164: Fix This Next (And Stop Keeping Up With The Entrepre-Joneses) with Mike Michalowicz

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For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am so thrilled and excited to be welcoming Mike Michalowicz back to the show. Mike was here to talk about one of his previous books, surge in episode 37, but I cannot even begin to tell you those of you who are listening. And Mike, you're here now. This man has changed my life.

And.

And I don't even think, Mike, you know the extent to which we met over margaritas.

Yeah. You remember that?

Of course I remember that.

Yeah.

Over an author dinner that my friend, Dorie Clark. Our mutual friend. And in fact, it was the first Dory dinner that I attended. And so thanks to that dinner, I'm such good friends with Dorie. And then you, Mike, have just been a frigging game changer.

We were, you know, we were sitting next to each other and like, who wants drinks? And you're like, margarita. I'm like, this girl's awesome. And I look at everyone else. Else. Everyone else, like, no club soda, please. I'm like, is this a group of wimps? Like, what's going on? So then I'm like, I think we. Yeah, we shared a guacamole and got margaritas. I'm like, thank God there's someone here who respects Mexico, because everyone else doesn't.

Although now I see and fix this next, which we're going to talk about today. It's a tequila gimlet. Talk to me about this.

Oh, my God, I love gimlets. Have you ever had one? No. So it's a margarita without the sugar. And so gimlet is.

A popular old drink, and all it is is a freshly squeezed lime in the pure essence of it over ice, and then the liquor of your choice. So you could have a vodka gimlet or a tequila gimlet. It's I'd say one quarter to one third lime juice, freshly squeezed, maybe a little splash of club soda, but that's for weaklings. And then your tequila or alcohol of choice. And to me, it's the essence of a margarita without that sweetness that can get you kind of puckering and a nasty hangover.

That's the best part. I know. Because a bad margarita, they're really too sweet.

Way too sweet. And they're packed with color. And you know that's true. Yeah.

Okay. We're gonna have to do a. Like a five year reunion. I think of this. Of this dinner.

So I just got into old. Yeah, we should. We. First of all, we should do that. And I've moved even on further now to old fash.

So we got a bar at our house. And here's a tip. If you don't want to drink, don't get a bar for your house.

That's a good one.

Yeah. So I'm this closet mixologist, and now making drinks and to really nail the old fashioned, I had to go for probably 30 to 40 iterations. And you can't leave a drink, like, abandoned. So.

By the way, it wasn't like I drank made 40 old fashions in one night. This was over months. But then I really nailed it. And then it tastes so good. It's like, I can't just have one old Fashioned. I gotta make it for everybody. So I noticed I was drinking more because of my old fashioned penchant.

Totally. And then when you have this obsession and then you start to look forward to it, probably you're like, hey, where's that?

Oh, totally. You get the fireplace going. And I'm a college football fan. If there's football, a fireplace, and a bar, it's like, oh, my God, game over. It's heaven for me. But it's also dangerous because I won't stop easily.

Well, I'm happy to know. So this is the secret sauce that has you, like, churning out such brilliant books.

Yeah, he's drinking.

Okay, we are going to get into your newest book, Fix this next. The subtitle is make the vital change that will level up your business.

And that's very podcasty. Vital change.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, speaking of which, if you don't listen to Mike's podcast, Entrepreneurship Elevated, right?

Yes. Yes.

You have so many. It's so funny. Like, you just talk about having fun with the podcast. You're like, there's a soundboard. It's incredible.

Yeah. Yeah. And we play games. We. We do name the fake product. And I make up a fake product among two other absurd products, but they're real and be able to guess it. And what's happened, Jenny, is it's caused this. This bifurcation of our listeners. We have. Half the community is like, I just love the content. I just want to hear the interview. Another half, it's like, I don't even listen to interview. I just to the game and the horsing around. So now we have. We split this community. We got to figure out how to manage both.

Well, it is really funny, and I was just about to bring that up because there are some times where I'm like, okay, skip, skip, skip. And I get to the meat of it. And then there are other times where it's so entertaining and it has nothing to do with you. It's like, whatever mood I'm in. I know you've said that, because it is. I could see how you'd have two different types of listeners, but are in different moods.

Totally, totally.

They're very distinct.

Yeah. And totally. And what we think is the new format that we're considering is changes that the beginning part is just the interview and we get right into it. And then the end part is the fun and joking around because we kind of pack on both ends like an Oreo cookie. There's a little joke around, fun in the beginning and the end, and the cream's in the middle, but it's a little bit hard to skip and navigate. So that's our little tweak where.

I love that. I really love that. And then. And then, as Neil Passricho calls it, the end of the podcast club. So then when you're joking around at the end, the people who have listened heard the interview. They're in the end of the podcast club. They just.

I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, my wife listens to Dax Holly. Dax Shepard. And so I just. I've been listening closely to that, and it's just interesting how they package it.

I was just thinking about that show because he does a great job, surprisingly, even if any of you listening were not previously a Dax shepherd superfan, his podcast is amazing.

It is.

And they have his. He calls his soulmate, which I wonder what his wife thinks about that. Kristen. Her last name is escaping me. She's famous. What the heck is his last name?

Oh, Dax. Kristen. Oh, shit. Oh, my God. This is. Do not Google it. Whatever you do, do not Google it, because one of us is going to shout it out.

Someone in momentum. I can Pict.

Or her face.

I know, too. She's in.

No Googling. Yeah. Promise. No Googling. We just got to think of it.

I'll not Google. We need to call for an assist. But basically Dax says, and now for the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman. And I wonder, like, what is your. Does your wife. Is your wife cool with that? But they do a great fact check, and she definitely calls out anything that he might have gotten wrong. So if we had a fact checker right now, they would be laughing at us and ready to go.

Yeah, that's right. They do the fact check. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And I don't know, you know, the soulmate thing, like, I. I think it can be perceived two ways. I think people can perceive romantically, but a soulmate really just means, I think, in simpatico in a extraordinary way, but not necessarily around romance right now. So I see how they could be.

You're cool with it? Well, it's just such a singular expression. My soul. It's not like one of my soulmates or, you know, that's why I would. It's just funny every time I hear it. But, hey, kudos if I'm with you. We have so many. My friend Penny, we've done a bunch of podcasts, calls them soul groups or soul travelers. Like, there's really a group that all of our souls have reincarnated together. You. I started to say the intro, how much you've changed my life. I just specifically want to call out. And what's funny is that I actually blurbed Prophet first when you republished it. And even at the time I wrote that blurb, I had yet to fully. I mean, I was way into it, but it's a gift that keeps on giving. So I have profit firsted my business, then I clockworked it, and that was like the whole theme of 2019. And every time you write a new book, I'm just jumping for joy because I voraciously consume it. I can't put it down. And these are business books, people. Okay. Still, I can't put it down. So Fix this Next came out. I was like, yes. We immediately are doing it for the Momentum Book Club, which. This is our second pilot episode. Momo is on live. They get to come off mute and ask questions in the second half. So we're book clubbing it. I wrote to my team, like, everybody needs to read Fix this Next. And they've just been my solace, my comfort, my guides, and most of all, like, this stuff really works. It works.

