Profit Before Anything Else: With Mike Michalowicz, Author of “Profit First”

My Guest

Today I’m joined by entrepreneur, investor, and best-selling author, Mike Michalowicz. Mike is the author of nine books, most notably Profit First, which boasts ~8,700 ratings on Amazon.com with an average rating of 4.8 stars. The book outlines a deceptively simple yet highly effective system to help businesses hit their target profit numbers with a high degree of regularity.

In addition to being a best-selling author, Mike is himself a serial entrepreneur, having founded, operated, and successfully exited several companies across his multi-decade career. He now spends much of his professional time writing, speaking, and coaching CEOs and entrepreneurs on the various systems and tools that helped make him successful.

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Questions Asked

Introduction

  • Walk us through the chronology of your career, including what led you to what you’re doing today

Profit First

  • Please walk us through the basics of the Profit First method
  • You’re a big advocate of paying down debt as aggressively as possible. How and why did you form this opinion?
  • Does your aversion to leverage change at all depending on prevailing interest rates and/or the specific debt instrument in question?
  • Does your aversion to leverage apply to your personal finances as well?
  • You’ve said that the inverse relationship between growth and profitability is a false dichotomy, and that targeting one over the other would be a mistake. Can you elaborate?
  • Tell us about your experience “firing” problematic or unprofitable clients, and how you go about doing so today
  • Based on your personal experience navigating several exits, what advice might you give to post-exit entrepreneurs, both financial and otherwise?

Small Business Entrepreneurship

  • Tell us about your personal “BHAG”: What is it, and why did you choose it?
  • You’re an advocate of time tracking: Why and how do you track your time, what tools you use, and what benefits have resulted from this practice?
  • What are the most frequent mistakes that you see leaders make with respect to goal setting for their companies?
  • How did you pitch yourself and your book ideas to publishers who probably decline thousands of business book ideas each year?

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Thanks to our Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Oberle Risk Strategies⁠⁠⁠⁠, the leading insurance brokerage and insurance diligence provider for the search fund community. The company is led by ⁠⁠August Felker⁠⁠ (himself a 2-time successful searcher), and has been trusted by search investors, lenders, searchers and CEOs for over a decade now. Their due diligence offering (which is 100% free of charge) will assess the pros and cons of your target company’s insurance program, including any potential coverage gaps, the pro-forma insurance pricing, and the program structure changes needed for closing. At or shortly after closing, they then execute on all of those findings on your behalf. Oberle has serviced over 900 customers across a decade of operation, including countless searchers and CEOs within the ETA community.

This episode is brought to you by The Profit Line. The Profit Line is a boutique finance and accounting firm that provides a wide range of accounting services to small and medium businesses generating anywhere between $5M to $50M in revenue. On a fractional, outsourced basis, they do day-to-day bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, month-end accruals, tax compliance, and financial statement preparation, among countless other things. I was a customer of theirs for 7 consecutive years while running my own company, and am speaking as a happy customer. Book a call with Founder and CEO, Fern Gordon (Ferngordon@theprofitline.com) or visit their LinkedIn page to learn how they might be able to help you exactly as they helped me.


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