Putting profit first with Michael Michalowicz

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by HubSpot. We’ll show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience, as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody Drew McLellan here with another episode of build a better agency. I love doing these podcasts and I love talking to my guests, but I got to tell you, I have had this one scheduled for a while and I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. This is a guy who I have followed for quite a while. I have read every book that he’s written, and many of you have had me tell you to read his books and talk about his philosophies. I am really selfishly looking forward to this conversation.

I hope you enjoy it too, but I’m all for it. If you want to come along for the ride, you’re more than welcome to. Let me tell you a little bit about my guest. So, my guess is Mike Michalowicz. Mike, by his third 35th birthday, he had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became an angel investor and proceeded to lose his entire fortune. He started over again, really driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies.

Many of you are familiar with his innovative strategy called profit first, which I talk about on a regular basis, a way for businesses to ensure profitability from their very next deposit forward. Mike is now running his third million dollar venture as a former small business columnist for the wall street journal. He’s a former MSNBC business makeover expert, keynote speaker on innovative entrepreneurial topics, and he has written many books, including Profit First, Surge, The Pumpkin Plan, and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which business week, by the way, deemed the entrepreneur’s cult classics. With all of that, Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Michalowicz:

Drew, it’s awesome. Thanks for having me, brother. I appreciate this.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. Let’s talk a little bit. Let’s dig right into, had a bunch of money and the next day have no money. What was that all about?

Mike Michalowicz:

That sucked.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, right. That’s a bad day.

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah, it’s a bad day. It’s a bad day. Yeah, if anyone tells you, oh, it’s a great awakening or something, it’s pretty painful, [crosstalk 00:02:32]. What happened to me is I had … Has been in the entrepreneurial space all my life. I’d sold my second company. It was two companies in a row I’d sold. My second one was acquired by a Fortune 500, and I thought I had the formula figured out that simply when you … If you want to achieve wealth, it’s an eventuality. You got to build, build, build. It doesn’t matter how much your business struggles, as long as you stick with the struggle and then exit out.

By the second I did this, I was like, oh, I figured it out. This is what you do. And so I did two things. I bought all the trophies in the world, the cars, moved into the expensive town, joined the club, because I thought, to should show off my wealth, it was really arrogance and ego. I’m embarrassed about it now, but that’s how I behaved. The other part was, I said, I’m going to become an angel investor and start all these different businesses and just pump them and dump them because this is where wealth comes from.

I had no right to be in the angel space. I had no clue what I was doing. I lost my money through ego, arrogance and ignorance. It took me only two years. I had become a millionaire when I was in my early 30s, I lost everything. My wife and three children, I had to come home to them to tell them, the guy who was meant to provide for the family was the guy who actually stole it all away. That moment was, oh, it was brutal.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I can’t even imagine. How do you go from that to the writing the books that you’ve written, to put in together the strategies that you now teach? What was the transition from sort of that confession that you had to make at home and looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, okay, maybe I wasn’t quite as smart as I thought I was, to what you’re now teaching today?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. It took me. When that day happened, it was literally a day. It was Valentine’s Day of 2000.

Drew McLellan:

Oh lovely.

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. Perfect.

Drew McLellan:

Lovely.

Mike Michalowicz:

That’s the day I found out that … My accountant called me and said, Mike, you should declare bankruptcy. You’re done. I didn’t declare bankruptcy. I felt so ashamed of what I did. I knew I had to dig my own way out of this as I told my family. My daughter, literally, as I was telling the story, she was nine years old, ran to her room and got her piggy bank and said, “Daddy, daddy I’ll help us.” It was that desperate.

What that triggered is this turning moment, which was a two year turn. I went through actually depression. So, it didn’t get better.

Drew McLellan:

I’m sure.

Mike Michalowicz:

I went through functional depression. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it. Meaning, I think a lot of people watching the show actually have experienced, maybe even yourself have experienced depression in some form. It is more prevalent in the entrepreneurial community than anywhere else in the world. I went through depression, which for me, was a of drinking when I should’ve been drinking, a lot of insomnia and no social situations where I put myself in. I was hibernating in my house, a rental.