Thank you. Now I think you're, like, my soulmate.

At least I'd be honored if that were true. You're my soulmate, but you're the one that's guiding me from afar, so it's.

One of those situations.

So thank you for saying that. First of all, I'm honestly, truly flattered.

I don't know if I'll ever get tired of that. I've been so blessed now to meet readers and hear their stories of success, and I thought at a certain point I'd get numb to it, but it hasn't. Actually, the reverse has happened.

I kind of feel like when Taylor Swift walks into a stadium and she does that, like, oh, my God, that's how I feel. And I think she's being legit, because I'm experiencing that, too. It actually is so surprisingly exciting and happy, I feel. But what the essence is and kind of the secret behind the scenes here, every book I've written is something that I get inquiries from readers About. And this is the big. And I also need it for my own business. Like, I needed to figure out how to be profitable in the worst effing way. I needed to figure out how to run a business efficiently and implemented it. And what I found is when you write a book like you wrote pivot, when you write a book, you got to live by those principles. Otherwise you're seen as a charlatan. And you know that's not the right word, charlatan. But if I like, if I'm not doing clockwork, people like, what if I'm not? If I don't, could you imagine I don't use profit first my own business. Yeah, everyone else needs it. But I don't. Like, no. Like, I live by every book I write. So it's become this, the ultimate enforcement mechanism for fixing the things I need to fix.

I 100% agree. I've always said when you sign on to write a book because the book kind of chooses you as this. At the same time, it's a soul thing. And you just sign up for that front row seat to whatever that topic is. Like if you, if you thought you were an expert when you started writing the book, just wait and see what shows up in life and business during the book writing journey. Because that's when it really gets locked.

In and there's, it's so bizarre. Like I'll be writing and then.

I have to start researching things because you need a story, right? So I'm writing something, I'm like, oh, how does this play out in like basketball, for example? And then so I go down these. They're not even rabbit holes, they're research holes. So here's an example. And I'm not sure which one of my books I included it in, but I was.

Working on one of my books and I said to myself, what would they do in basketball to simplify? So I think it was clockwork. What would make the process more simple? And so I typed in like simplifying basketball. And through this.

Kind of rambling research, I come across this guy, I can't remember his name now, Pete somebody, who was the last NBA basketball player to throw underhand. A granny style, you know, he's bending the knees and. And he was one of the most prolific scoring basketball players of all time. And it was because of this technique, throwing underhand. Well, I don't know if it's Magic Johnson or Kareem Dul Jabbar, but some famous basketball players. Only one basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game. So that's unheard of happening one game. And in that one game, say it was Magic Johnson, in that one game, actually threw underhand. Now, you don't use underhand on the court. You use it when you're doing the free throw shots. But the underhand throw, the mechanics are so simplified. So if you throw overhand a basketball, you have two hands on it, you have your guide hand. So I'm right handed. My right hand would be the throwing hand, my left hand, my guide hand. Both elbows are bent, it's over my head. I'm looking up, I have to bend my knees and I push up with my knees, I extend my elbows and flip my wrists. So there's all these different kind of joints that are moving at one time. Well, underhand, you actually grab the ball over top. That's the key. So it's not under the ball, it's over the top of the ball and you grab it and you simply bend at your back. You bend your knees slightly and then you keep your arms extended in a perfect vertical, taut line and you throw the ball and it gets this backspin. But now the mechanics are you're moving your knees and you're moving your shoulder joints, but nothing else. No wrists, no elbows. And it reduces the variables and therefore the effectiveness and is so much higher. I was like, oh, my gosh. So I include that story and I continue to research it. And I must have spent hours and hours researching and making some calls to learn about this process. And that's what I love about authorship.

Authorship. It turns on these things like I would never have experienced or researched otherwise.

Speaking of metaphors, you also, on that note, researched beehives.

Yeah, I did.

In Clockwork, the central metaphor is a beehive. But more specifically, finding one's own queen bee role, what's the role that you and only you can do? Your unique genius and how do. And I love how you say in that book the queen bee role is a role. It's not a person. It's not. So I. Jenny, I'm not the queen bee, even though it feels that way of my business, I'm in the queen bee role, similar to you, of thought, leadership and big ideas and systems, smart, simplified systems and strategies that really make a difference. So we're very similar in that way. And I love how you describe your journey. And I've watched you on this journey of I didn't know you when you started your big multimillion dollar businesses. But even with those, you say sometimes you have the Same problems, but with more zeros on the end. You were still finding your ups and downs in this big roller coaster and getting in debt, getting out of it. And then in more recent years, you've recognized that your queen bee role that you're serving is really ideas and books and specifically ones that have super practical tools that help eradicate entrepreneurial poverty.

Wow, you really. Yeah, you know, my whole shtick.

I got your shtick. But yeah, I'd love for you to talk about making that transition for you as a business owner and how you've structured your life and your work to honor that role for yourself.

So, you know, the queen bee role you nailed it is not a person and it's not even there. Our own individual, individual zone of genius is really what the organization's zone of genius is, which in a small business is typically the owner. So that runs in parallel. But at a certain point, if we want to leave our business in respects to having as a job and be a true owner of the business, the business needs to own that zone of genius. And so the qbr, by the way, I translated that. It's called biomimicry. Biomimicry is where you look at Mother Nature and you translate what she's done back to business or some aspect of your life. And the argument for the power of biomimicry is Mother Nature has spent billions of years figuring out something.

Instead of us spending 10 minutes and shooting from the hip, why don't we take billions of years of research and employ that?

The analogy with beehives are bees are very efficient at scaling and the critical role, or the queen bee role of a beehive is the production of eggs. That's what matter. The confusion with queen bees and also in business is, oh, that means the queen bee is the most important bee, which she's not. She's just serving the most important role. If she fails to produce eggs, they will spawn a new queen bee and get rid of the prior one. So in my business, as I was doing this for myself, you're writing a book, you're held accountable to your own book. We looked at our queen bee role. I found a way to identify it, by the way, for businesses that I didn't include in the book. I only found this out afterwards and I'm.

