Booked Solid by Michael Port

You can find a fair number of books that will tell you how to find new business — books on marketing, promoting yourself, networking, generating sales leads, etc.

However, few books actually address the very real pain of being so booked solid you have no time to even think about growing your business — or making changes to your business model so that you’re not working so many hours and can actually enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Sure, you can get books such as the E-Myth Revisited and Getting Things Done. Both are great books, but neither one really addresses how taking your business to the next level involves a great deal of soul searching . . . and fretting . . . and taking one step forward for every two or three steps back.

Michael Port, in his latest book, Beyond Booked Solid, takes you on this journey.

In Beyond Booked Solid, Port discusses how to address our own self-created business problems that we encounter once we’ve stepped up to a higher level of play.

According to Port, we need to “solve these new problems with a more sophisticated level of thinking than that which created the problems in the first place.”

It’s this “sophisticated thinking” that Port covers in his book. In succeeding chapters he talks about how making changes to your business and yourself is a continual process — indeed, if we’re serious about being successful, then we’re never quite done making continual improvements.

What I like about this book, and what makes it different from other “how to” business books, is that Port explains the process but leaves it up to you to decide what is best for you.

In other words, he  doesn’t say, “Do it this way and you’ll be successful like me.”

Instead, he has you delve deep into yourself to determine what you want from business and from your life, and then explains the various ways of getting there based on your priorities and business model.

What I also like about this book is that Port pulls in a great many ideas from many different sources. Indeed, he names this very process: cross-appropriation.

Due to his ability to see and adopt new ideas from outside his “disclosive space,” Port is able to use seemingly unrelated ideas in connection with taking a business to the next level.

For example, he repeatedly talks about Toyota and its mission to continually improve its automobiles and how business owners can apply this idea to their own office proccesses — including answering email! (It works, too.)

If you’re looking for a book that will tell you how to get more clients, read Port’s first book, Book Yourself Solid.

If you’re at the stage of the game where you’re completely overwhelmed with too much work, don’t remember the last time you took a day off, and can’t seem to find the time to work on your business because you’re too busy working in your business, read Beyond Booked Solid.

As soon as I finished reading it, I immediately knew what my next step was: signing up for Basecamp, an online project management application. I’ve been using it for two days now and don’t know how I went this long without it.