What do you think?
Rate this book
Two Extra Steps: The Unfair Edge Anyone Can Use
Not yet published
Expected 9 Jun 26You don't need to do it all. You just need to do what others won’t.
Discover a no-nonsense strategy for builders, doers, entrepreneurs, and high-performers who are done settling for mediocre results.
Most businesses never create real separation from the competition. Why? Because most stop where everyone else stops. They stop at “good enough.” They stop at what’s expected. They stop at what’s easy.
But the top 1%? They think differently. They act differently. They go further than everyone else is willing to go. They take the Two Extra Steps.
Created by serial entrepreneur Bill Faeth, this framework is built on the real-world lessons of scaling 37 companies and building a $22M short-term rental portfolio from the ground up.
Step 1: The Mindset This is where separation begins—in how you think, decide, and show up. It’s the inner game that turns amateurs into professionals. It’s where you build the clarity and focus that drive real results. It’s where you master the boring foundations others skip. It’s also where you set a standard so high, most won’t reach it . . . and even fewer can sustain it. Step 2: The Execution This is the outer game where standards become results. It’s where you do the hard, repetitive, unglamorous work others avoid. This is where you show up when others check out and where consistency becomes your competitive edge. Here, discipline replaces motivation and follow-through becomes your default. Execution isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what others won’t, longer than they can. Two Extra Steps gives you the clearest possible path to stand out, scale up, and own your space—without overcomplicating it.
Discover a no-nonsense strategy for builders, doers, entrepreneurs, and high-performers who are done settling for mediocre results.
Most businesses never create real separation from the competition. Why? Because most stop where everyone else stops. They stop at “good enough.” They stop at what’s expected. They stop at what’s easy.
But the top 1%? They think differently. They act differently. They go further than everyone else is willing to go. They take the Two Extra Steps.
Created by serial entrepreneur Bill Faeth, this framework is built on the real-world lessons of scaling 37 companies and building a $22M short-term rental portfolio from the ground up.
Step 1: The Mindset This is where separation begins—in how you think, decide, and show up. It’s the inner game that turns amateurs into professionals. It’s where you build the clarity and focus that drive real results. It’s where you master the boring foundations others skip. It’s also where you set a standard so high, most won’t reach it . . . and even fewer can sustain it. Step 2: The Execution This is the outer game where standards become results. It’s where you do the hard, repetitive, unglamorous work others avoid. This is where you show up when others check out and where consistency becomes your competitive edge. Here, discipline replaces motivation and follow-through becomes your default. Execution isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what others won’t, longer than they can. Two Extra Steps gives you the clearest possible path to stand out, scale up, and own your space—without overcomplicating it.
240 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication June 9, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Unfair Edge of Exactness
Bill Faeth’s “Two Extra Steps” is most persuasive when it replaces the mythology of more with the discipline of seeing the buyer, the margin, the handoff, and the exit clearly
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 16th, 2026
“Two Extra Steps” is a book that thinks it is about effort, and is better when it is about eyesight. Bill Faeth’s formula is clean enough to fit on a wristband, a coffee mug, or the inside of a founder’s eyelids at 4:37 a.m.: think what others don’t, do what others won’t.
At full volume, the book is a no-excuses sermon against average. When it earns its keep, it becomes something sharper and less inflatable: a manual for making the blurry parts of a founder-run business impossible to ignore.
In July 1989, sixteen-year-old Faeth shoots a 71 at the Long Beach Junior Match Play Championship, his first under-par round in a major junior event. For a moment, he leads the field. His mother, too nervous to watch, emerges from the pro shop smelling of Marlboro Menthols and relief. Then a younger, scrawnier kid named Eldrick Woods collapses from heat exhaustion, gets back up, sinks his putt, and posts a 64. The humiliation is not just the number. It is what follows. Earl Woods does not treat the round as a coronation. He turns lunch into a clinic, then sends Tiger to the range, the bunker, and the putting green for more work, including hundreds of five-footers after a round that had already erased the field.
