Our MD’s Summer Reading List for Business Owners and Leaders

Summer can be a chance to switch off.

For business owners, founders and leaders, that’s often easier said than done. Even when the out-of-office is on, the part of your brain thinking about people, plans and the next challenge rarely shuts down completely.

A good book can give that thinking somewhere useful to go. Today Team founder and Managing Director Jamie Boyd has always been a keen reader of business, leadership and performance books.

He didn’t begin his career with a business degree or years of management experience. After injury brought his professional rugby career to an end, he used a £3,000 loan from The Prince’s Trust to lease a van and start Today Team. From there, he had to learn every part of running and growing a business while doing the work itself. Books have been one part of that education, alongside experience, mentoring and learning from other business leaders.

So, for anyone looking for something thought-provoking to pack alongside the sun cream this summer, here are four of Jamie’s recommendations.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Michael E. Gerber

This is the book Jamie recommends most frequently to other business owners. In fact, he describes it as the first piece of homework he gives to people he mentors.

The central idea is particularly relevant to anyone who starts a company because they’re good at delivering a particular product or service.

Being good at the work doesn’t automatically mean you know how to build a business around it.

Gerber describes the different roles an owner has to play: the technician doing the work, the manager creating order and the entrepreneur looking ahead. The difficulty is that many founders spend so much time being the technician that they never create the structure needed for the company to grow.

For Jamie, that lesson couldn’t have been more direct. Today Team began with him behind the wheel of a van, handling the deliveries and dealing with whatever else needed doing. In the early stages, the business depended on his own time, energy and availability.

Growth meant gradually moving away from doing everything himself. It required better systems, clearly defined responsibilities and people who could make good decisions without every question coming back to the founder.

“When you start out, doing everything yourself can feel like commitment. For a while, it probably is. But eventually it becomes the thing that holds the business back.

The biggest lesson I took from The E-Myth was to keep asking whether I was building a proper business or simply creating a demanding job for myself. It made me think much more seriously about processes, leadership and giving other people the opportunity to take responsibility.”

It remains a useful question at every stage of growth: are you working on the business, or have you been pulled back into working entirely within it?

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Matthew Syed

Drawing on examples from sport, business and other high-performance environments, Bounce looks at what really separates exceptional performers from everybody else.

Its argument is that what we often describe as natural talent is usually backed by far more practice, repetition and effort than the outside world ever sees. Syed explores the importance of hard work, will, learning and the ability to perform under pressure.

With Jamie’s background in professional rugby, the sporting connection immediately resonated.

Sport teaches you that potential is only the starting point. Training has to be repeated when you’re tired, when progress feels slow and when nobody is watching. Performance on the day is usually the result of habits built over months or years.

The same principle applies in business.

In same-day logistics, customers often come to Today Team when something has already gone wrong or time is running out. They see the collection being arranged, the vehicle arriving and the delivery being completed. What they don’t necessarily see are the systems, communication and accumulated experience that allow the team to respond quickly and calmly.

Reliable performance is rarely created by one heroic moment. It comes from practising the basics, reviewing what happened and maintaining standards every day.

“Sport taught me that nobody gets better simply by talking about being better. You improve through repetition, feedback and putting the work in.

It’s the same in business. You can have plenty of potential, but it’s your habits and preparation that determine what happens when the pressure is on.

At Today Team, we want people to keep learning, asking questions and improving rather than assuming they’ve ever completely mastered the job.”

Talent may open a door, but sustained performance depends on what happens afterwards.

Unstoppable

Cynthia Kersey

Unstoppable brings together 45 stories of people who overcame setbacks and continued pursuing their goals, supported by a seven-step plan for turning ambition into action.

It would be easy to dismiss a book about perseverance as simple motivation, but the stories make a more practical point: setbacks are rarely a sign that the original goal was wrong.

Sometimes the route towards it simply has to change.

That idea has obvious relevance to Jamie’s own story. His original ambition was to build a career in professional rugby. When a serious knee injury ended that path, he had to find a new source of purpose and challenge.

Starting a courier company wasn’t part of a long-established plan.He had no previous experience of running a business and had to learn sales, customer service, finance, recruitment, marketing and operations as the company developed. He has since described that hands-on education as one of the most valuable parts of his journey.

There have been plenty of further obstacles along the way. Economic downturns, rising costs, operational pressures and the disruption of Covid have all demanded changes in direction.

Being unstoppable doesn’t mean pretending those difficulties aren’t real. It means facing them, adjusting and continuing to move.

“Resilience isn’t about charging ahead regardless of what’s happening around you. Sometimes you have to stop, look honestly at the situation and change the plan.

My rugby career ending felt like everything I had worked towards had disappeared. Looking back, it forced me onto a different path and gave me a new challenge. Unstoppable is a reminder that a setback can change your direction without deciding your destination.”

For founders in particular, that ability to absorb a setback without allowing it to define the whole journey is essential.

How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson: The Business of Winning and Managing Success

Professor Damian Hughes

Jamie may be a rugby man, but he has always been interested in the leadership of Sir Alex Ferguson.

Ferguson’s success wasn’t simply about understanding football. It came from building teams, setting standards, managing different personalities and continuing to evolve over more than two decades at the highest level.

Professor Damian Hughes turns that record into ten practical lessons for leadership and business. The book looks at subjects including people management, confidence, mindset, visualisation and embracing change.

Perhaps the most valuable theme is contained in the subtitle: winning and managing success.

Achieving a strong result once is one challenge. Creating the environment in which good results can be repeated is another entirely.

As a company grows, the team that helped it reach one stage may need to develop new skills for the next. Leaders have to maintain clear standards while recognising that different people respond to different forms of support, responsibility and motivation.

They also have to know when to make changes. Ferguson repeatedly rebuilt successful teams rather than waiting for performance to decline. That willingness to evolve is just as relevant in business, where yesterday’s processes and structures won’t necessarily support tomorrow’s ambitions.

“What interests me about Sir Alex Ferguson is the length of time he remained successful. He didn’t build one winning team and leave it at that. He kept developing people, adapting and rebuilding while protecting the standards expected throughout the organisation.

For me, that’s the real test of leadership. It isn’t about being the loudest person in the room or having every answer yourself. It’s about creating clarity, getting the best from different people and making difficult decisions early enough.”

Whether you support Manchester United or couldn’t care less about football, the lessons on people and performance translate well beyond sport.

What’s on your reading list?

No business book provides every answer.

What a good one can do is make you look at a familiar problem differently, challenge an assumption or give you a useful question to take back into the business.

These four books have stayed with Jamie because their lessons can be applied in practice: build a company that doesn’t depend entirely on its founder, keep working at the fundamentals, remain resilient when plans change and create a team capable of sustaining success.

That should provide enough thinking material for a week beside the pool.

Love logistics, but not loving your current role?

We’re growing, so if you know logistics, enjoy solving problems and feel ready for a fresh opportunity, we’d like to hear from you.

Today Team is a fast-moving same day courier and logistics business based in Warrington, supporting businesses across the UK with urgent, time-critical deliveries.

Since 2005, Today Team has grown from one leased van into a trusted same day courier and logistics provider. That growth has come from high standards, clear communication and a team that cares about doing the job properly.

We’re not looking for people who just want to clock in and coast.

We’re looking for people who take pride in their work, keep their word and understand how important good service is when customers are relying on you.

Open to a conversation?