Today, I'd like to introduce you to Mike Michalowicz – a man whose knowledge and experience has single-handedly changed our business.
To put it simply, he’s a real guy talking about real shit with real failures and real successes, straight from the horse’s mouth.
He’s brutally honest, humorous, and he takes you through a journey from being a new entrepreneur to the entrepreneur that wants to grow the big huge giant pumpkins to the entrepreneur that has a healthy bottom line business.
The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur
Mike's first book, [easyazon_link identifier=”0981808204″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur[/easyazon_link], is all about starting your business with the end in mind. Usually, you start up a business because of your vision and your mission, but you might not think about where this end road leads
In this book, he helps to keep your goals in a 90-day view. He always about what specifically to evaluate daily, quarterly, and to always keep things in front of you.
When starting out, we often measure the wrong crap (like social media followings), and then wonder why we're broke and they’re not getting paid. The goal is to get more obsessed with how profitable you are versus how popular you are.
The way your business serves you and you serve the world is by you being profitable, not just popular. [easyazon_link identifier=”0981808204″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur[/easyazon_link] is all about not getting ahead of yourself, not getting too far down the road, doing what you need to do now.
Focus on creating things to be prosperous and profitable, not popular and broke.
The Pumpkin Plan
Mike second book, [easyazon_link identifier=”1591844886″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]The Pumpkin Plan[/easyazon_link], is all about scaling in a way that doesn’t drive you crazy and doesn’t stretch you to the point of burnout.
Your main goal with this book is to try to harvest the prized pumpkin in your business, not harvesting all those crappy, dead, rotting pumpkins that take all your time and over all your field – the big pumpkin wins the prize.
He has an analogy in the book that we really loved. Mike talks about the cost of prized pumpkin seeds versus gold. If you were to purchase a prized pumpkin seed that could be a blue ribbon winner, that seed would cost you $1800, which is nearly double what a gold bar is worth. We equate gold as the most valuable thing on the planet, but here are these prize pumpkin seeds that are worth so much more.
[easyazon_link identifier=”1591844886″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]The Pumpkin Plan[/easyazon_link] is also about who your clients are. It's about making sure you’ve packaged and positioned yourself in a way that you don’t have to work 10 times harder than you have to to get your favorite clients and your desired profitability.You don’t have to appeal to everybody. You don’t want to appeal to everybody. You just want to appeal to a certain type of clients.
[easyazon_link identifier=”1591844886″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]The Pumpkin Plan[/easyazon_link] takes great courage and requires you to think outside of your box to get the prized pumpkin. There's a big focus on choosing a niche.You're established your business, but you want to increase your revenue and expand. That doesn’t mean you start planting everything you can because you’re going to end up having 40 pumpkins to harvest at one time and you just can’t make that much pie.
Profit First
Mike's third book, [easyazon_link identifier=”0981808298″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]Profit First[/easyazon_link], is all about, you guessed it, profit, but from a fresh perspective.
Typically, your accounting equation is sales minus expenses equal profit:
Sales – Expenses = Profit
That’s what you’re used to, but Mike rearranges it and it’s a mindset change – sales minus profit equals expenses:
Sales – Profit = Expenses
That’s the new formula for the bottom line business.
It’s really easy to throw money at things that you think will help you, at the detriment of your own livelihood, your own income, and your own lifestyle. His one equation says it all.
Another key concept of the book is that your business has to serve you and if your business isn’t serving you, why are you doing this? The way your business is serving you is by paying you.
If you're running the numbers for your business in your your head, that’s not your real numbers – that’s is your opinion of what you’re doing. If you’re not tracking your sales, profit, and expenses in-detail, then you aren't learning how to care for and respect the money people are paying you.
It's never too early or too late to start the [easyazon_link identifier=”0981808298″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”rocksolid-20″]Profit First[/easyazon_link] plan. Learning to keep track of your money in an easy-to-use system is how you ensure that you keep money coming in – this is how you can serve your business so it will serve you big profit in return.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, we highly recommend all three of Mike Michalowicz ‘s books for your business bookshelf. No matter what stage you're at in your business, Mike's books will help you established the foundation you need to scale, grow, and keep the profits flowing in.