Pseudo desirous of rewriting that book, doing a revised and expanded version. I'm just not there yet. There's a few more things I want to nail down, but the quicker way finding it is to identify what is the promise of Your brand, like, what's your company's promise to the world? It's got to be a singular promise. The biggest promise, the guarantee, the commitment to whatever you want to say. And so as an author, for me, I realized that my commitment is to make entrepreneurship simple or simpler, to simplify the journey. So with that commitment, entrepreneurship made simple, I even have that on my website now, that promise, I ask of all the things that our organization does, what one activity, and the QBR is always a singular activity, what one activity most supports that commitment to our clients? And for me, it's writing books. I need to write books that make entrepreneurship simple. Now, just like you, I use public speaking. I do podcasts, we send out drip campaigns with videos and a little bit of content here and there. All these things are contributing to making entrepreneurship simple. But of all those things I do, only one can be the most important. And so I could say it's writing books. I could say screw writing books. You know, no one really reads anymore. I'm really going to crank up my speaking engagements. I'm really going to be just speaking all the time and I'll write books, but they'll be crappy because I'm not going to spend time on it. I would argue in that case, I've now compromised my qbr. I'm saying, yes, let's not produce eggs anymore. Let's just live in the beehive. I will start to very quickly get a reputation as a bad author or poor author. Like these books are hack jobs put together. Yeah, he does public speaking, but his books suck. And my career, my business, over time would start to degradate and then die out. The QBR provides the survival mechanism for the organization or the thriving mechanism. The flip scenario is too. I could say I'm going all in on the books. Actually, I'm going to stop speaking. I'm not going to do any more podcasts, but I'm going to write life changing books. I'm going to put every ounce of my energy there. I'd argue my business may not scale the same way, but because I've devoted myself to writing excellent books, the heart of the organization stays constant and therefore the organization will stick around. So it was that realization of the importance of books. There's one last part is I've also realized I painted myself in the corner because I'm the one writing the books. And if I'm the one writing the books, the day I stop doing it, the organization stops delivering on its qbr. So I can make two choices now. I can continue to write the books myself or I can find a way to do it alternatively. And one option is ghost writing, but I mean you hire someone else to write your books, but it's just, it's so inconsistent with who I am that the authenticity would be lost and the books would not be the quality. So that's not options out. But I discovered another option. There's these book series, like the Four Dummies series, for example, and they're written by different books, but it's under one genre. So I'm like, oh, I could write the four Entrepreneur series. So I gave my first stab at this. I wrote a book called Profit first as you were talking about earlier. And now there's three or even four published derivative versions of Profit First. There's Profit first for attorneys, Profit first for contractors, Profit first for E commerce providers written by different authors under my brand, but required 1/1,000th of the effort because it was just giving them a little bit direction on an outline and their officer races. But I still derive the core deliverable. I'm still benefiting a community now a specific community. It's still expanding. The brand is still generating more revenue. I don't have to do the work myself. So that's how I, you know, at the end of the day, we have to make a choice. Once we identify clearly what the QBR is, do we want to serve it ourselves, which keeps us trapped because you can't grow beyond that. The company is stuck. Or are we willing to release the QBR for other people to do?

That's what's been so interesting to watch in your journey, at least from what I've seen the last few years where you almost now have these sub businesses.

Yes.

So there's a clockwork business, there's a profit first business. And now I see you shaping the fix this next business. And I know you, Mike, have a shell company called Obsidian Launch.

I do.

But are you. What's it like running all these sub businesses or have you taken yourself out so effectively that other people really own them and you have some kind of revenue share?

Yeah, so I have in the different businesses to different degrees, have removed myself. I will tell you the ultimate shortcut to do this, but may I say that's a cliffhanger. It's actually just a changing of one word which has been of the greatest impact on me and how my businesses operate. Literally just changing one word. So I'll share that as my big cliffhanger story. So.

My business is I don't operate them for every business there is a president, including for Obsidian Launch, which is simply a shell company. So I wrote a book called the Pumpkin Plan. There is a company that acquired the rights and gave me a licensing fee for that and then pays me a percentage of the revenue. What I need, my sole responsibility back to that organization is to sell as many, as many Pumpkin Plan books as possible. Because the greater the awareness around the Pumpkin Plan, the more consultants they bring on Private first. The exact same arrangement, a little bit different. I actually have equity in that business, but that was just how we had to structure it. But there's a president for that company and that person's responsible. His name is Ron. Is responsible to grow profit first to its greatest effect. And I share in the revenue. Clockwork, which has been the most efficient, no coincidence there, but the most efficient transfer of a business. It was acquired by the license for Clockwork is acquired by Adrienne Dorison, a entrepreneur in Florida and built Run like Clockwork, her own organization around the license. And.

Their first full year into it achieved a million dollars in revenue by providing training classes around Clockwork.

They did is they buy the license, there's an upfront fee, and then pay me a percentage of revenue into perpetuity. And my job is to.

Simply promote the books because the more the platform grows and the more awareness is around by that stuff. Someone reads a book, then the first question people have after reading a business book is am I doing it right? People read Profit first. Okay, I read profit first, but am I doing it right? Or am I even doing it? I read Clockwork, but am I doing it right? So these training companies and consulting organizations become the outlet for it. And the last step was with Obsidian, which is the holding company for all the different books and licenses.

And certain I call pet projects or guinea pig projects because I'm writing a new book now and we need to start guinea pigging it today. And so Obsidian is the test bed for it. And we're doing activity around that. That company has a president, her name's Kelsey Ayres and she runs the company. The day to day operations, the hr. She leads all of it. And here's the cliffhanger. So I used to call myself an entrepreneur. My favorite word, it still is my favorite word in the English language. But the word entrepreneur has become so bastardized with hustle and grind and hard work and sacrifice and all this stuff. It's become the perception of entrepreneur is the polar opposite of what it was. An entrepreneur is someone who organizes the resources around them to Achieve a vision. So they organize their employees. If you have some, your clients, your vendors, your technology, all that stuff to achieve an outcome that you have set. And since it's now it's turned to hustle and grind, I'm like, I don't want to be the person carrying the business on my back. I've taken on a new label and it's shareholder. And so this is what I'm now challenging entrepreneurs. Jenny to use. I challenge you too, Jenny. Next time you're like a cocktail party or something and someone says what you do, don't say, I'm an entrepreneur or an author or any of those things. Say, you're a shareholder in a small business and watch that person spit out their tequila gimlet going, what.

The hell's that? And my response when I started saying this was the same. Like, I don't even know what I just said. But what a shareholder is like, I own stock in Ford. When Ford sends me a distribution check, I don't go back down to Ford and say, hey, I got to work for this. I got to work a few hours. What I do with Ford as a shareholder is I simply render my opinion through votes, and then they send me a distribution check. Well, that's what my business is. That's what I want my businesses to do. That I render influence over them. Direction, ideas, thoughts, votes. And then the business returns a paycheck to me. I don't want to be working within my business at all. And so that's. I changed that term. I started to behave more and more consistently at that. Now, one last thing. The beautiful thing about being a shareholder in a small business is you have the right to insert yourself in the way that gives you joy. And I love to write books. I love doing the call we're doing right now. I hope people are getting value, but I'm just love bullshitting and talking about this stuff. And so as a shareholder, I have the freedom to do what I want when I want with my business, but I'm not beholden to support my business.

That's such a powerful change. And I can see exactly how you've made that transition and even how you define financial freedom is that you've accumulated enough where your money makes money. And that hustle, grit, grind, as you call it, trying to keep up with the entrepreneur Joneses.

Oh, you like that?

Yeah, I loved that. I laughed out loud.

Penguin wanted to cut that out. What is that funny? I think we had the same editor writing your book. So the funny thing is they're a wonderful company. I love them. And my editor was extraordinary. The thing is, they're not entrepreneurs. So when I saw that they're like, no one will know what an entrepra Jones is.

