Episode Details

In this episode, we meet Mike Michalowicz, serial entrepreneur and multiple best-selling author.

Self-defined as a normal guy with a normal upbringing, by his 35th birthday, Mike 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.

Then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies. Among other innovative strategies, Mike created the "Profit First Formula", a way for businesses to ensure profitability from their very next deposit forward.

Mike is now running his third million dollar venture, alongside keynote speaking and is also the author of Profit First, Surge, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which BusinessWeek deemed "the entrepreneur's cult classic."

In this episode we talk about:

• How his early success ultimately proved to be a fallacy and led to his downfall;
• Why workaholism is not a badge of honour and must be defeated in our culture;
• How to reframe your value in the marketplace by choosing to become dispensable instead of indispensable; and
• Why having no cash, experience or contacts are your biggest assets when it comes to starting a business.

You can find out all about Mike on his website - https://www.mikemichalowicz.com/ (or https://mikemotorbike.com).

Thanks to Jeff Brown for recommending Mike.

• I was typically average! It's funny, I hear stories of other people that have gone through extraordinary trauma or had some kind of awakening to their calling in their childhood, and that wasn't me. But one thing I think that was interesting, whenever my parents would talk about work, is that I had to find that one job working for that one big corporation because that's the safest way to navigate through life. And even today, they still are confused by the path of the entrepreneur. So maybe that's the thing that kind of triggered my desire to explore.
• I think the greatest lesson I learned in lacrosse was the power of the mind. One of the necessary skills in lacrosse as a middie was to face off. When I did, I realised my thoughts were determining how successful I was on these face-offs. If I thought I could beat the person I was going against and had a plan of where I was gonna move the ball, I was wildly successful. But if I ever felt intimidated or lacked confidence, I would falter. And in business, I realised the power of thought dictates our subsequent actions.

• My first business was in IT Support and my exit was via private equity. The second business was in computer crime investigation and I was in the right place at the right time. First six months I think we did over half a million dollars. The first full year, we did around one and a half or two million. And then in the second year in business, we were on a run for seven million dollars in revenue. In the moment, I thought I was just super smart, but my company got part of the Enron trial.
• We were racking up debt, borrowing from the banks, pulling credit lines. I think at one point when we sold the company, we maybe had a half a million dollars of debt. But it was acquired by a Fortune 500 because we were on such a fast growth trajectory, and then it started to instil in my thoughts that, "Oh