Today our expert guest is Mike Michalowicz, who by the age of 35 had founded and sold two multi-million dollar businesses. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became a small business angel investor, where he proceeded to lose his entire fortune—but then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy and strong companies. He’s devoted his life to the research and delivery of innovative, impactful, and entrepreneurial strategies to you.
He created the Profit First framework, which is used by hundreds of thousands of companies across the world to drive profit, and the creator of Clockwork, a powerful method to make any business run automatically. His latest, and possibly most impactful tool, is “Fix This Next,” the book where he details the strategies businesses can use to determine what to do and in what order to ensure healthy, fast, permanent growth.
The idea for this latest book came about from a technical error. He sent an email out to his readership and asked them about the biggest challenges they are facing this year—but he accidentally sent the same email out three times. And in several instances, the same person answered the same question multiple times with different answers. It became clear that the biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face is knowing what their biggest challenge is.
It was that feedback, that entrepreneurs are feeling constantly burnt out because everything feels like a fire that needs to be put out, that led to him writing a book on finding out the most impactful thing to do to move the business forward, and the sequence instead of always addressing every apparent issue.
When you look at humanity, 99.5% of our genetic makeup is identical. When you look at business, we like to think every business is so different, but like with humanity, there are so many identical needs that are consistent across all businesses, and that boils down to five levels of needs:
- Sales: If you have no sales, you have no business. This is the oxygen for the business. But sales without considering the other levels of the needs leads to hyperventilation.
- Profitability: This is the stability of the organization—the absorption of oxygen into the bloodstream. Any business that focuses on sales but not profit will go out of business at the smallest hiccup.
- Order: This is the creation of efficiency. This moves a businesses growth beyond the need for the owner to work longer and harder.
- Impact: Creating a transformation for clients and customers.
- Legacy: Creation of business permanence that’s designed to live on in perpetuity.
Once you know these levels, start at the bottom and find out whether or not your business is satisfying those needs. If yes, move up. If not, you need to look closer and find out how you can address this level of need. There are five core needs for every level of need, a total of 25 for each business.
The method used to figure out HOW to fix what needs fixing can be found using the acronym OMEN:
- Objective: What are you trying to fix?
- Measurements: What do you need to get from your objective?
- Evaluation frequency: How often you evaluate your progress on a specific measurement and objective.
- Nurture: Give yourself the ability to modify the objective, measurements, and evaluation frequency based on the needs and knowledge of the time.
To realize our vision for our organization we need to follow a sequence of steps in a specific direction. Most businesses, instead of moving in one direction, keep moving in a circuitous pattern. Find out where you want to go, map out the path to getting there, and take one step forward at a time.
The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway
“Know your purpose, be true to your purpose. I don’t know if it’s self-given or God-given, I think that’s our choice, but I had a purpose to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. What I found by that purpose is that it’s the ultimate driver. The biggest determinate of success is how determined you are to have success, and the biggest driver is purpose.”
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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.
Resources:
- Learn more: mikemichalowicz.com
- Read: “Fix This Next”
- Read: “Clockwork”
- Read: “Profit First”
- Facebook: facebook.com/MikeMichalowiczFanPage
- Instagram: instagram.com/mikemichalowicz
- Twitter: twitter.com/MikeMichalowicz
The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media
There is incredible potential that lies within each and every one of us to create positive change in our lives (and the lives of others) while achieving our dreams.
This is the Power of You!