How it turned was interesting. There was a moment, and I can’t remember the day, but there was a moment when I asked a question that I had never asked before. There’s one question that circulates all the time. They say, if you had all the money in the world, what would you do? It’s a good question, but there’s one assumption that is bad. The good question is, if you had freedom, what would be your passion, your calling, your purpose? What would you [crosstalk 00:06:01]? The fallacy or the flaw, I should say, in that question is, there’s an assumption that there is no financial constraints.

Meaning I could say my calling is to be a beach bum and drink margaritas on the beach in the Caribbean for the rest of my life. Yeah. Okay, that works. But the reality is we need to have a sustainable way of living our calling, or purpose, or desire, and it’s got to bring financial … Well, the question that came to me was, now that I have no money, because I’d blew all of the money, if I had no money, and I didn’t, what would I do with my life?

I think it’s the confluence of those two questions, if you had all the money in the world, you had total freedom, what would you do? But if you have to make a living doing it, what would you do? And once those answers are the exact same thing, that’s when you found, that’s when you truly found. I remember one time ago saying, if I had all the money in the world, I’d be an author. I want to just be an educator. I want to learn because I can teach. And the more I teach, the more I learn, and that just appeals to me.

But now I had no money. I said, what do I want to do? I said, I want to be an author and I can make a living doing this. I can really serve people and survive. Those two answers align, and that was kind of the aha, and I’ve set out and endeavored to do it. I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years now, nine years into it. Listen, it hasn’t been an easy journey. More and more people hear about me today because of the popularity of Profit First in particular. And they’re like, oh my God, you came out of nowhere. You’re an overnight success. You decided to write a book and look what you did.

And I’m like, that’s actually book number five, and each one’s been a fight, but I love it so much that it doesn’t feel like a fight. I’m in it because I love it.

Drew McLellan:

All of your books that are about running your business in a better, smarter, more profitable way. There’s incongruity in I lost everything I own, and now let me teach you how to run a business. So, how do you reconcile those two? How do those work together to be the wisdom that is in your books?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. So, I found, well, I had success with my other businesses. I mean, they grew … Both of them were multi-million dollar businesses. If you wanted to find a successful, both of them were acquired. But there were certain elements I got wrong, but good timing played in my favor, or I could just survive long enough before someone else acquired it and fixed those bad elements. What was interesting was there were some things I was doing right, and I’ve now extracted with as worth. There’s many things I was doing wrong and I’ve investigated those.

I run a business today too, a new business, for many years now. What I’ve done is ever … As I write my books, I do two things. I say, what did I do wrong in my life? What did I do right in regarding this concept? Then I interview dozens, if not 50 or 60, entrepreneurs that have done it right, compile the common thing. Then the one thing I do that I don’t think was typical of most authors, but maybe, then I test on myself. Because I have an existing business, I’m writing a new book now. It’s not here. It’s called Clockwork. It’s not going to be out for another year.

I just finished the manuscript. I’ve been working on it for six years. I’ve been testing it for the last three years, in my business. Now I know for me what works, for these other entrepreneurs’ works. I got the proof for myself and now it becomes a book. I’ve done that, like Profit First, I started 10 years ago, right? In 2008, I started writing Profit First. This newest release just came out six months ago. I’m testing on myself, and only once I prove it to myself and can see the common thread, in all these other entrepreneurial businesses, do I think is valid enough to print the thesis.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It’s interesting because my business model is a little bit the same. So, I own an ad agency, but I also work with 250 agencies, and people say, well, why do you do both? And I’m like, my agency is like the lab, where I get to test things. Or people will tell me about a new tool or a new technique or a project management style. I get to test it in my lab before I tell other people that it works. Or I can say, well, here’s what had happened for us, so your mileage may vary, but blah to blah.