That scene is the image the book keeps trying to live up to, and also its best defense against its own slogan. The obvious lesson is that winners keep working after everyone else goes home. Faeth believes that with every cell of his entrepreneurial body. But the deeper lesson is more exacting. Earl is not saying “practice more” in the abstract. He is asking about the third hole, the approach shots, the visualization, the missed short putt. The difference is not just exertion. It is attention under pressure.
From there, “Two Extra Steps” climbs out of the golf memory and into an owner’s ladder from buyer to exit. Faeth defines the two steps as thinking what others do not and doing what others will not, then applies that doctrine to buyer personas, saturation, differentiation, pricing, marketing, sales ladders, sales-and-marketing alignment, customer service, growth, leadership, pivoting, life planning, exit strategy, and personal productivity. A thinner version could have been a seventeen-chapter drum solo on “try harder.” This one is more useful than that. It keeps asking a more commercial, more embarrassing question: where, exactly, has the business stopped looking?
The structure turns the slogan into a route. Buyer clarity leads to differentiation. Differentiation creates margin room. Better pricing needs marketing that sells outcomes rather than features. Marketing has to meet a sales process that lets buyers move at their own pace. Service has to turn the sale into loyalty. Growth has to be profitable, not merely loud. Leadership has to make the company less dependent on the founder’s adrenaline. Exit planning has to turn the whole operation into something another person can inspect, trust, and run. That sequence gives the book ballast its title does not quite promise.
Its most useful sleight of hand is making vagueness feel expensive. In one persuasive early chapter, Faeth describes opening Wild Bill’s Texas Smokehouse in Taft, California. He and his wife build the restaurant around what they love: good barbecue, scratch sides, a fast-casual model, recipes studied in Texas. The food is not the problem. The buyer is. “Anyone who’s hungry,” Faeth notes, is not a buyer persona. It is a wish with a cash register. Once he studies the market, the real opportunity appears: weekday oil-field workers who need speed, consistency, and calories, and oil companies that need catering for meetings and events. The restaurant pivots toward faster lunch service, bulk orders, overnight preparation, and jobsite delivery. Catering becomes the bulk of revenue, and the business eventually exits successfully. The food did not become better. The business became less fogged.
Faeth is sharpest when he shows money leaking. A transportation company chases top-line revenue until he helps its founder fire a major client that is actually losing money. A short-term rental software company differentiates not by adding more SaaS glitter to the chandelier, but by giving overwhelmed hosts the templates, emails, landing pages, automations, and support they need to use the tool. A luxury transportation membership succeeds because the buyer is not really buying a ride; the buyer is buying access, convenience, priority, and status without waiting on hold like a civilian. A personal welcome call reduces churn because a customer handed off to a department is not the same as a customer welcomed into a relationship.
The service chapter is where the book’s pulse steadies. Faeth recalls returning to the Four Seasons in Boston after years away and being greeted by name because the staff had reviewed guest records and recognized him as he arrived. He adapts this lesson at Silver Oak Transportation, training chauffeurs to research clients in advance and greet them personally rather than stand around with a limp paper sign. In another anecdote, he wins business from Asurion by turning a vendor event into a memorable experience with elf costumes, Santa photos, and an “Executive for a Day” service that lets travel managers experience the treatment they are booking for others. These details could sound gimmicky in summary, and some are admittedly one candy cane away from carnival. But Faeth’s point is sober: customer service is not what happens after value has been created. It is value creation.
On the shelf, the book belongs near Michael E. Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited,” Will Guidara’s “Unreasonable Hospitality,” and Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers,” though Faeth is less parabolic than Gerber, less graceful than Guidara, and less narrowly offer-obsessed than Hormozi. His lane is more gravelly: part founder confession, part sales-room training, part service playbook, part premium-pricing pep talk. He likes clean systems, but he likes a good close more. He wants the phone answered in two rings and the EBITDA ready for inspection. He wants you to know your buyer’s favorite drink, their fears, their platform habits, and the precise moment they are most likely to give you a credit card. He wants the business to have both a pulse and a dashboard.
