Reading is key to having new ideas to fuel the expansion of your business. I currently have 30+ unread business books that I’m slogging through, many of which have provided me terrific ideas to utilize in my business. Sometimes I come across a book that I feel is worth mentioning on this blog, and having read Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan I can happily say that this is one of those books.

The book is all about the dream of many small business owners - bagging that large corporate customer that will provide steady revenue and skyrocket the growth of the company. Through 200 well-written pages Kaplan presents a practical plan for doing just that. He demystifies the process involved from start to finish in a blueprint that any small business owner can follow, spelling out the big and small points of interacting with a giant company and its bureaucracy.

What really sold me on this book and the techniques inside is the practical approach it takes. Kaplan has bagged his own elephants, with the first ever being Proctor & Gamble. He draws on this experience heavily within the book, with the Proctor and Gamble account being the focal example as Kaplan lays out his plan. In addition to the usual high level business recipes that business books love to provide, he shares indispensible tricks that he picked up along the way such as the time he got his status upgraded from supplier to contractor to get his own security badge (allowing him to setup and attend meetings far more easily than the competition).

It goes without saying that a truly large contract is a breakthrough for a company and properly managed it is the start of a truly booming business. This plan provides an amazing playbook to draw from to accomplish this and to do so without collapsing the company along the way. Kaplan makes sure to cover how to manage the relationship and the critical mistakes people make that could cause the deal to destroy them. Everything within the book is highly readable too, making it one of the scarce non-fiction books that are hard to put down.

I highly recommend picking this title up as I can’t imagine any business owner not being able to learn a significant amount from it, whether you are eyeing your first elephant or are looking to expand your impressive client list.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under Books, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Business Strategy, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.