Double Double - How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less

WOW! Hard to believe I'm the only one who didn't give this book 5 stars.

The book is not a How To ... like the subtitle suggests. It does have some useful ideas about various aspects of business (vision, communication, hiring, metrics), though none of them are ground breaking. But what disappointed was the lack of a coherent process as the title indicated. His only process is to create a vision for where your company should be in 3 years then start working on all these other aspects - but he doesn't give any way to prioritize or structure the process. I suspect he does this better in his one-on-one consulting which this book seems designed to promote.

In addition, most of the advice seems to be geared toward small companies - ie those without an HR person - despite his stories of coaching at very large companies.

The marketing and PR sections also seem slanted toward consumer oriented companies rather than B2B.

He relies heavily on his experience with 1-800-GOTJUNK and College Pro Painters. The latter company is not that well regarded in my experience and I thought the former company was until I read a piece in this book where revenue fell because they ran out of franchises to sell. It occurs to me that a franchise company that makes most of it's money from selling franchises rather than the royalty of selling products or services is probably asking to be a flash in the pan. Good thing Herold got out when he did.

You'll probably get some good ideas reading this book - but if you read a lot of business books you'll have seen many (maybe all) of the ideas in other places. Just don't expect it to be a step by step recipe.