This is such a great leadership book! Jeff Morrill has written Profit Wise: How to Make Money in Business by Doing the Right Thing from a lifetime of doing the right thing. As the co-founder of Planet Subaru near Boston, he learned while building a successful car dealership. From there he has started many other businesses, generating millions of dollars in revenue every year. If you are looking for an excellent book on how to do the right thing in business and leadership, this is it.
Whenever an author uses the word “Business” in the title, it is going to be listed with other business titles. I actually felt that this book was more about leadership than about the nuts and bolts of starting and running a business. As a leadership book, I actually believe it will have a much broader audience than just those who are looking for guidance in starting a business or taking their existing one to the next level.
One of the reasons that Morrill’s book resonated so much with me was because the leadership principles that he espouses in Profit Wise are those that I have tried to incorporate in my own life. As a career police officer to now serving in a volunteer capacity at a medium-sized church, I have found that knowing how lead and manage other people the right way never goes out of style.
For example, Chapter Two is “Defining Reality.” Morrill writes that “Defining reality is telling the story of why your company exists, what you try to accomplish, how you go about doing it, and who does the work.” This “Why are we here?” question is Leadership 101. Any leader of any organization who can’t define reality is destined for a very short career!
In Chapter Four, he discusses “Leading the Team.” The author focuses on Character and Skills. While too many companies elevate job skills above all else, Morrill understands that character is actually more important when it comes to building our team. Of course technical and job skills are important but if we hire that talented person who doesn’t have the right character, we are setting our company up for a failure.
As a manager in the police department, I occasionally got the opportunity to add personnel to some of the units that I oversaw. Whenever possible, I went after younger, less experienced officers, but who had the character and values that I was looking for. I found that it was easier to teach them what needed to be done and they had fewer bad habits to correct.
In the chapter entitled, “Making Decisions and Solving Problems,” Jeff leans into one of the other important aspects of leadership. There is nothing worse than working for that leader who doesn’t know how to make a decision. By the very nature of their position, leaders make decisions. Sadly, in many organizations this ability to be decisive is not taken into account during the promotional process. This often causes serious problems for the company and incredible frustration for the team members. Morrill provides some tried and true steps to help the reader make better decisions.
There is plenty more leadership gold in Profit Wise: How to Make More Money in Business by Doing the Right Thing. There are some excellent business insights in these pages, as well. The book is an easy read at a little over a hundred pages and well worth the price. Click on the link to read a free chapter and see if this might be exactly what you need to read next
