Like most leaders, I’ve read a lot of business books over the years. Many were interesting. A few were useful. Three, however, became references I kept coming back to at different stages of building and scaling Revenue Analytics.
This isn’t a “top three books you must read” post. It’s more practical than that. These are the books whose ideas we fell back on during our company’s pivot, capital raises, RIFs, a global pandemic, and ultimately selling the business. Not because they were profound, but because they were usable.
Early growth: Realizing scale requires a different company
No Man’s Land: Where Growing Companies Fail by Doug Tatum
When we were growing our consulting business, things felt… fine. Revenue was increasing. Clients were happy. We were hiring. From the outside, it looked like success.
Internally, though, the struggle was real.
No Man’s Land put language to what we were experiencing, the dangerous middle between founder-led hustle and a truly scalable organization. Complexity creeps in. Decisions slow down. The organization starts depending too heavily on a few people, and systems fail to keep up with ambition.
The biggest lesson I took wasn’t about process. It was about limits. Consulting scales linearly. People become the constraint. That realization set the table for our decision to pivot to a SaaS model. Not because SaaS is inherently “better,” but because it aligned with how we wanted to grow.
The pivot: People matter more than the plan
Good to Great by Jim Collins
When we decided to pivot from a consulting company to a SaaS company, the strategy was the easy part. The hard part was the organization, the cultural change, and the magnitude of the transformation required.
While it ultimately became more of an evolution than a revolution, focusing on “getting the right people on the bus, then deciding where to drive it” was instrumental to making the pivot work. Having the right people to navigate the twists and turns mattered as much, if not more, than having the right features in the product.
Some people who were exceptional in the consulting model weren’t right for the SaaS one. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially in a tight-knit organization, but it’s reality. In moments of change, talent density beats the world’s best org chart.
Hire for character, collaboration, intellectual curiosity, and ownership. You can’t have too much of any of them.
Crunch time: When optimism isn’t enough
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
If there’s one book I’d call the most practical, it’s this one.
No matter how much we wish otherwise, there isn’t always a clean answer, a tidy framework, or a “best practice” that makes decisions clear.
During the pandemic, we were nine months past our Series A and fully committed to the SaaS pivot. The market froze. Uncertainty spiked. We had to make hard calls quickly, on costs, priorities, and people.
What resonated most was the simple truth that there is no single rulebook for building a successful company. Every situation is contextual, and leadership often requires making decisions without complete information or certainty. Progress depends less on finding the “right” answer and more on having the courage to act, the grit to stay the course, and the willingness to own the outcome. That perspective mattered during RIFs, capital conversations, and moments when leadership meant absorbing fear so the rest of the organization could keep moving.
This book doesn’t glamorize leadership. It treats it like what it is...lonely, consequential, and often uncomfortable.
Looking back: Why these decades old books still matter
None of them provided answers. They provided principles and perspective, ways of thinking that held up under pressure. That’s what operators need, especially in PE-backed environments where expectations are high, time horizons are short, and execution matters.
The right book at the right moment doesn’t change your business. It changes how you make decisions when the stakes are real.
And that’s usually enough.