The most consistent thing I have observed across more than 35 years in finance and business is this: the women who build something serious never stop learning. Not because they lack confidence, but because they understand that growth is not a phase you go through at the start. It is a practice you maintain throughout.
This list is not a collection of feel-good reads. It is a commercially curated selection of books that will change how you think, how you lead, and how you build. We update it regularly because the business landscape shifts constantly, and your reading list should reflect where business is right now.
We have organised them by the job they do, so you can pick up the one that meets you where you are right now.
Featured
The Future is Female
Trudy Heins, 2025
This is the book I wrote for the woman who is done with vague empowerment and ready for real commercial strategy. The Future is Female is not a memoir and it is not a motivational read. It is a practical, commercially grounded guide to building a business that is profitable, sustainable, and built around you as a leader rather than around the hours you are willing to work.
Drawing on more than 35 years in finance and business, including three decades as a Certified Financial Planner, I wrote this book because I kept seeing the same patterns in the women I worked with. Extraordinary capability, chronically undervalued, under-structured, and often one bad month away from questioning everything they had built. This book addresses all of that directly.
If you read one book from this list, make it this one. Not because I wrote it, but because it is the one most specifically designed for the woman you are trying to become.
Commercial Foundations
These books will change how you think about the structure and mechanics of your business. They are not motivational reads. They are operational ones.
Build Like a Woman
Kathleen Griffith, 2023
Griffith has directed more than 500 million dollars in marketing spend for clients including Nike Women and Verizon, and she wrote this book because she found the women’s business space was strong on encouragement and weak on the practical mechanics of actually building something.
The book covers life design, mindset, brand strategy, sales, and marketing in a structured, sequential way that is genuinely useful rather than aspirational. What makes it stand out is how directly it speaks to women who want a business that feeds their life rather than consumes it, without sacrificing commercial ambition to get there. A strong starting point for any woman who wants both the foundations and the mindset work in one place.
$100M Offers
Alex Hormozi, 2021
Hormozi built a business portfolio worth more than 100 million dollars and this book is his breakdown of how offer design drives almost everything else in a business. His central argument is that most businesses do not have a sales problem or a marketing problem. They have an offer problem: what they are selling is not compelling enough to make the decision to buy feel obvious.
He covers how to price, package, and position a service offer in a way that makes the sale almost effortless when it reaches the right person. It is direct, commercially ruthless, and one of the most practically applicable books available for service-based business owners right now. If your conversion rate is lower than you think it should be, start here.
We Should All Be Millionaires
Rachel Rodgers, 2021
Rachel Rodgers is a Black woman, a mother of four, an attorney, and an eight-figure business owner. She wrote this book because she got tired of financial advice that told women to spend less rather than earn more, and because she understood that economic power is one of the most direct routes to real equality.
The book is commercially rigorous and practically structured. Rodgers walks you through the mindset shifts, the business decisions, and the specific behaviours that keep women operating below their financial potential, and she does it without the soft framing that makes most money books easy to put down. This is one of the most important books in this list for any woman who knows she should be charging more, building more, and keeping more of what she earns.
Leadership and CEO Mindset
Growing a business requires you to grow as a leader. These books address the thinking, habits, and internal shifts that separate women who build something that lasts from those who stay busy without building anything of substance.
Dare to Lead
Brene Brown, 2018
Brown’s research on vulnerability and courage is some of the most important leadership thinking of the last two decades, and Dare to Lead is the most commercially useful application of that research for women building and running businesses.
The central argument is that brave leadership requires the willingness to have hard conversations, to sit with uncertainty, and to prioritise trust over comfort. If you have been avoiding a conversation with a client, a team member, or yourself about something that is not working in your business, this book will help you understand why and give you a framework for what to do instead. It is also one of the most useful books available on the specific leadership behaviours that build high-trust teams, which matters the moment you stop working alone.
The Let Them Theory
Mel Robbins, 2024
Robbins’ framework is built around a single idea: most of the energy women in business spend managing other people’s perceptions, reactions, and opinions is energy that could be directed toward building something. Let them think what they think. Let them react how they react. Get back to work.
It sounds simple and the application is genuinely powerful, particularly for women who find themselves editing their decisions, their pricing, their visibility, or their ambition based on what they think other people will say. The book applies the framework across eight areas including career, relationships, and goals, and it is written in Robbins’ characteristically direct and accessible style.
Rewrite Your Rules
Morgan Debaun, 2024
Debaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity Inc., one of the fastest growing media companies in the United States. She wrote this book for the women who have achieved a level of success but feel they are still playing by rules they never consciously agreed to: rules about what ambition looks like, what leadership looks like, and what a successful business owner is supposed to sacrifice to get there.
The book covers the shift from operator to CEO, the internal recalibration that scaling requires, and the specific mindset patterns that keep high-performing women stuck below their potential. If you have grown your business but feel like you are still running it like a solopreneur rather than leading it like a CEO, this is the book that will name that gap and give you a path through it.
Pricing, Money and Financial Confidence
Financial literacy is not optional in business. It is the difference between a business that survives and one that performs. These three books will give you a commercially grounded relationship with money that most business owners never develop.
Playing Big
Tara Mohr, 2014
The title undersells the content. This is not a book about being bolder for the sake of it. It is a carefully researched, practically structured guide to understanding the internal patterns that keep capable women operating below their potential, and specifically the ways those patterns show up in business decisions around pricing, visibility, and opportunity.
Mohr’s concept of the inner critic as a distinct voice that can be observed and managed rather than obeyed is one of the most useful frameworks available for women who know intellectually that they should be charging more, showing up more visibly, or saying yes to bigger opportunities, but find themselves consistently holding back. Read this before you discount your prices again.