I'm like, oh, it's so good. Oh, my God.

I'm like. But it's.

It's this.

This need that. This necessity we have as entrepreneurs to keep up with more than just our neighbors. It's our. The other entrepreneurs you can never satisfy. Like, you don't get that. Like, no, we don't think anyone will. I said we're freaking keeping it. So that's one of like 10 or 13, 10 to 15 things I fought for to keep.

Thank goodness. Because those little bon mots make your books so funny and personal. And Entrepreneur Jones is. Oh, my. We talk about this in momentum all the time of looking at what other people are doing and trying to pull back from other people's launches or best practices or.

Oh my God, it's the worst thing to do. Yeah. And so many people. Because it is the Entrepreneur Joneses. There's so much bullshit going on. There's so much. So many people report their stuff and it's just. It's chalked up with ego and artificialness and maybe not even with negative intent or harmful intent, just with proudful intent. And then the next person says, I got to do that plus some. And then it's such a dangerous trap.

Well, and shout out to Sarah Santa Croce, who's in momentum. She has a podcast called the Gentle Business Revolution where she's debunking all of that.

That's so cool.

And then I don't have to tell you, you wrote profit first and you say it again and fix this next, that the definition of profit is cold, hard cash that the shareholders, there's that word. Can use for themselves in any way they want, such that using it will not negatively impact the continued healthy operations of the business. That's a long thing for me to weave in to say that so much of the entreprageones people are reporting top line revenue, not profit. You can make a million dollars. Look what happened with WeWork. You can earn a billion dollars, but if you spend 2 billion, you have no profit. You're in the red. And that does not get clearly stated on a lot of these online businesses.

Of course not. No. And it is. It literally is that simple. It's the revenue and the money left over which is the profit. And we think there's a lot more complexity. But if you make one Bill and you spend two bills, you're done. Stick a fork in you. And what I think also is people don't understand. I didn't. And so when I say people, I'm talking about me. I didn't understand that sales translates directly to stress. And here's what I mean, here's the effect, and I'll tell you how it gets there. So the more sales your organization has, the more stressed out the owner is. Inevitably, and in the most cases, if they haven't mastered profit, it's a sure thing. Here's the reason. Sales translates to organizational responsibility. The more stuff my company sells, the more responsibility put on my organization. I have to deliver on the goods or services. Well, the more goods or services I have to deliver, the more weight the entrepreneur carries, because most entrepreneurs are in the grind and hustle mode. So more sales, more organizational stress, which means more owner stress because they're the superhero swooping in and which means the owner is going home having near heart attacks and or literal heart attacks. The problem is we're ignoring profit. And many businesses think that we can sell our way to profit, which is even worse. We're saying we can stress ourselves out even more and one day some profit will magically arise. So I'm not impressed. I used to be, but I'm not impressed when a company says they do 1 million or 10 or 50 or 100 million. Actually, I just had some in my office. I go with a $300 million company and listen, I don't roll my eyes and say, oh, I don't think they're bragging. They just told me the fact. But I asked them, I said, hey, what's the real number? It was funny. The person says, I have a $300 million company. Oh, that's great. But I'm really curious about the real number. How profitable is it? Oh, it's a shit year. We're not doing so good. I'm like, okay, so the reality is you have a business that's not doing so good. Now that's something we can work with and resol if we hide behind the gross revenue. It's just a fog. It's just a smoked mirror.

Thank you for sharing that. And that's profit first is you have to set the profit aside first for yourself. And by the way, if you go to the show notes for this episode, listeners. Pivotmethod.com 160 I'm going to give you my financial modeling template, which has some profit first tabs. Always with you. Credit to you, Mike. So Always has a link to the book.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Don't worry. But I, I found it helpful to pencil these things out. And even someone asked a question about what banks I use that's not in the spreadsheet. But you can get the sheet pivotmethod.com160 and before we open it up because this is our momentum book club of the month. And like I said that Momo's on live and they'll get to ask questions here soon. You were mentioning something that even you struggled with and that's what's so wild about running a business. And. And I had this aha. When I was reading Clockwork. But you really said it explicitly in Fix this Next. And in Fix this Next you say the DNA for all businesses is nearly identical. It's the same problems with the extra zeros at the end. And you said when it comes to marketing and branding, different is good. But in the basic structure, all businesses have the same biology.

That's right.

Now, 2019 was my big year of stepping back, restructuring, creating more systems, more scale. Clockworking with E Myth revisited. Built society. Clockwork. You know, I had this really powerful combination of books. And I have to say, Mike, I got a little deflated at one point because I'm like, I've been here struggling for eight years to do something that is already outlined in every single one of these books. That my business is, no, it's not unique. It is not different. What the hell have I been doing for these last eight years? And I was just kind of honestly embarrassed that I even worked at Google. I went back, I listened to one of their early their earnings calls, and I went and looked at the org chart as it was in 2006 when I started. And I thought I worked at a company that is one of the most successful in history. And I still, why couldn't I figure out these departments for my own business?

I was frustrated. So now you're turning into my business therapist. But I know you shared a story, a similar one of a guy that been in business 13 years. That was like.

A. Yeah, yeah. Why do we struggle if it's all. So if all businesses have 98% same DNA.

Yeah. So you're very human. That's the label. We all do that. And I think the reason we struggle is it's human nature to throw complexity at difficulty. So when we are not achieving a result we want in the time we want, we will throw complexity at it, saying, oh, the solution. I haven't achieved the solution where Actually, we just haven't had the persistence or patience. So a lot of businesses throw complexity. The second thing is it's human nature to get into routine, which then becomes habit. And habit is a very comforting thing. There's a phenomenal book by Charles Duhigg called Power of Habits. He talks about this click whirl process we go through and basically we'll do behavior repeatedly because there's always a reward, even if the reward looks like a negative consequence. So if someone smokes, I think he used that example. Everyone knows if you're a smoker, the consequences ultimately your demise in potentially a horrific way. But the reward, of course for smoking is not the long term considerations, it's the near team term is like, oh, I felt a little bit chill, but relaxed, maybe cool, whatever the psychological benefits are. So there's a short term, there's always a short term reward. So in business struggle, there's a short term reward. A lot of us that are in this kind of superhero mentality where we swoop in and do things, you get that pat in the back from someone in the office, or you give yourself a pat on the back, wow, I swooped in and saved the day again. It's the worst thing you do for your business long term because it's so dependent upon you. I swooped in and fixed the day again. So I give myself a pat on the back. So maybe get stuck. Many of us get stuck in that pattern. Then to get out of it, we say, well, I've been stuck here so long, if I want to get out of this can't be a simple change. It has to be complexity. Because we always default to complexity. The only way to support complexity is by saying, well, my business is so different, so odd, no one can figure it out. And that's why I haven't figured it out. We put all these justifications and reasons, what I found in my research, both anecdotal and technical, that I would say 99% of businesses, all businesses are identical. So you could take a pizza shop and you could take a proctologist and you could take a manufacturing plant and I would say 99% of the process the same. They're all actually manufacturers. All of them are taking an input of ingredients. Could be the patient, could be the dough, it could be the, the items. It's going through a sequence of activities and then delivering an end product or emotion. So the end product for a consulting business, like if I'm an accountant, what I'm delivering at the end of the day is Maybe not a physical manufactured product, but I'm definitely creating an emotion of confidence, of direction or whatever the sensations are. And it's the 1% that is unique, but that's like humanity. Like if we, if we did the biological makeup of me and you and a thousand other people at the most molecular level and went through all of us, we'd see that we're 99% the same. It's only the 1% that we see the difference. Oh, male, female, because you can see the external effects of that. You can see the skin color, height, weight, but that's literally the 1% of the difference. But that's the visual, outward facing part. And so businesses are the same when we look at them from the outside, we see the 1% different, the weight, the sex, the skin color. And we place this judgment of that's a very unique business, it's very different. And even internally say we're very unique, you know, every person's unique. And the reality is that's bullshit. People aren't that. I mean, we are unique in that 1%. There's a massive amount of differences there. But when it comes to the essence of the human makeup, we're the same. When it comes to the essence of business makeup, we're all the same. And the advantage here then is, you know, for humans, medicinal care, it's pretty much the same. If you have a headache.