The prose arrives in a coaching shirt, stopwatch in hand. Faeth writes in short, emphatic bursts: problem, correction, story, lesson, framework, action. His diction is plain, commercial, and forceful: average, premium, super, leverage, friction, pain, outcome, clarity, execution. He favors binaries: features versus outcomes, price versus value, middle lane versus fast lane, vague category versus real buyer, hobbyist versus professional. The sentences do not shimmer; they clock in.
The speed helps. It also costs. Faeth does not trust implication when a second, third, and fourth repetition are available. He often states the lesson, dramatizes it, restates it, and then closes with a contrast between what “your competition” does and what “you will” do. For a reader using the book as a practical checklist, the drumbeat may be welcome. For a reader attuned to style, it can feel like being sold the same set of steak knives by a man who has already successfully cut through the shoe. The best examples do not need so much escorting. The pink vans of the glass company, the 456-page SOP manual, the personal Airbnb welcome video, the unprofitable client fired despite impressive revenue, the owner who comes to the table after a botched steak – these images carry the argument more elegantly than the surrounding insistence that average is death.
The book is less sure-footed when operator sense gets drowned out by the brass section. The 99-percent-versus-1-percent framing will motivate some readers and narrow the room for others. Not every market ceiling is low because the owner lacked courage. Not every customer wants, needs, or can afford a higher-priced version of the product. Not every problem can be solved by differentiation, and not every constraint is an excuse in a cheaper suit. Faeth knows how to push; he is less interested in when pressure should become restraint.
A sharper unease follows in the conversion advice. Faeth is commercially alert on urgency, scarcity, pain amplification, decision authority, and pattern interrupts. These tools are not automatically suspect; they can be used responsibly. Still, “Two Extra Steps” is more interested in what converts than in where conversion becomes pressure. Its service chapters know that customers want to be respected. Its sales chapters occasionally risk treating them as momentum with wallets. That tension does not sink the book, but it deserves to stay visible, like a service charge printed in very small type.
The book feels most of the moment when it refuses to mistake revenue for health. In a small-business climate defined by margin pressure, expensive acquisition, impatient customers, and owner fatigue, Faeth’s insistence on profitability over vanity growth feels timely without straining for relevance. He is very good on the difference between a busy business and a healthy one. The chapter on exit strategy gives the book its adult supervision. A company without clean books, documented processes, trained management, quality controls, and a model that can run without the founder is not fully an asset. It may be income. It may be identity. It may even be a heroic amount of work wrapped in a logo. But it is not yet fully sellable.
That chapter quietly revises the bargain the book seemed to be making. The “extra steps” are not always dramatic. They are often boring, adult, and unphotogenic: update the financials, document the workflow, train the role on video, stop letting the founder’s brain serve as the filing cabinet, build the company so someone else can understand it. The 456-page SOP manual Faeth describes may be the book’s least glamorous and most revealing image. Here, the unfair advantage is not a fist pump. It is paperwork with a pulse.
Late in the book, the life-planning and personal-productivity chapters complicate the opening gospel of outworking everyone. Faeth admits that he once went five and a half years without a vacation, sacrificing health, marriage, energy, and time with his daughter while telling himself he was doing it for his family. The book is more honest when it admits that relentless ambition can become bad math: more revenue, less life; more motion, less meaning. His proposed alternative is not work-life balance, which he treats as too tidy, but integration: business, finances, marriage, family, hobbies, grief planning, and legacy designed to serve one another. Not every reader will thrill to the details of his morning routine, with its supplements, sauna, and protected predawn hours. A little red light therapy goes a long way on the page. But the underlying point is sound: if the business requires constant emergency from its owner, the business has not made the owner free. It has merely changed the lock.
The ending returns to the range, but the book has already made its best shot. Chapter 17 sends the reader back to Tiger Woods, the putt, and the unfinished work after the triumph. Formally, the return works. Intellectually, the true landing comes earlier, in the combined force of the exit and productivity chapters: the test of the Two Extra Steps is not whether the founder can push harder forever, but whether the founder can build something clear enough, profitable enough, documented enough, and personally aligned enough that the founder no longer has to stand in every doorway.
