Mike Michalowicz explains the Pumpkin Plan: grow your business like elite pumpkin farmers grow giant pumpkins, by cutting weak clients and focusing resources on what you do best. Two business owners doubled their revenue in months by saying no to unprofitable work and concentrating on their strongest services.
My name is Mike Michalos. I'm the author of The Pumpkin Plan. I think a lot of business books I've read are really out of the box, so different that it's hard to connect with. So for me to make change, I always try to figure out what are the smallest things to change. So I wrote a book, Pumpkin Plan, about the few things you need to change that results in the biggest success. That's how the concept came about. So I was— just ran across an article about a pumpkin farmer, and I was fascinated that most pumpkin farmers grow ordinary small pumpkins. Very few grow these colossal successes. So I said, well, how do they do it? And I studied them for like a year and said, oh my God, this is how big businesses take off, the same method. And said the strategy he's followed is only a little bit different than any other pumpkin farmer. If you continue that pattern, 5 years from today, you'll be in the exact same spot.
The extraordinary pumpkin farmer ignores the weak and focuses on the strong.
One of the biggest things is you grow by saying no. The discipline of saying no to opportunities and things that really aren't your core competency, staying focused. The more you water what you're great at, it will grow, it'll take off.
I actually do my own version of the Pumpkin Plan already where I have started trimming the clients that aren't as profitable and focusing on the ones that are profitable and do need my services.
I weeded out the headache clients and my business has actually doubled in the 2 or 3 months that I've been doing this.
Well, it definitely validates what I'm doing and it gives me the encouragement I need to keep doing it because sometimes it is hard to say no to a client.
My experience is most people are only this far away. It's not like you have to do huge changes. They're just discontent with a few things. They just need to change a few things and once they do, take off.
Be extraordinary. Don't play it safe. You know, really nurture those big pumpkins. I mean, if it fails, you can grow another pumpkin. It's not the end of the world.