Everyone can take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Like it works for basically everybody. And the reason is because we're all made the same. Could you imagine each person was unique and if they had a headache with Android, had their own medicine, it would never work. This is true for business too. When a business has its proverbial headache.

The medicinal solution is the same as aspirin or ibuprofen is the exact same thing. So we just have to be careful about how jaded we are about what we see on the skin of a business and really appreciate that we're really all identical.

And I think it's also.

Momentum is a community for heart based business owners. And so I talk about the difference. Oftentimes our businesses are not started with scale in mind, ultimate scale, or even being a shareholder. It's a personal need connected to a personal mission. And at least in my case, a was delivering services for the good first half of the business. Prior to pivot coming out. I was coaching, I was speaking. And as you said, even though I couldn't say this at the time, all those sales translated to me delivering more rather than Working on the business, which is what 2019 was about.

You know what's so funny is.

Many businesses are founded with an ideology. Maybe that's a version of a heart based business, yet we skip to that component. So in fix this next I had those five levels of the business hierarchy of needs. And I would say when it comes to that ideology, we're talking about the impact level, the legacy level. But before that comes sales and profit and order. And many businesses skip that. Now in the most common or traditional definition of a ideology based business, I think of not for profits. We want to eradicate cancer, we want to help homeless people. And they have this ideology. Well, they skip this impact they're having on their community right away. But they ignore sales, which for not for profit is donations, funding, that's the equivalent of sales. They ignore profitability which even, and I've worked with not for profits, it is astonishing how they don't grasp they have to be profitable, that is their sustainability. They got to run a business that actually is able to retain money to support the doors, the doors being open in the future. And they don't work on efficiency. So what they try to do is they build this massive ideology and it's like building a structure. If you're going to build a five story structure and you start building this massive fourth floor, but there's no foundation and there's no first, second and third floor to put it on. When you drop the fourth floor on thin air, it comes crashing down and everything smashes. And that's why the failure rate is so high for not for profits, but that's why the failure rate is so high for profits because they also go in with an ideology, ignoring the necessity of sales and profit and organization order. I would argue these hard based businesses, the impact you're having is so important, but you can't do that without these other elements. They're a necessity. And the greater the impact you want to have, the greater you have to be at sales and profit and order. And if you ignore those components, stick a fork in you, it's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time before it's going to collapse.

Right before it'll collapse or you, the founder, are burnt out and I know.

And resentful, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not sustainable. And in fact there's some, there's so much good stuff here. I wish we had five hours together. But the business hierarchy of needs is a pyramid that Mike has translated from Maslow's hierarchy to your Business. And just to recap for listeners in order, it starts with sales. Without that you don't even have a business profit order, impact and ultimately legacy. And what I love actually related to this is that the first question of the whole pyramid is lifestyle congruence. Do you know what the company's sales performance must be to support your personal comfort? And I finally made a calculator for that in the spreadsheet that I've shared that this the show notes for 160. But I didn't do that like I never got crystal clear. And for me I think that's the problem. When you start out as a solopreneur or slash kind of a freelancer, you associate any check that comes into the business as mine. A check that comes in, I own. I, Jetty Blake own. No, it's not like that. So now I'm an S corp. I put myself on salary. I personally am only going to see a small part of that check because it goes to the operations of the business, the taxes, the profit account, which I have, you know, and so the calculation and the number ultimately needs to be much higher to say, oh, what am I going to take home? Not just to survive and live paycheck to entrepreneurial paycheck, but to support personal comfort.

Yeah, I got a call from Jacob Limmer, so. Jacob Limmer. So here's one thing I do. I don't know, Jenny, if you do this when I'm working on a book, I invite in my readers totally gratis. I mean they got to pay for their travel, but invite them in for a day or two, even workshop where I'm just going to. I tell them I'm going to share my most raw thoughts and ideas and I want you to guinea pig and experiment with them. So it could be good, it could be disaster. I want your critical feedback. So I did this as I was writing Fix this. Next we do it and I think about 30 people showed up and Jacob Lemmer is sitting there in the back. He owns a roastery, which ironically I mentioned in the book. He mocks the name of roasteries even though he owns one. He makes coffee and he owns two coffee shops in South Dakota. They've been around for I think it's 13 years. And I talked about this lifestyle congruence and the necessity to correspond the sales of an organization back to the founder or owner's needs. And my argument is the reason business owners start a business is typically for two reasons, either one or the other. In most cases, I found a combination One is to do something that brings them joy. So as a heart based business, you experience joy as you are of service or of impact to others. You get joy out of the work you do as you experience it, as you see the effect it's having. Second part for most or all business owners is then the impact on their financials. Financial the definition of that could be financial freedom where we don't need to worry about day to day survival. So it's impact or to be of service and to experience financial freedom. And I said to ensure this financial freedom component, you need to know what you need for your base survivability, the base level of comfort actually. So you're not worried? I'm not saying like if, if you could make all the money in the world, how would you spend it? And all the things you do with it really just to support your current lifestyle as you define it as comfortable. What is it? Jacob, being such a great student, he goes, I'm going to do this. He goes, I don't believe in it.

He reported back just his thoughts about hemming and hawing and this is bullshit. He goes, I've been in business for 13 years, I really have to figure out how much I have to make at home. But every time he went through the fix, this next analysis, it kept on pinpointing, you don't know what you need for your home. And he came up with what he called the Midwest lifestyle. He lives in the Midwest, South Dakota and determined that he's got a family, I think of two or three kids, $4,000 a month as adequate to support a lifestyle of base comfort for him and his family. Roof over the head, food on the table.

