Kevin SimpsonCPA Web Books · Founder at CPA Web Books

Mike Michalowicz: My Mission to End Entrepreneurial Poverty

17 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this keynote, Mike Michalowicz declares his mission to eradicate what he calls "entrepreneurial poverty," which he breaks down into four distinct forms: financial poverty, time poverty, marketing poverty, and leadership poverty. He explains each type and links them to his bestselling books—Profit First tackles financial poverty, Clockwork addresses time poverty, Get Different solves marketing poverty, and All In confronts leadership poverty. Michalowicz shares his strategic approach to speaking engagements, choosing to prioritize a limited number of All In talks over the higher‑volume Profit First presentations, emphasizing intentional throttling to focus on impact rather than volume. Throughout, he expresses joy and determination in pursuing this mission.

Chapters

I'm on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. And entrepreneurial poverty, yes, there's financial poverty and that's critical, but there is time poverty, which is actually worse, where people are sacrificing their family and sacrificing their friends and life just for the business. That is atrocious to me. I gotta fix that. That's why I wrote Clockwork. There's marketing poverty where people are afraid or don't know how to give themselves exposure. And that's why I wrote Get Different. And there's leadership poverty where people are either authoritative leaders where they have disdain from their own colleagues or they're wishy-washy and their colleagues don't have any direction. That's why I wrote All In. I have a mission to do all of these things. It brings me such joy. I speak All In. I actually just did a big keynote on that recently, but I'll maybe do 15 or 20 All In speeches this year compared to Profit First where I could have done 70 or 80 if I wanted to, but I'm choosing to do 10 or 15 of those. I am throttling. So if I do something differently, if it was around the money, I would focus more and more on a category, but I'm really freaking happy. So I wouldn't do anything different. I wouldn't do anything different.