A super practical guide to building a successful business by spending ninety minutes a day on the stuff that really matters. Have you got a brilliant business idea, but are not sure how to find the time to start making it a reality? Or perhaps you have your dream up and running but you need help to grow?
Join best-selling author and multi-award winning entrepreneur, Nigel Botterill, and his co-author Martin Gladdish, as they explore the history, wisdom and uncanny natural phenomena that surrounds each 90 minute chunk of time that we live in and equip you with the tools to think big, grow fast and build your successful business in those 90–minute chunks!
Build Your Business in 90 Minutes A Day reveals lessons from the true stories of everyday entrepreneurs who dedicate 90 minutes a day to building their success. Woven amongst these inspirational tales are the remarkable accounts of world-changing events from English history, space and popular culture, that were determined in just 90 minutes. Amidst pages of startling science fact surrounding this magical number, you will learn just how powerful it can be when applied to your life. An hour and a half will never seem quite the same again.
Nigel has built eight separate million pound+ businesses from scratch and won a shed full of awards in the process. No one knows better than him what it takes to build big businesses fast!
Designed to be read in just 90 minutes (plus a few extra bits)
Packed with toolsto help youthink big, grow fast and builda successful business
A mixture of wisdom, teaching and success stories from Nigel Botterill and the entrepreneurs he has helped
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Build Your Business In 90 Minutes A Day an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Build Your Business In 90 Minutes A Day by Nigel Botterill, Martin Gladdish in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Entrepreneurship. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
PART ONE The Start, the Science and Seven Stories of Success…
HOW IT ALL STARTED
It was a B-I-G step when I started out in business on my own in January 2003. No one in my family had ever been an entrepreneur. We were police officers, carpenters, Methodist ministers or dinner ladies.
I was 36 when I launched my company. For 20 years prior to that I'd forged what could be described as a successful corporate career – firstly with Barclays, then with John Caudwell at Phones4U and finally at CPP in York.
I'll never forget my first morning as an entrepreneur. My wife Sue had taken our three children off to school and I had commuted the 15 stairs to the back bedroom – home of my new empire. With the house completely silent, the first thought that struck me was, ‘What have I done?’
You see, we had a nice life. Nice cars, nice house, nice holidays. I'd earned a big six-figure salary with chunky bonuses – and I was putting it all on the line to pursue the ‘dream’ of building my own consultancy business. The responsibility weighed heavily on my shoulders that day – as it still does today – but it fired within me a determination to succeed. I wanted to prove to all the doubters who thought I was crazy to walk away from a ‘safe secure job’ that I could do this. To build something special. Something meaningful. Something big. To make a real difference in the world. I was aiming high.
Sue and I had a plan. Well, more of a target – with a deadline. We made a deal that I had to earn £100,000 for us (i.e. profit) in my first year in order to keep the business. If I succeeded, I'd carry on. If I failed, I'd get a job whilst I was still employable. I was blissfully ignorant of what it would take to earn £100k profit – which was undoubtedly a good thing.
So, we remortgaged our house (something relatively easy to do back then) and freed up some capital that we could live off for a few months whilst I built our fortune.
And I got off to a pretty good start.
I was smart enough in those early days to recognize that my biggest weakness was that everything I'd learned in corporate life – which had helped me to succeed in climbing the greasy pole – was of no use whatsoever when it comes to running your own business. So I looked around for help. I knew that I wasn't the first person to make this transition, so I set out to find people who had made the journey before and who could help me.
One such gentleman was named Martin Howey. He used to come round to my house every couple of weeks and give me the benefit of his wisdom and expertise. I guess you could call it mentoring – but we never did.
Three months in to my new venture, Martin was sitting in my lounge with a cup of tea when he asked me: ‘What's the most important thing you’ve got to do for this business of yours to succeed?'
Now, that's one of those awful questions, and I flip-flopped around a bit before settling on my answer of ‘getting and keeping customers’. I said: ‘If I get and keep enough customers then one way or the other, everything else will get taken care of.’
‘I think you’re right,' said Martin.
Phew, I thought.
‘So when are you getting and keeping customers today then?’