Enjoying the basics of life. And he called that number Midwest comfort. In New York City, that number is probably a different number. But he goes, that's my number. Once I had that and then I correspondence to sales, he's like, oh my gosh, our sales are actually at the right number. Like we have enough sales to support this. I'm just not extracting the profit. So it gave him clarity by doing that first step in the sales level. He then realized he had no other sales issues before this. He kept on simply saying, I need to sell more, I'm not making enough, I need to sell more. Once he realized what he needed truly to make, then he realized the sales are adequate to support it, but the profit isn't there for some reason. And you move towards a profit level and subsequently resolve that.

And as you said, when we mistakenly think sales are the problem it actually creates a tremendous amount of more work for the entrepreneur and for the business. And complication.

It's the most common response. It's the most common instinctual response that owners say, I need to sell my way out of this. And that's what my gut's telling me. And what I found is that our gut is a really, really bad compass for a business. For our own self preservation, I think it's actually very effective. But for business preservation, it's not. Because if you look at it from our own vantage point, like, you are neurologically wired into yourself. Like you, Jenny Blake, if you're walking down a dark alley and all of a sudden you feel the heebie jeebies that you're going to get murdered, please turn around and walk out. Because your senses, sight, smell, touch, all those things are trig to give you this emotion saying, fight or flight. Well, go. But we're not neurologically wired into our business. So when we get the heebie jeebies about a business situation.

We are neurologically wired into the business. So we just make this assumption. And the easiest assumption is we need to sell more. Not profitable. We need to sell more. Not efficient enough. If we had more sales, it'd bring about efficiency, not having enough impact on this world. We need to sell more. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur reverts to selling more, which adds more organizational stress and actually puts the company in a more dire situation than a healthy situation.

Thank you for. Yeah, I want to put a pin in this, because as I read the intuition section, I have thoughts on that, and it's something that I thought it was so funny how you said that you're like, you cannot rely on your intuition for your business, maybe for yourself. And I do think there's a way to do that. But. But before we get back to that, if we have time, I want to open it up to Kevin, who's here live in our Momo book club, and Kevin has a podcast on the topic of burnout. So, Kevin, if you could just come off mute, introduce yourself, tell us the name of your show, and I think it really ties in with the person who's at the helm of all of this. So over to you, Kevin.

All right.

Hello. Can you hear me?

We can hear you. All right, great.

Hey, it's nice to meet you, Mike. Nice to meet you, Kevin. Yeah, my name is Kevin Joseph. I'm the host of the podcast Talk Burnout with Kevin Joseph, where I talk to experts about ways to avoid and overcome burnout. Definitely at work. Burnout is a very Prevalent issue. And so talk to people and learn about different ways to avoid that and kind of get a handle on their own business and their own work. So I had a question for you about your book. My favorite parts of the book were the case studies using the Omen method, which I thought was a very practical way of looking at business problems. Can you talk a bit about how you came up with that method? Yeah. Yeah. So. Oh, it's so wild, by the way, Kevin, to hear you and Jenny talking about the book, because the book doesn't. I know this will come out near the book release, but as we're recording this, the book hasn't come out yet. So that's really. To me, this is super cool because, like, you're the first person to ask me about the Omen method.

So it derived from. There's a couple measurement methods. There's one called the okr, which is. Oh, gosh, I cannot remember the.

We used to use it at Google. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Key results.

Oh, yeah.

This is crazy. This happened to both of us twice because he wrote a book on it, but Google had been using it for a long time.

Kristen Bell. Kristen Bell.

Yes.

I knew it would hit me.

Gosh.

Okay, good.

Now you'll get this next one, too.

Yes, I'll get the next one. It'll come to me in about an hour. So whoever wrote it. And then there's smart, which is a very popular one. Specific, measurable, and so forth. Well, Omen is a consolidated version of smart.

But smart was designed to encompass also personal goals. And this is about specific business goals where there's a team element. And smart, which stands for specific, measurable, I think, attainable, realistic, and timeframe. I think that's it.

Smart was always so boring to me, by the way.

Yeah, it's kind of boring and overwhelming. And it's for an individual. So Omen was designed for consideration of a team. Here's what it is. Once you pinpoint the vital need of your business, and we need to. We need that. We're having a problem with our conversion. We get enough prospects. We should have enough prospects, but they're not converting. So we have a conversion issue into making these prospects clients. That's the problem. Then you do Omen, which is the objective. Well, the objective is to increase the conversion, but we would give it detail. So say I'm getting one new client a month. I want to get five new clients a month. Because that would put me in congruence with my sales objectives. Once I understood my lifestyle Congruence. So I need 5 new conversions a month. That's the objective. The M in omen stands for the measurement. How are you going to measure it? And I already kind of specified it. As I was saying, the objective, which is five new clients, we're going to define it by a client, but you give it more specificity once the client makes the payment. So five new clients who've paid, that's the clear measurement of.

The result. E stands for evaluation. And it's really just getting a frequency. What I found in some businesses is we don't set a frequency check in on our numbers. So it's arbitrary. It's like, oh, how are we doing on sales? Like, that's literally the conversation periodically or randomly. So with the evaluation method, we're going to say every week or every. Every day or every hour or every month is the frequency. We're going to check in on it. Maybe for this, where we're looking at how many clients we engage a month, maybe monthly is the right setting, but for something like website traffic and you have a thousand visitors a day, maybe checking every hour is better. I make a change within the first hour. Can we start seeing the impact it has? If I wait a month or two and that change was not effective or is negative, well, holy cow.

I'm in trouble. So E stands for evaluation, frequency, and then N. Nurture is the involvement of the team.

How can we allow ourselves or how can we get insights from our team to drive better results and give ourselves the flexibility to set new objectives or new measurements?

One problem I see people do is they write, you know, the company's going to achieve a million dollars more revenue this year. And it's. They arrive at it, however, and then the business is clearly not making that. Well, they, they then just say, well, we didn't achieve our goal, the nurture goal. The nurture objective is to say, well, hold on, we're not trending toward a million. Why? What's going on? Is there something wrong? Or maybe something's right? Maybe this is the way it should be. We need to set a new measurement. Maybe say that million dollars additional revenue was not the right setting. It should have been 250. And we realized it's because this reason and setting in new goal. A lot of these goals are so static that the result is either we achieve it or we abandon it. And that's a problem. It should be either we achieve it or we determine why we're not achieving it and then reset it. And that's what nurture is about. So it came out of studying these other goal setting methods. And this I found to be the best way to involve a team and to simplify goal setting.

It came to me when you were saying, nurture. John Doerr. Measure what matters.

Oh, gosh, you're on fire.

And I didn't let myself look it up.

No, you can't. That's the rule. That's the rule, Jenny. Never.

I didn't look it up.

John Doer. That's it.

John Doerr. Yeah. Measure what matters.

Measure what matters.

Thank you for going through the Omen method. And you also mentioned something I just want to pull out and highlight, which is the whole point of the book. Fix this Next is about identifying the vital need. And you say like the weakest link in a chain. If one link is about to break, the whole chain is going to snap. And that's often what's happening in our business. So that's the vital need. And then. And then the rest of the book are all these amazing examples using the Omen method. So I'm glad. Kevin, thank you for bringing that up.