That is why the title, with its little gym-bag confidence, slightly misdirects. “Two Extra Steps” sounds like a book about more: more effort, more intensity, more grind, more after-hours sweat on the range. Sometimes it is. But the sharper book inside the book is about less of the wrong thing: less guesswork, less vanity revenue, less feature-chatter, less friction, less founder bottleneck, less service indifference, less calendar chaos, less business trapped in the owner’s skull.
I would rate “Two Extra Steps” 79/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 3/5 stars. That score reflects a book that is genuinely useful, often sharp, and alive to the mechanics of selling, but held back by repetition, over-amplification, and too little patience around the pressure lines of sales psychology and premium positioning.
A book need not be banished for bringing a bullhorn, though one may occasionally wish it would set the thing down. Faeth has written a practical book with a salesman’s lungs and an operator’s eye. The lungs can tire you. The eye notices what many business books skate past. His most durable advice is not to become a business superhero, though he sometimes speaks as if issuing capes at the door. It is to look where average businesses prefer not to look: at the buyer they have not defined, the price they have not tested, the customer they have not recognized, the process they have not written down, the revenue that is not profit, the calendar that is eating the owner alive.
The boy on the golf course thought he had reached the top of the leaderboard. Then Tiger Woods collapsed, got up, made the putt, and went back to work. Faeth returns to that moment as a lesson in exceptional effort. The better lesson is quieter. After the round is over, the real work is not merely to hit more balls. It is to know exactly which putt you missed, why it mattered, and whether you are willing to stand there long enough to stop missing it.
Bill Faeth’s “Two Extra Steps” is most persuasive when it replaces the mythology of more with the discipline of seeing the buyer, the margin, the handoff, and the exit clearly
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 16th, 2026
“Two Extra Steps” is a book that thinks it is about effort, and is better when it is about eyesight. Bill Faeth’s formula is clean enough to fit on a wristband, a coffee mug, or the inside of a founder’s eyelids at 4:37 a.m.: think what others don’t, do what others won’t.
At full volume, the book is a no-excuses sermon against average. When it earns its keep, it becomes something sharper and less inflatable: a manual for making the blurry parts of a founder-run business impossible to ignore.
In July 1989, sixteen-year-old Faeth shoots a 71 at the Long Beach Junior Match Play Championship, his first under-par round in a major junior event. For a moment, he leads the field. His mother, too nervous to watch, emerges from the pro shop smelling of Marlboro Menthols and relief. Then a younger, scrawnier kid named Eldrick Woods collapses from heat exhaustion, gets back up, sinks his putt, and posts a 64. The humiliation is not just the number. It is what follows. Earl Woods does not treat the round as a coronation. He turns lunch into a clinic, then sends Tiger to the range, the bunker, and the putting green for more work, including hundreds of five-footers after a round that had already erased the field.
That scene is the image the book keeps trying to live up to, and also its best defense against its own slogan. The obvious lesson is that winners keep working after everyone else goes home. Faeth believes that with every cell of his entrepreneurial body. But the deeper lesson is more exacting. Earl is not saying “practice more” in the abstract. He is asking about the third hole, the approach shots, the visualization, the missed short putt. The difference is not just exertion. It is attention under pressure.
From there, “Two Extra Steps” climbs out of the golf memory and into an owner’s ladder from buyer to exit. Faeth defines the two steps as thinking what others do not and doing what others will not, then applies that doctrine to buyer personas, saturation, differentiation, pricing, marketing, sales ladders, sales-and-marketing alignment, customer service, growth, leadership, pivoting, life planning, exit strategy, and personal productivity. A thinner version could have been a seventeen-chapter drum solo on “try harder.” This one is more useful than that. It keeps asking a more commercial, more embarrassing question: where, exactly, has the business stopped looking?
The structure turns the slogan into a route. Buyer clarity leads to differentiation. Differentiation creates margin room. Better pricing needs marketing that sells outcomes rather than features. Marketing has to meet a sales process that lets buyers move at their own pace. Service has to turn the sale into loyalty. Growth has to be profitable, not merely loud. Leadership has to make the company less dependent on the founder’s adrenaline. Exit planning has to turn the whole operation into something another person can inspect, trust, and run. That sequence gives the book ballast its title does not quite promise.
