Scale Up

I’ll admit: I rolled my eyes when I saw yet another book promising to “unlock exponential growth.” But *Scale Up* won me over by doing something radical in the business audiobook space—it *assumes you’re already competent*. Rich isn’t here to teach you Sales 101; he’s diagnosing why your $2M business can’t crack $5M, and his answers are often uncomfortable. The chapter on “revenue addiction” (where he argues most founders are hooked on the wrong kind of income) hit like a gut punch—I paused the audiobook three times to scribble notes. Miller’s narration grows on you; his initial flatness starts to feel like the voice of a weary mentor who’s tired of watching people repeat the same mistakes. That said, the audiobook stumbles in its latter half when Rich dives into operational templates. The spreadsheets and workflows are gold, but they’re *meant to be seen*, not heard, and Miller’s recitation of column headers feels clunky without visual aids. The real standout? Rich’s treatment of scaling as a *psychological* problem, not just a logistical one. His riff on how founders self-sabotage by clinging to “hero mode” (where they’re the only ones who can close deals or fix crises) is the best dissection I’ve heard of why smart people build unscalable companies. The audiobook’s 5-hour runtime is tight, though I’d have traded some of the repetitive case studies for more of Rich’s sharp asides—like his throwaway line about how “most ‘culture’ is just unchecked founder trauma.” If you’re drowning in generic scaling advice, this is the antidote. Just be warned: it’s not a feel-good listen. It’s the audiobook equivalent of a stress test for your business model.