I actually think there’s credibility in the experimentation, but be that sometimes it doesn’t work. So, in my mind, the fact that you’ve built successful businesses and you’ve made mistakes along the way, which you’ve been pretty transparent about, and that you’ve learned from those mistakes, that’s actually what makes your books so pragmatic.

Mike Michalowicz:

Thank you. Thank you. I think you’re right. I remember the first iteration of Profit First, first I did it for myself. Then I wrote an article, I used to write for The Wall Street Journal, so I wrote an article about it and it got a lot popularity. Then started getting emails saying, hey, this isn’t working. It wasn’t working for me, but I didn’t even realize it, when I was putting profit into my business and allocating profit first, that sometimes my business would be under duress and I’d actually borrow, I’m air quoting borrow from my profit. I was actually stealing from myself and unwinding the system.

Drew McLellan:

Which doesn’t allow you to correct the mistake, right?

Mike Michalowicz:

You’re right.

Drew McLellan:

It allows you to mask the mistake.

Mike Michalowicz:

I was masking the mistake. Then I was like, oh my God, other people like, holy crap, I didn’t actually make the system, so I went through another iteration. I like that term, it’s a lab. It’s a living lab.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. One of the things I love about Profit First is the idea that, and for those of you that haven’t read it, the idea is that in most businesses, and Mike feel free to correct me when I’m telling people what you wrote differently than what you wrote. The idea is, in most businesses, we pay all our bills and do all this other stuff. And if there’s profit leftover, we, as the owner, keep it. But, and as you have heard me preach a million times, when you leave too much money in your business, it gives you permission to make bad decisions, like keep more employees than you should or buy something that really you can’t afford.

The methodology that profit first teaches is that you set a percentage, and you really need to read the book, I’m clearly making it more simple than it is, but that you pull a percentage of your business out immediately and you put it in a separate bank account so that you, the business owner, are properly compensated for running a profitable business first, and then you in essence, have to run your business on the smaller plate, right?

It’s like an all you can eat buffet. If they give you a smaller plate, you eat less because you can only put so much on your plate, right?

Mike Michalowicz:

Right.

Drew McLellan:

If you are running your business with this smaller plate mentality, you will make smarter decisions for your business because you don’t have this big fat bank account that you’re in essence, you’ve already paid tax on that money in many cases, because you’ve left it in retained earnings, and now you’re just piddling it away because you’re making bad business decisions.

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. That’s the essence of the book. There’s subsequent steps to it, but it is the pay yourself first principle. We’ve all been told this in our personal lives. When you take home income, immediately reserve money for your future, hide it from yourself, live off the remainder, and sure enough, your lifestyle will adjust. I say, oh my gosh, this may apply to my business, and it does [crosstalk 00:13:34] business.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Mike Michalowicz:

Money flows in, you reserve stuff for your profitability, and you force your business’s lifestyle to live off the remainder. It does live off the remainder.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, right. If your business has no profit, clearly, what that is saying to you is that you are choosing to make decisions about how you run your business that don’t serve the profitability part of your business. In many cases, especially in agencies, what that means is you have one or two too many staff people. And because you love them or you know that their kids in college, or whatever it is, and I get it, I’ve made the exact same mistake, you keep them on the payroll even though the business doesn’t justify them being there. The minute you take some of that money out of the pot and you don’t have it to pay them, now, all of a sudden, you have to learn how to run your business with the right number of staff, right?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. It’s save the one or two people and kill everyone else off as a result. If the ship is sinking, we got to get rid of the things. Sometimes it’s not people, sometimes it’s living a lifestyle as an owner that’s beyond what the business can support. Most often it’s a combination of many variables, but it-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, right. It’s not as subscriptions you don’t use anymore, it’s services. Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Michalowicz:

The funny thing ism when we do take our profit first, it forces our business to get very real about what money is truly available, because now we’re reverse engineering that profitability. [crosstalk 00:14:57] first, this is only what your business can survive off of. Now you have to make the decisions around that number.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. I don’t have any agencies that have implemented this system that are not running better businesses 12 months later, because you’re forced to run a business better.