Its most useful sleight of hand is making vagueness feel expensive. In one persuasive early chapter, Faeth describes opening Wild Bill’s Texas Smokehouse in Taft, California. He and his wife build the restaurant around what they love: good barbecue, scratch sides, a fast-casual model, recipes studied in Texas. The food is not the problem. The buyer is. “Anyone who’s hungry,” Faeth notes, is not a buyer persona. It is a wish with a cash register. Once he studies the market, the real opportunity appears: weekday oil-field workers who need speed, consistency, and calories, and oil companies that need catering for meetings and events. The restaurant pivots toward faster lunch service, bulk orders, overnight preparation, and jobsite delivery. Catering becomes the bulk of revenue, and the business eventually exits successfully. The food did not become better. The business became less fogged.
Faeth is sharpest when he shows money leaking. A transportation company chases top-line revenue until he helps its founder fire a major client that is actually losing money. A short-term rental software company differentiates not by adding more SaaS glitter to the chandelier, but by giving overwhelmed hosts the templates, emails, landing pages, automations, and support they need to use the tool. A luxury transportation membership succeeds because the buyer is not really buying a ride; the buyer is buying access, convenience, priority, and status without waiting on hold like a civilian. A personal welcome call reduces churn because a customer handed off to a department is not the same as a customer welcomed into a relationship.
The service chapter is where the book’s pulse steadies. Faeth recalls returning to the Four Seasons in Boston after years away and being greeted by name because the staff had reviewed guest records and recognized him as he arrived. He adapts this lesson at Silver Oak Transportation, training chauffeurs to research clients in advance and greet them personally rather than stand around with a limp paper sign. In another anecdote, he wins business from Asurion by turning a vendor event into a memorable experience with elf costumes, Santa photos, and an “Executive for a Day” service that lets travel managers experience the treatment they are booking for others. These details could sound gimmicky in summary, and some are admittedly one candy cane away from carnival. But Faeth’s point is sober: customer service is not what happens after value has been created. It is value creation.
On the shelf, the book belongs near Michael E. Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited,” Will Guidara’s “Unreasonable Hospitality,” and Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers,” though Faeth is less parabolic than Gerber, less graceful than Guidara, and less narrowly offer-obsessed than Hormozi. His lane is more gravelly: part founder confession, part sales-room training, part service playbook, part premium-pricing pep talk. He likes clean systems, but he likes a good close more. He wants the phone answered in two rings and the EBITDA ready for inspection. He wants you to know your buyer’s favorite drink, their fears, their platform habits, and the precise moment they are most likely to give you a credit card. He wants the business to have both a pulse and a dashboard.
The prose arrives in a coaching shirt, stopwatch in hand. Faeth writes in short, emphatic bursts: problem, correction, story, lesson, framework, action. His diction is plain, commercial, and forceful: average, premium, super, leverage, friction, pain, outcome, clarity, execution. He favors binaries: features versus outcomes, price versus value, middle lane versus fast lane, vague category versus real buyer, hobbyist versus professional. The sentences do not shimmer; they clock in.
The speed helps. It also costs. Faeth does not trust implication when a second, third, and fourth repetition are available. He often states the lesson, dramatizes it, restates it, and then closes with a contrast between what “your competition” does and what “you will” do. For a reader using the book as a practical checklist, the drumbeat may be welcome. For a reader attuned to style, it can feel like being sold the same set of steak knives by a man who has already successfully cut through the shoe. The best examples do not need so much escorting. The pink vans of the glass company, the 456-page SOP manual, the personal Airbnb welcome video, the unprofitable client fired despite impressive revenue, the owner who comes to the table after a botched steak – these images carry the argument more elegantly than the surrounding insistence that average is death.
The book is less sure-footed when operator sense gets drowned out by the brass section. The 99-percent-versus-1-percent framing will motivate some readers and narrow the room for others. Not every market ceiling is low because the owner lacked courage. Not every customer wants, needs, or can afford a higher-priced version of the product. Not every problem can be solved by differentiation, and not every constraint is an excuse in a cheaper suit. Faeth knows how to push; he is less interested in when pressure should become restraint.