It is funny. The weakest link. So I've been teaching now I did a few presentations on Fix this Next. They're still very rudimentary. And as an author at least, what I found is the first year of a book's popularity. There's no speaking like on that topic. It really takes about a full year before people start requesting it for a keynote. But you want to start preparing a year in advance. Presented it and it's so funny. So I talked to this one company. They were a $25 million revenue company. They were, I think, a $6 million in profit.

Right.

So that's the number that matters. That's a 20% plus profit. So it's impressive. And they were just trying to fix everything at once. And I taught this process to them. And the owner, his name was Mike too, coincidentally came up and said, oh my gosh, we gotta find our weakest link. And he then emailed me the next day and just determined. It was in the concept of role alignment. I talk about that in the book too, of getting everyone matched, matching their talents, their capabilities to the tasks that need those talents, as opposed to matching people to titles. Your reception, your president, your sales. No, matching people to their talents. And the impact has been extraordinary on the top line. But also just the engagement of his employees where before he was trying to fix everything. Just back to your point. It's that one link, that one resolve. Strengthen the entirety of the Chain.

Absolutely. And I'm with you. I say on my team, I don't want anybody doing work that drains them. If you don't like the work, I'm not going to take it personally. Let me know. We'll solve the problem, we'll delegate it. We might get rid of it all together. There's no reason that to have talented people miserable.

Oh my God.

No. No. Yeah. Sarah Santa Croce, I mentioned her earlier of the gentle business revolution submitted a question. She said I loved the book and especially the last part on heart and based promoters. It's the only way forward. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the Company of One? That's a book Paul Jarvis wrote and do his systems. Do your systems, Mike, apply to that concept? So what do you, what do you do with people who want to stay small and company.

Yeah. So Company one. I have to. I have not read that book, so shame on me. I have to presume it's about solopreneurs just based upon that title, Micro Business. Right?

Yeah.

So I think the size of a business and the size of impact has no direct correlation. And shame on me if I ever felt that way. I believe the smallest physical size businesses have the greatest impact. And you've seen this, right? You've seen this in individuals that have this heroic impact. I'm just picking arbitrary names and no religious focus but Gandhi or Mother Teresa, like you look at these people and, and I would argue that Mother Teresa probably ran 100 million to a billion dollar practice there in collecting donations, serving the poor, serving community. So they were business people. But their operations, at least my very rudimentary understanding of the impact they'd done and how they did it was an individual. But they all had one big component and it was a big mission, a big purpose that others wanted to be involved in or supported. There's a lot about leadership. Everyone's a leader. Everyone and their mother is a freaking leader today. But I would argue that we all really thirst to follow. I do and I think we all do. And I don't mean that in the negative contents which sadly is perceived like a follower. Oh, you're sheep. Like, oh, you get pushed around. No, I want to.

Get involved in something that speaks to me but without having to create it. Invented support. I just want to contribute in a way I want to contribute. And so when I started this, when I really got clear on my own purpose, which is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. Entrepreneurial poverty is that gap between this perceived success entrepreneurs have and the reality of the struggles, that gap that I call entrepreneurial poverty. And I am committed to close it. As I speak more and more about that and do more and more work around it, there are more and more people who are getting involved in supporting it. Just I think it was last week, last Friday, I did a keynote on Profit First. Yet I think seven keynotes on Profit first were delivered that day because there was other people speaking on it. Two clockwork presentations were done by Adrian's team and so forth. And some of us being on Pumpkin Plan, the work I was doing, but they've taken ownership over it because it's not about Mike's book. It's about this mission to eradicate national poverty. And these people want to follow in a system that's already been developed. They don't want to recreate the wheel, but they see a part of their life's calling is complementing this arena, and they want to complement it by leveraging the system that's out there. So to answer this question a little more succinctly, hopefully, is it's not about how big the business is. It's how big the purpose is. And that has great impact. It's the purpose.

And I think one thing that at least I'm finding is I've always wanted to stay small. Small but mighty but. And sometimes systems and a team actually help serve that purpose. And so it doesn't have to be overly complicated, like growing just to grow or just to keep up with the entrepreneurship Joneses. But for me, at least, I did hit a point where I just wasn't able to have the impact and sort of scale and reach without getting a little more sophisticated in an infrastructure way.

I think small. When we say we want to be small, because I said that too, it translates really into an emotion. There's something behind that. It's really not the size. It means I don't want to.

Be stuck in a bureaucratic situation. I don't want red tape.

I was just thinking that, right.

And clicks. I don't want clicks. So that's when I said, I don't want to be small. I don't want clicks. That was because my biggest business had 30 employees, which is a very small business. But once we passed about 10 employees, it started getting clicking, like the two factions and stuff. I mean, I never want to go there again. And that was one fear.

The other fear was clicks, like on a URL or something.

Oh, no. I click like, yes.

It's massive to me. So.

Right. So I didn't want those type of clicks. And.

So I've been saying, I want to be small, I want to be small. But then once I started to investigate, oh, the reason behind it, no, I don't want to be small. I just don't want clicks to occur. I don't want to ever be in a position again where I need to generate. The stress of generating money, just cover payroll was so overwhelming that my focus was this pant about payroll. We did $200,000 monthly payroll and I remember, like, gosh, if I don't get $200,000 in business in this week, I can't cover payroll. I don't want that. So those are the definitions of it. And that started changing my mentality. I want to have great impact under these parameters where there's no panic about payroll. So cash flow has to be addressed the whole way. And Profit first is doing that now. And no clicks. And so we are very selective of how we hire and how we engage our team to avoid clicks. Now we only have 12 employees today.

So we're not to where I was before, but we're click free as far as I can tell, and staying there because we've been very disciplined about it.

So that's the challenge I put out for anyone that wants to be small. You don't want to be small. You don't want certain things to happen and define those clearly.

That's what it's very reassuring. It's also reassuring for me to hear you say you Even having had 30 employees at one point, the stress of payroll. And I feel that as well. Even with only me on full time payroll. And I'm like, oh, I've got to make payroll every month. And it really changed something once that happened. And I like hearing you. And I just interviewed Michael Mungay Stanier, who's stepping out of the CE role. Wow. CEO role of his company. And I love hearing about those of you. You have so much experience with different businesses scaling back. Like you're always sort of toggling and adjusting.

Yeah, it is comforting. Right. So I like to hear those stories too. There's this misperception. I think it's a human default that I have is looking at a person and filling in their backstory for them. Right. So I'm having dinner with with Dave Ramsey next month. And I had the whole backstory like, here's this billionaire guy and it was easy, but it's not really the story. And he's not always crushing it. Things aren't always flowing. There's struggles and mistakes, but I Filled in the backstory. And I just picked his name because I think a lot of people recognize his name. But it's true for all people I meet.