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah, totally.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. There’s no fat that allows you to mask bad business decisions.

Mike Michalowicz:

That’s right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. If you haven’t read it, listeners, make sure that you grab it. But let’s back up a little bit. You had several books that led up to Profit First. What do you think are some of the … When I think about the first few books that you wrote, so The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan, what were some of the kernels of that, that sort of set someone up to be a profit first business? In other words, there are some basic business principles in some of your earlier books that get a business ready to do profit first. What are some of those that our readers might find valuable?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah, so The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is my first book. What I wanted to tackle in that book was the misconception of the importance of resources. The resources could be resources of cash to start a business, resources of a network of people, when you start a business that you have to have a network or education. We need to have education. What I realized is successful business launches actually are facilitated through the lack of resources because the lack of resources force innovation.

If I don’t have a network of people to buy from, I have to get really innovative and how to market and find them. If I don’t have the cash to get started, I got to get super innovative about how to get started with no crash, bootstrapping, it’s ultimate. My favorite though, is education. If I don’t have the education or the knowledge of the market, the only way into the market is by breaking the rules, because I don’t know the rules.

Yet, the irony is, it’s the lack of those things that prevent people from starting a business. Most people say, I’m not ready yet. I need more education. I can’t, I’m not ready. I need to save more money. I’m not ready yet because I don’t have a network out there that’s going to buy from me. I don’t have people to advise me. And they wait. The one thing that we’re spending that we can never recover is time. Time is the only non-renewable resource in the world.

That’s the one thing we have. What I try to argue in Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is start now, even when you have no resources, and ironically, it’s to your advantage not to have resources. The other book that I think the big kernel from the Pumpkin Plan, [crosstalk 00:17:43]. The big thing from the pumpkin plan was, once people had read the first book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, people coming to me, some people were coming to me and saying, I got started now, I got to grow this thing. How do I grow it organically?

That was the big thing. Because even though in the news, we hear about the venture capital raises and all these different things that Facebook did or Google did, most businesses don’t live that lottery winning lifestyle. Most businesses are bootstrapped. I remember once I was at a conference with about a hundred entrepreneurs, some wildly successful recognized business names. Burt’s Bees was there, 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Another company makes cases called Speck, an expensive case for a phone, and there’s a VC who sat in front of a hundred people in this room.

And he said, “Of all the successful businesses in here, who raise venture capital?” And one hand out of a hundred went up. He said, “The reality is the most of you will never, have never, and will never, therefore you have to grow organically on your own.” In The Pumpkin Plan, what I did was I started researching out how to organically grow a company to explosive size. What I found is the parallel is ironically, colossal pumpkin farmers, the processes they follow, the foundational process, translates into the business process, and we can grow a wildly successful business, kind of following some of their principles.

Drew McLellan:

Hang on. You’re researching the business book, how in the world do you learn? I live in the Midwest where farmers are all around me. I don’t know the super secret of pumpkin farmers. So, how is your researching a book, do you go, oh, look at the interesting parallel between pumpkin farmers and business?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. It’s weird. These parallels present themselves in the weirdest ways, but this one wasn’t so weird. I was working with a business coach years prior, and he said, “Mike, if you want to see organic growth,” he goes, “seek out organic growth.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Stop looking at your industry. That’s what people do.” He goes, “Well, look way outside.” He goes, “I challenge you,” and he just told me, “I challenge you to look at pumpkin farmers.” I’m like, what? He goes, “Do it. They know organic growth.” He goes, “Just learn from the outside.” So, I spent, ended up being a year, but a few days initially, and then ultimately a year of studying colossal pumpkin farming. Not a full-time devotion, but enough that it was a little bit on the odd side and started seeing with these guys do.

I’m like, oh my gosh. When we look outside, we’re outside the forest, the answers are so clear and obvious. I could see, oh my gosh, step one, step two, step three. That will work inside my firm. He just pointed me to it. Other times I kind of fall into it, but that one was pushed into my lap.

