People ask me all the time how I write books. The honest answer is that I do not start by writing. I start by reading. Every book I have published grew out of years of absorbing other people's thinking, arguing with it in the margins, testing it against my own experience, and eventually arriving at a perspective clear enough to put into a framework of my own.

I am not naming these books to create a reading list for its own sake. I am naming them because understanding what shaped my thinking is the fastest way to understand why my books are structured the way they are. These are the books that were on my desk, on my nightstand, and open in a second browser window while I was building the arguments in Buying Wealth, Creative Acquisitions, The 7 Minute Phone Call, and Built to Run.

The Books Behind Buying Wealth

Writing about real estate acquisition required me to think clearly about a subject where most of the popular literature is either deeply academic or borderline promotional. I needed frameworks that were honest about risk and honest about how wealth actually compounds over time, not how it looks in a best-case spreadsheet.

The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller gave me a useful baseline for thinking about systematic acquisition. Keller's framework for defining investment criteria before you start looking was something I expanded on significantly in Buying Wealth, particularly in the chapters on setting acquisition parameters and building a repeatable deal funnel. I do not agree with every assumption Keller makes about market conditions, but the underlying discipline of knowing your numbers before you fall in love with a property is exactly right.

Real Estate Finance and Investments by Brueggeman and Fisher is not a beach read. It is a textbook, and I used it like one. When I was building the due diligence frameworks and the financial modeling sections of Buying Wealth, I kept going back to Brueggeman and Fisher to make sure the mechanics were sound. The popularized version of real estate math that circulates in seminars and podcasts often skips the parts that matter most when a deal goes sideways. This book does not skip anything.

The Art of the Deal Flow thinking, broadly, comes from studying how private equity firms source and evaluate investments at scale and then asking how much of that thinking translates to individual buyers operating with far less capital and fewer resources. The answer is: more than you would expect. The discipline of pipeline thinking, of always having the next three deals in various stages of evaluation rather than going all-in on one, directly influenced the chapter on building a sustainable acquisition practice in Buying Wealth.

The Books Behind Creative Acquisitions

Creative Acquisitions is the book I wanted most to get right, because the subject matter has an unusually high density of bad information in circulation. Seller financing, business buying, creative deal structures, these are topics where the advice ranges from genuinely useful to outright dangerous, and the dangerous advice often sounds more exciting than the useful kind.

Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel was important to me not because I agree with all of it but because Deibel made a serious, systematic argument for why buying an existing business is often a better path than starting from scratch. I had been making this argument in conversations for years. Reading Deibel helped me sharpen the counterarguments I needed to anticipate and pushed me to be more specific about which buyers, in which situations, with which capital positions, actually benefit from acquisition versus startup. That specificity is throughout Creative Acquisitions.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Other Restructuring Activities by Donald DePamphilis is another textbook, and again I used it that way. The deal structure chapters of Creative Acquisitions, specifically the sections on earnouts, seller notes, and working capital adjustments, were written after extensive time with DePamphilis. Most business buyers never encounter this material until they are already in a deal they do not fully understand. I wanted to give readers enough background to know the questions to ask before they signed anything.

I also spent a meaningful amount of time with HBR case studies on small business acquisitions, particularly the ones that went wrong. There is more to learn from failed acquisitions than successful ones, because the successful ones can be explained by luck in retrospect. The failures are almost always traceable to specific, avoidable decisions. That pattern thinking is embedded throughout the risk evaluation sections of the book.

The Books Behind The 7 Minute Phone Call

This was the most personal book for me to write, because prospecting is the skill I built from scratch without a lot of formal guidance. I learned it through repetition and through studying people who were dramatically better at it than I was. The reading I did while writing The 7 Minute Phone Call was less about finding the framework and more about finding the language to describe something I had been doing intuitively for years.

To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink reset my thinking about what selling actually is. Pink's argument that we are all in the business of moving people, that persuasion is a universal human activity rather than something that belongs exclusively to salespeople, gave me the philosophical grounding I needed to write honestly about prospecting without making it sound manipulative. The phone call framework I built is not about manipulation. It is about earning the right to a conversation. Pink's framing helped me say that clearly.

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff influenced how I think about the opening thirty seconds of a call, which I have argued elsewhere is where most prospecting calls are won or lost. Klaff's framing concept, the idea that the way you position the conversation before you say anything substantive determines how everything you say afterward is received, is something I built into the permission-based opening structure of The 7 Minute Phone Call.

The Challenger Sale by Dixon and Adamson pushed back on my assumptions about relationship-building as a primary sales strategy in a useful way. The research they cite suggests that the most effective salespeople lead with insight rather than rapport, that they teach prospects something before they pitch anything. The version of this I adapted for prospecting calls is the relevance question I describe in the book: before you ask for anything, demonstrate that you have thought specifically about the person you are calling and why this call might matter to them.

The Books Behind Built to Run

Built to Run was the hardest book to write because I had to be honest about mistakes I made in my own businesses before I understood how to build systems that worked without constant owner intervention. Reading while writing this one felt less like research and more like therapy.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is the obvious starting point for anyone thinking about business systems, and I want to be clear that I put it on this list not because it is commonly cited but because it genuinely changed how I thought about the role of the owner. Gerber's technician-manager-entrepreneur framework is simple enough to sound dismissible and accurate enough that most business owners I know have recognized themselves in it immediately upon reading it. The chapter in Built to Run on the owner's job description came directly out of the questions Gerber forced me to answer about what I was actually doing versus what I should have been delegating.

Traction by Gino Wickman and the broader EOS framework gave me a useful vocabulary for organizational structure, particularly the concept of the integrator and the distinction between vision and implementation. I do not prescribe EOS specifically in Built to Run because not every business needs the full system, but the underlying principles about how accountability flows through an organization are woven into the operational chapters throughout the book.

Good to Great by Jim Collins is twenty-five years old and still the most honest large-scale research project I know of on what actually separates companies that sustain performance from companies that flame out. The hedgehog concept and the flywheel metaphor both influenced how I wrote about sustainable business models in Built to Run, specifically the sections on choosing what your business should and should not be good at before you try to scale anything.

The Principle Behind the List

If there is a common thread across everything I read while writing these four books, it is this: I was looking for work that was honest about difficulty. The best business books I have read do not promise shortcuts. They describe the actual shape of the challenge and then give you a framework for navigating it more intelligently than you would have otherwise.

That is what I tried to do in my own books. Not to simplify, but to clarify. The acquisition process is genuinely complex. Prospecting is genuinely hard. Building a business that runs without you requires genuinely uncomfortable changes to how you work. The reading list above is full of people who understood that and wrote honestly about it anyway. I tried to do the same.

If you want to dig into the frameworks themselves, each book has its own page on this site. You can start with whichever challenge is most pressing for you right now: real estate acquisitions, buying businesses, prospecting and sales, or building operational systems. More on the author journey and the thinking behind the books at drconnorrobertson.com.

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