But we've all gone through these ebbs and flows. So here's something I've done, and I have this on me right now. And I've had it on for the last two years. When I had this realization, to me, this was my big realization about humanity. It's like, oh, my gosh. That infinity sign is the human journey. We keep going, and it's figure eight. And all of us are on the same pathway. And while one person at the moment seems to be successful and one other person is down on their level luck, you know what? They're exactly the same. We're just. We're looking at each other from different parts on this infinity loop. And we can both serve each other. We're just in a different part of our own journey. It's all about sharing. And so.

When I'm much better now than filling in the backstory and saying, oh, life was handed to them and they didn't struggle to realize. Everyone's had their own version of struggles. And there's something to learn from everybody, from everyone I meet, even if they look like they're down or luck, now they got something to share, or if they look like they're successful, now they have something to share. We all just have this pathway. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm kind of rambling a little bit there.

I love the infinity loop as well, the infinity sign. And I've thought a lot about it on the creatives journey, where there are periods of and even the business building journey of super intense productivity. Focus, flow, momentum, we're flying. And then sometimes after a launch, there's total and utter retreat, rest, sometimes burnout, where you just collapse or you're in what Penny and I call a goose state, or you just goose day. You're like, who am I?

What is this?

What is life? I know we're almost out of time, and I'm feeling myself like, jenny, don't ask another question. But I'm actually dying to know, so maybe you can just give us a brief response before we close out. You've written at least a lot of your recent books with a writing partner, AJ who you thank and acknowledgements. Can you just give us a snapshot of what's it like to write with a partner? Just what's your process? I think a lot of people don't want to write alone or they can't Find the motivation to do it. And you've been so successful at it.

Yeah. So, you know, there's this third option. So you can. You can write alone. You can use a ghostwriter who writes for you, or you can.

By the way, I'm with you on the integrity about ghostwriting. Sorry to interrupt. There's a ghost in your book. Like, there's no soul in it.

If you're seeing it. Yeah.

And that person, like. And then. And then you're putting your name on something that. I don't know. It's so weird to me. At least put them as a co author. There's.

Exactly.

Continue.

Yeah. Ghostwriter doesn't work for me. So a co writer is someone who writes with you. And we do it in iterations. So I write the first version of the book, which is this. Not even a book. It's just this ugly vomit of text. And then AJ will come kind of talk. We'll talk about it. AJ will compile it into this much more cohesive flow. And then I'll write stories. And back and forth, it starts ping pong back and forth. The result is a. Well, I'm sorry. The process is arduous. So for me to write a book, the average book takes me five years. And so I have like, people like, how do you turn out a book every year or two if it takes you five years? Well, I'm writing four books right now. Like, there's four different. You know, I have a book coming out April 28th that's fixed next. But I have another book called different is Better that's. I'm preparing for release in 2021, probably another book club.

Different is Better. Yeah. I'm really pumped about this book. Can't wait. And I have the disadvantage advantage coming out. So I have all these books kind of queued up, but AJ and I go back and forth writing on it. And, you know, AJ's job is she's an extraordinary writer, better than I am by far. So she can take. When I write 10 words, she can communicate that in six words as better. She's also is. Beats the drama on simplicity. She is, I mean, to the point of like, I want to pull my now thinning hair out. And she's like, mike, we gotta make this simpler. I'm like, oh, my God, you cannot make it simpler. And back to the drawing board. So she forces me back to the drawing board over and over again. If a concept is not simple enough, it holds me accountable for that.

We've agreed. And it's appropriate that she's not going to be an author of the book. So she's not a co author or author of the book. She's a writing partner. And I give her accolades and attribution in every single book. And she's built a business. She doesn't do it just for me. She does it for other people too. Has built a very successful business doing this.

So yeah, that's. That's A.J. harper. Amazing human, awesome.

I love hearing the details of you do the first messy first draft. And she simplifies. My dad's really good.

He.

We call it Occam's razoring. Because Occam is like the whole principle of Occam's razor is. Yeah, if it can be said.

I know, I know. Occam's razor. Yeah, that's basically what it is. It gets to the most simple form because that's usually solution.

So we call it razoring. Like Ari dad like razor. This one, you know.

Oh, that's cool. Razoring. Yeah, I made for that from you.

Please do. I want to end with a quote from the end of your book. You say your business is the greatest platform for self expression and to be of service. It is a powerful force that when channeled, will deliver the most miraculous experiences to you. If you could leave listeners with 1, 1, fix this next, one piece of homework or something to try when they stop listening, what would it be?

The greatest thing I think they could do is really get clarity on purpose. So I didn't include this in any of my books yet, and I don't know if I ever will, but one of the interviews I did, I don't recall the person's name. As a psychologist, I was asking her, I said, how do you find your life's purpose? Because I was trying to figure out how you translate life's purpose into a business. And she goes, oh, it's the big T or the little ticket. I said, what are those? And she's A big T is a big trauma in your life. She goes, you know, sadly for many of us, we've experienced a big trauma of physical or sexual abuse or financial trauma, something to effect. And she goes, that moment, when you look at it, is a defining moment that many of us will say, I will never allow this to happen to myself or anyone again. She goes, that is a call to purpose to fix this for others and ourselves. She said, there's a little tease. I'm like, what's the little tease? Because that's the drip. Assaults, like, you know, you're picked on in high school or grade school, over and over again. And just a certain point, that building drip campaign of trauma becomes this moment of I will never allow this to happen again or I will fix this, resolve it. There's one third. She goes, there's one other element that can happen for some people too, is the childhood dream. Like the one day I will. She goes, that can come on purpose too. And you know, for me, it was financial trauma.

It doesn't have to happen in your childhood, by the way. It can happen any time in life. But the financial trauma happened to me. And that was the moment I said, oh my gosh, I'm never going to allow another entrepreneur to struggle like I did. I'm never going to allow myself to struggle like that again. And I realized it was more than just financial. It was all these other areas of working my ass off. And those are things I was sacrificing life itself to support business. So I just encourage everyone and spend time finding your purpose. And it's not, at least for me, it wasn't like, oh, next morning I woke up and I got it. I mean, it took years and years of thought. But if you start investing time and thinking about your purpose and maybe you already know, but if you start thinking about it and then you build your business around that purpose, you become unstoppable. Like, I would rather take on Jeff Bezos than take on someone that's. That's devoted to their purpose, that purpose person. Because Jeff Bezos, I'm not picking on Jeff Bezos here, but someone with wealth will exhaust those funds. Purpose is unexhaustible. That is someone that can't be defeated.

Amazing, Mike. Thank you so much. And listeners, don't forget you can get show notes and the template from this episode. Pivotmethod.com 160 and please go out and pre order. This book is out in April, so let's all support Mike's launch. Pre order the book. It's called Fix this. Next. And even better is on launch day leave an Amazon review. So it's out April 28th. And that's I don't think. Well, maybe listeners, maybe you know. But it is such a boost for authors like Mike. And he's been so generous, you've been so generous with your time. And let's help him out as much as we can because Mike, like, the reason I'm still in business is such a large part. Thanks to you. Thank you so much, Jenny.

Thank you. This was so much fun.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter Ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Sam.