Million Dollar Action
Rachel Rodgers, 2024
The follow-up to We Should All Be Millionaires and the more practically focused of the two. Where the first book makes the case for why women need to earn more, this one gives you the specific actions, decisions, and commercial moves to make it happen. Rodgers is direct, commercially grounded, and has built the results to back everything she says.
If you have read We Should All Be Millionaires and found yourself nodding but not moving, this is the book that closes that gap. Concrete, action-oriented, and written for the woman who is done with theory and ready to build.
The Mirrored Door
Ellen Taaffe, 2023
Taaffe spent decades in corporate leadership before becoming a business school professor and executive coach, and this book is her comprehensive analysis of the internal barriers that prevent capable women from advancing commercially even when the external barriers are removed.
The mirrored door of the title refers to the moment when a woman reaches a threshold and turns back, not because she was stopped but because she stopped herself. Taaffe identifies the specific patterns behind that moment and gives a practical, research-backed framework for moving through it. One of the most commercially useful books published recently for women who are performing well but have a sense that they are still holding back somewhere they cannot quite name.
Visibility, Sales and Growth
These books address the external game: how you show up, how you sell, and how you build the kind of commercial momentum that compounds over time.
Unfiltered
Rachel Pedersen, 2024
Pedersen built an eight-figure business from scratch and this book is her unfiltered account of what that actually required. It is not a polished success story. It is the version most business books never give you: the poverty, the imposter syndrome, the specific moments where everything could have gone the other way, and the commercial decisions that changed the trajectory.
For women in business who are in what Pedersen calls the messy middle, not yet where they want to be but too far in to go back, this book is the read that will give you both the honest companionship and the practical framework to get through it. Raw, commercially honest, and genuinely useful.
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Angela Duckworth, 2016
Duckworth is a psychologist who spent years studying high achievers across fields as different as the military, professional sport, and competitive spelling, and what she found was consistent: talent alone does not predict success. The combination of passion and perseverance she calls grit does.
For women in business, this research matters because it reframes the narrative around what it takes to build something. The moments when a business is hard, when growth is slow, when nothing seems to be working, are not evidence that you chose the wrong path. They are the normal texture of building anything worth building. Duckworth gives you both the evidence and the practical framework for developing the quality that makes the difference between the women who get through those moments and the ones who do not.
Supercommunicators
Charles Duhigg, 2024
Every client conversation, every sales call, every difficult conversation with a team member involves three types of conversation happening simultaneously: a practical one, an emotional one, and a social one. Most people are only consciously aware of one of them, which is why so many important conversations go sideways.
Duhigg’s research identifies what the best communicators do differently and gives you a specific, learnable framework for replicating it. For women in business who want to close more clients, lead more effectively, and navigate the inevitable difficult conversations that come with building something, this is one of the most practically useful books published in recent years.
Strategy and Exit
This book addresses the long game: how to build a business that is genuinely valuable, and what it looks like to eventually profit from everything you have built.
Built to Sell
John Warrillow, 2011
Most service businesses are not built to sell. They are built around their owner, which means the moment that owner steps back the value disappears with them. Warrillow’s book is a practical guide to building a service business that has real transferable value, whether you intend to sell it or not.
The principles he outlines, systematising delivery, reducing owner dependency, building recurring revenue, and creating processes that run without you, are not just exit planning principles. They are the same principles that make a business worth owning in the first place. Read this early, not when you are ready to sell.
AI and Your Business
Artificial intelligence is no longer optional. It is already reshaping how businesses operate, how services are delivered, and how competitive advantage is built. Every serious business owner needs a working understanding of what AI actually is, what it can and cannot do, and how to use it without losing what makes your business distinctively yours.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Ethan Mollick, 2024
Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School and one of the most practically grounded voices on AI in business. This is not a book about the future of AI or the philosophical implications of machine intelligence. It is a working guide for right now: how to use AI as a co-worker, a thinking partner, and a production tool without surrendering your judgment or your voice to it.
His four principles are immediately applicable: always invite AI to the table, be the human in the loop, treat AI as the worst version of itself it will ever be, and assume the current AI is already more capable than you think. For women in business who have been watching AI from the sidelines, this is the book that will give you a practical entry point without the hype or the alarm. Named a New York Times bestseller and a best book of the year by both the Financial Times and The Economist.
A note on this list: we have made a deliberate choice to feature female authors wherever comparable books exist. In four cases, specifically $100M Offers, Supercommunicators, Built to Sell, and Co-Intelligence, we have kept male-authored titles because no female-authored equivalent covers the same ground at the same depth. We would rather give you the most useful book than the most convenient one.
If you are ready to go beyond reading and start building with proper commercial strategy and financial structure behind you, the FEMPIRE Academy has the tools, frameworks, and coaching support to make that happen.
Trudy Heins, CEO and Master Coach, FEMPIRE
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As the owner of Fempire and founder of Trudy Heins Business Coaching, The Holistic Health Hive, and Woman Friday, Trudy’s mission is to help women create strong, strategic, and financially resilient businesses, the kind that support the life you really want.
With over 36 years in business and finance including 30 years as a Certified Financial Planner. Trudy has built and sold multiple businesses, led high-performing national sales teams, and coached hundreds of women to achieve lasting success.
She knows what it takes to go from idea to income and from coach to company owner.
I actually bought Barbara Corcoran’s book Kate. I remember discussing it with you and had forgotten to buy it. Thanks for a great reminder and for the great list of reads on this list…I’m happy to say I read most of them. Mx