Drew McLellan:

Because I think when you’re looking for it and you’re thinking it’s all cooking in the back of your head, you sort of see it. But that idea of stepping back and out of the industry and being able to sort of clearly see what needs to be done, that’s what agencies do every day. We step outside of our clients. We’re not in the steel-making industry or the financial services industry. We, as experts, can step back and go, oh, well, here’s what has to happen.

I think sometimes agency owners go, I don’t know why they don’t see that. Well, because they’re right in the midst of it. Right?

Mike Michalowicz:

So true. It’s so true.

Drew McLellan:

Let’s talk about a little bit about that organic growth because every agency struggles with, other than referrals and getting more business from current customers, most agencies struggle with business development because the agency owner is often still in the business and so they’re tasked with the biz-dev responsibilities as well as the operational responsibility. So, what are some of the takeaways from the pumpkin farmer that we can apply?

Mike Michalowicz:

Yeah. I think one of the big takeaways was the process of, I call like growing or matriculating the strong sprouts. Here’s the analogy I found in pumpkin farmers. The ordinary pumpkin farmer actually focuses on weak sprouts because they’re in, what’s called the quantity game. The more sprouts I grow, the better, because in the fall season, when we’re recording this, in the fall season, that’s when you make your money.

So, you’re in the quantity game, the more sprouts you [inaudible 00:22:00]. You need to help the weak cause the strong can make it on their own. The interesting thing is the colossal farmers were the absolute flip opposite. When they saw weak sprouts, they actually pulled them out because they were stealing away nutrients and ditched them. The colossal farmer knows that a strong sprout has the most potential to become a colossal pumpkin. So, they actually assist the strong.

Well, I found the parallel in business, most businesses focus on the weak. The ordinary business says, who’s my weakest customer? As the owner, don’t worry, no one else worry about them. I’ll take care of them, that pain in the ass. They focus on their own personal weaknesses. I’m not a good salesperson, I’m going to go to some sales training, or I’m not a good accountant, therefore to get familiar with my books, I want to go to accounting and really get strong in this.

Well, the colossal entrepreneur, I found did the opposite. He said, what are my strengths? If I am a great presenter, I’m going to go out there and get the word out about, in the biggest way. Who’s our strongest customer? The weak customers, we’re going to actually remove, or at least not make our primary care point. It’s going to be our best customers. I, as the business owner, will cater to the best and therefore grow them.

I thought one of the big takeaways was identifying your best customers and amplifying them, concentrating on them, finding your best strengths in your business, amplifying that, always focusing on the strong and actually cutting away and carving out the weak.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, that ties exactly to one of the things that I’m constantly teaching agency owners, which is you can’t be everything to everybody. Have core skills that you offer, serve verticals that you know super well and that you can have great strength in, but do not be a mile wide and an inch deep. Really build on your strengths and allow three or four of those legs support your stool.

Mike Michalowicz:

Just planning off of that, and I agree 100%, is the natural tendency of many entrepreneurs, agencies alike, focus on the weak customer. What I mean by the weak customer is a customer that calls up and they’re not happy with the service. They want the work redone. They won’t pay their bill. You redo the work and they still don’t pay their bill. By the way, I’m not even necessarily indicating these are bad people. They could be good people. They’re just bad for business, [crosstalk 00:24:20] for our business. Well, what happens is that triggers a response for many small business owners, agencies.

We cater to them more or say, oh my God, this customer is so upset. Let’s work harder. Let’s try more. We cater to them, and then an interesting phenomenon happens because we’re catering to the weak customer, that weak customer is surrounded by other people likely like them. Birds of a feather flock together after all. So, they call their friends and say, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe this. I don’t pay this guy, I get the best service in the world. You got to go here too.” And we start cloning our weak customers.

That’s the irony. If we’re focused on our best, the ones who pay us well, who we cater to, they will tell the other birds of feather they hang out with, which are great customers and will attract more great customers.

Dre