A sharper unease follows in the conversion advice. Faeth is commercially alert on urgency, scarcity, pain amplification, decision authority, and pattern interrupts. These tools are not automatically suspect; they can be used responsibly. Still, “Two Extra Steps” is more interested in what converts than in where conversion becomes pressure. Its service chapters know that customers want to be respected. Its sales chapters occasionally risk treating them as momentum with wallets. That tension does not sink the book, but it deserves to stay visible, like a service charge printed in very small type.
The book feels most of the moment when it refuses to mistake revenue for health. In a small-business climate defined by margin pressure, expensive acquisition, impatient customers, and owner fatigue, Faeth’s insistence on profitability over vanity growth feels timely without straining for relevance. He is very good on the difference between a busy business and a healthy one. The chapter on exit strategy gives the book its adult supervision. A company without clean books, documented processes, trained management, quality controls, and a model that can run without the founder is not fully an asset. It may be income. It may be identity. It may even be a heroic amount of work wrapped in a logo. But it is not yet fully sellable.
That chapter quietly revises the bargain the book seemed to be making. The “extra steps” are not always dramatic. They are often boring, adult, and unphotogenic: update the financials, document the workflow, train the role on video, stop letting the founder’s brain serve as the filing cabinet, build the company so someone else can understand it. The 456-page SOP manual Faeth describes may be the book’s least glamorous and most revealing image. Here, the unfair advantage is not a fist pump. It is paperwork with a pulse.
Late in the book, the life-planning and personal-productivity chapters complicate the opening gospel of outworking everyone. Faeth admits that he once went five and a half years without a vacation, sacrificing health, marriage, energy, and time with his daughter while telling himself he was doing it for his family. The book is more honest when it admits that relentless ambition can become bad math: more revenue, less life; more motion, less meaning. His proposed alternative is not work-life balance, which he treats as too tidy, but integration: business, finances, marriage, family, hobbies, grief planning, and legacy designed to serve one another. Not every reader will thrill to the details of his morning routine, with its supplements, sauna, and protected predawn hours. A little red light therapy goes a long way on the page. But the underlying point is sound: if the business requires constant emergency from its owner, the business has not made the owner free. It has merely changed the lock.
The ending returns to the range, but the book has already made its best shot. Chapter 17 sends the reader back to Tiger Woods, the putt, and the unfinished work after the triumph. Formally, the return works. Intellectually, the true landing comes earlier, in the combined force of the exit and productivity chapters: the test of the Two Extra Steps is not whether the founder can push harder forever, but whether the founder can build something clear enough, profitable enough, documented enough, and personally aligned enough that the founder no longer has to stand in every doorway.
That is why the title, with its little gym-bag confidence, slightly misdirects. “Two Extra Steps” sounds like a book about more: more effort, more intensity, more grind, more after-hours sweat on the range. Sometimes it is. But the sharper book inside the book is about less of the wrong thing: less guesswork, less vanity revenue, less feature-chatter, less friction, less founder bottleneck, less service indifference, less calendar chaos, less business trapped in the owner’s skull.
I would rate “Two Extra Steps” 79/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 3/5 stars. That score reflects a book that is genuinely useful, often sharp, and alive to the mechanics of selling, but held back by repetition, over-amplification, and too little patience around the pressure lines of sales psychology and premium positioning.
A book need not be banished for bringing a bullhorn, though one may occasionally wish it would set the thing down. Faeth has written a practical book with a salesman’s lungs and an operator’s eye. The lungs can tire you. The eye notices what many business books skate past. His most durable advice is not to become a business superhero, though he sometimes speaks as if issuing capes at the door. It is to look where average businesses prefer not to look: at the buyer they have not defined, the price they have not tested, the customer they have not recognized, the process they have not written down, the revenue that is not profit, the calendar that is eating the owner alive.