I looked puzzled. I'd had a busy morning, doing work for clients, handling some inbound calls, opening the post, going to the bank, processing some invoices. I hadn't had any time to ‘get and keep clients’.
‘But surely,’ said Martin, ‘any sane sensible person, once they understood what the single most important thing for their business was – especially when it's the most important thing in your life right now, which I know it is – would have some time set aside each day to do that single most important thing?’
I felt a twit. I mean, properly stupid.
He was right, of course. I had very big plans. I was driven and determined to succeed. But after just three months as an entrepreneur, I'd become consumed by the ‘busyness’ of the day-to-day and lost sight of the critical actions I needed to take daily if I was to achieve my goals.
So, stung into action by Martin's hugely impactful insight, I began a habit the very next day – one that has stayed with me ever since.
I'm a morning person. I'm at my most productive and sharpest the minute I get out of bed and my productivity slides gradually into oblivion as the day goes on. By the evening my capacity to do good work has virtually disappeared. So, the very next morning I went upstairs to my office and for the first 90 minutes I didn't open emails or do work for clients – I focused, first thing, on doing some of the things that would make my business more successful.
And 12 years on I still do that every single day.
In between times my team and I have built nine separate million-pound businesses right here in the UK. We've won armfuls of awards – including some of the most prestigious available – and if you were to look back at how we've done it, you'd find that we've built them all in 90-minute chunks.
90 minutes every morning
I usually get to the office around 7:30am and I work, uninterrupted and uninterruptible, in the perfect environment for me. I concentrate for 90 minutes every morning on the things that will make my business more successful – that will get and keep customers. There are many examples of these activities sprinkled generously amidst the stories in this book, with a list of the key ones, which I use in my daily 90-minute sessions, right at the end.
This means that I can emerge, blinking into the sun(!), at around 9/9:15am and face whatever the day throws at me – because I've done the single most important thing.
And that's what this book is all about.
I've never been secretive or shy about sharing this daily discipline to which I attribute such a lot of our success. And it turns out that lots of other entrepreneurs and business owners have enjoyed similar successes once they've embraced the habit.
It was another Martin, Martin Gladdish, who originally had the idea for this book. Having listened to me tell my story and embraced the lessons himself, he believed that more people should know about 90-minute chunks and the difference they can make. So off he went to work on uncovering scientific research that explains why 90 minutes is so important. Then he researched some incredible stories from history of how 90-minute chunks have genuinely changed the world. Then he persuaded me to map out exactly what I do in my 90 minutes, how I think about those sessions and the ingredients necessary to ensure that they make the most impact. Finally, he wrote a note for me to send to all the members of my Entrepreneur's Circle asking them for their stories about how 90-minute chunks had helped them. Nothing prepared me for the scale of their response – or the difference that it had made. Some of the hundreds of stories we received are interwoven into these pages. I hope you'll find them helpful as well as interesting and perhaps inspiring.
As with so many things in life, the principle of 90 minutes is very simple.
Getting it right and using 90-minute chunks to totally transform your business and your lifestyle needs some proper thought and effective implementation. But I promise you it's possible and within relatively easy reach.
Simply read on, and you'll see how.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF A GREAT NATION BUILT IN 90-MINUTE CHUNKS
Some 200 years before ‘1066 and all that’, the nation that we know today as Great Britain was being planned, presided over and fought for by the only English monarch to ever be given the title ‘The Great’. And he did it by meticulously segregating his day into small chunks of time.
Alfred the Great was born into the royal household in Wantage, Oxfordshire, in 849, the fifth son of Aethelwulf, King of Wessex. By the time he was made king in 871, he had already forged a reputation as a great warrior and administrator (think of him as an early Vladimir Putin), fighting off the invading Great Heathen Army and assisting his older brothers in their kingships.
Alfred's regal reputation, and the reason for his grandiose title, will always be associated with his military brilliance, totally restructuring the country's legal system, his commitment to education and his selfless efforts to improve his people's quality of life (perhaps not so Vladimir Putin after all).
The first ever 90-minute chunk timer
But it is the secret of how Alfred managed to achieve so much during his 28-year reign – and how he was able to l...
