You’ve got 20years of business experience – so what the fuck belongs in your business book?

After 20 years in business, you’ve learned a thing or two. You can spot a red-flag client from three miles away, your boundaries are as firmly established as those ancient Roman milestones buried beside A-roads, and you know your shit.

Then some bright spark suggests you should write a business book.

Which sounds like a damn fine idea. You’ve got a wealth of experience, stories, opinions, mistakes and hard-won lessons that other people could benefit from. A book could help you become known for what you do, open doors to new opportunities and give potential clients a bloody good reason to take you seriously.

There’s just one small problem… What the fuck are you going to write about?

Knowing your subject inside out and knowing which bits of those 20 years belong in a book can very quickly become so overwhelming that you chuck the ‘damn fine idea’ in the bin. I’m going to talk about how you can turn two decades of business experience into a book without producing a 400-page guided tour of everything that’s ever happened to you.

Knowing your shit doesn’t mean knowing what to put in your book

The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed business owner who started out on this glorious road of self-employment is very different from the battle-hardened business owner you are today. After all this time, you have honed your skills into getting amazing results for your clients. You have a particular approach to get those results. You know your subject inside out. All of which would make incredible reading material…wouldn’t it? 

Well, yes and no. 

Your business book isn’t about documenting everything you’ve ever learned, starting at day one and dumping the lot into a PDF. Just like every bit of content you share, your book needs a job. 

But that isn’t where I’d start.

First of all, get that knowledge out of your head. 

Client conversations. Stories. Mistakes. Lessons. Frameworks. Old blogs. Workshops. The things you’ve explained to clients a hundred times or more. Content posts. 

Some of it might make brilliant material for a book. Some of it won’t. Until you can see it together, you won’t be able to see what you’ve got to work with. This point is also where a lot of business owners come unstuck. When you’re so close to your own experiences, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. You’ve got years of knowledge rattling around in your head, but trying to make sense of it all on your own can leave you wondering where on earth to start.

There is a tendency to look at everything you’ve accumulated over the years, get completely overwhelmed and try to cram as much of it as possible into one book. The result is often a waffly, confusing pile of word salad that doesn’t really go anywhere. Eventually, the project gets abandoned. 

When I’m working with clients, I approach that mountain of information differently.

I’m looking for the common themes and the ideas that keep cropping up. The connections between stories, experiences and opinions that might not seem related at first glance.

Somewhere concealed in all that information, there’s often the beginnings of a bloody good book.

The trick is working out which one.

The Problem When You’re the Expert

20 years of business experience means you’ve clocked up experience, stories, and frameworks that are coming out of your ears. You start out thinking your business book is going to be about this, but halfway through, you’ve wandered off into the wilderness of the last twenty years.

So how do you decide what earns its place and what doesn’t?

Like anything in marketing, you start with the person. In this case: your reader. 

Chances are, they haven’t picked up your book because they’re desperate to know what you wore to your first business meeting or how you learned to ride a bike. Unless you’re writing a memoir, they’re reading because they want to understand something, learn something, or do something differently. Your reader needs to be central to the decisions you make about what goes into your book.

Some of your best stories might not belong in this particular one.

And I wouldn’t start out writing your business by getting hung up on chapter headings, the perfect title or what the cover might look like.

Those decisions come later, along with editing, publishing, and marketing. 

First, you need to know who you’re writing for, what you want them to take away from reading it and what job you need the book to do for your business.

Because there’s not much point spending six months writing a book only to discover you’ve written the wrong bloody one.

What’s the one thing holding your business book together?

So you’ve got your reader, and your themes. You know what you want it to do. But what connects the lot? This is where your central idea bolts the bloody lot together. It’s what holds everything together and keeps you on track when you start to wander off piste.

I call it your book’s anchor. 

When you’re writing a chapter, sharing a story or explaining a particular point, you can refer back to your anchor and ask yourself whether what you’ve written truly belongs in the book you’re trying to write. Just because you have a hilarious story from back in the day that you’re dying to tell, it doesn’t mean it automatically gets its place in the book. Having a core, central idea keeps you from rambling or drifting…hence, anchor. 

Clever, right?

Your experience is your raw material, not a finished book. 

A business book is a wonderful way of standing out in your industry, demonstrating your expertise and opening doors to opportunities that your business might not otherwise have access to. It’s like having a stage that elevates you instantly. It is a fabulous marketing tool, but for many business owners, the idea of actually writing a book can feel like a bit of a pipe dream.

Especially when you’ve got 20 years of knowledge rattling around in your head and no bloody clue where to start to turn it all into a book.

That’s where my Business Book Blueprint comes in.

We take all those ideas, stories, experiences and opinions and work out what belongs in your book, what doesn’t and how to bring it all together. Across our session, I’ll help you make the decisions we’ve talked about throughout this blog, take away the overwhelm and uncertainty, and turn your knowledge into a clear, workable book structure.

You’ll know where your book starts, where it finishes and what needs to happen in between.

All the gubbins, without the guesswork.

So instead of spending the next six months wondering what the fuck you’re supposed to be writing, you can get on with writing it.

Got a business book rattling around in your head? Find out how the Business Book Blueprint can help you get it onto paper.