The boy on the golf course thought he had reached the top of the leaderboard. Then Tiger Woods collapsed, got up, made the putt, and went back to work. Faeth returns to that moment as a lesson in exceptional effort. The better lesson is quieter. After the round is over, the real work is not merely to hit more balls. It is to know exactly which putt you missed, why it mattered, and whether you are willing to stand there long enough to stop missing it.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Two Extra Steps should be required reading for all business and hospitality management majors: no fluff or pointless life stories, just incredible detail, excellent examples, how to identity problems, and work though the problem solving process. Faeth jumps right into the nuts and bolts of creating a business that will not only succeed, but last, wasting no time. He helps readers identify their specific customers in order to best build their specific and individualized company, then refines it throughout the course of the book touching on topics such as how to build a team, invest in intentionality, build pricing structures, and complete the "super graders framework" to assess how their business stacks up against competitors. And no, "smarketing" is not a typo! I suggest taking notes and actually working through this book like a workbook! Two Extra Steps will help anyone willing to actually put in the work grow and multiply tiny successes into meaningful wins both in and out of the business sphere, then help owners price their business wisely so they can retire or reinvest.
Faeth comes across as real, not like those fake TikTok financial gurus whose posts on social media just try to sell you their proprietary get-rich-quick tutorial. He gives you everything you need to know and bases it off a simple formula:
~ Think what others don't: identify a specific need and possible solutions.
~ Do what others won't: complete one (or two!) extra steps, be memorable, eliminate pinch points, etc.
On a side note, it was heartbreaking to hear of Tiger Wood's abusive childhood knowing the fruit it produced in his glamorous, yet drug addled, alcohol dependent, criminal adult life.
Thanks to BenBella Books and NetGalley for this ARC!
Faeth comes across as real, not like those fake TikTok financial gurus whose posts on social media just try to sell you their proprietary get-rich-quick tutorial. He gives you everything you need to know and bases it off a simple formula:
~ Think what others don't: identify a specific need and possible solutions.
~ Do what others won't: complete one (or two!) extra steps, be memorable, eliminate pinch points, etc.
On a side note, it was heartbreaking to hear of Tiger Wood's abusive childhood knowing the fruit it produced in his glamorous, yet drug addled, alcohol dependent, criminal adult life.
Thanks to BenBella Books and NetGalley for this ARC!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher Brilliance Publishing for this 3-star audio ARC. The premise of the book is that the people who succeed most in business are the ones who think more clearly and follow through longer than everyone else. Bill Faeth builds this around two parts—mindset and execution—arguing that success starts with how you think and then shows up in consistent, often unglamorous work. The book moves through common business areas like identifying your customer, pricing, marketing, sales, and customer service, tying them back to the idea of going a little further than competitors. What helps the book stand out are the real-life examples from Faeth’s own ventures and clients, which make the lessons easier to picture and apply. None of the ideas are especially new—it’s not groundbreaking to say you should design for your customer, promote your business clearly, or pay attention to competitors—but the practical stories give those ideas more weight. Overall, this reads like a summarization of an entire MBA program and won't appeal to new business owners, but those who are established and looking to expand.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book felt like getting a pep talk from the one business guy who actually tells you to stop overcomplicating everything and just do the work. The advice was straightforward, actionable, and honestly refreshing. No fluffy “manifest your yacht” energy. Just consistent reminders that success usually comes from doing the boring things well and sticking with them longer than everyone else.
I appreciated how practical the mindset and execution sections were. A lot of business books repeat the same recycled nonsense, but this one gave examples and strategies that actually made sense in real life. The idea of “two extra steps” sounds simple, but the book does a great job explaining how those small extra efforts create huge separation over time.
It was motivating without feeling fake or preachy, and I found myself highlighting a ton of sections. Clean read overall except for one swear word. Highly recommend for entrepreneurs, creatives, or honestly anyone trying to stop being “good enough” and level up a little.
I appreciated how practical the mindset and execution sections were. A lot of business books repeat the same recycled nonsense, but this one gave examples and strategies that actually made sense in real life. The idea of “two extra steps” sounds simple, but the book does a great job explaining how those small extra efforts create huge separation over time.
It was motivating without feeling fake or preachy, and I found myself highlighting a ton of sections. Clean read overall except for one swear word. Highly recommend for entrepreneurs, creatives, or honestly anyone trying to stop being “good enough” and level up a little.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews