Cigars and Coffee w/ TheDM! (Feat. Mike Michalowicz, CEO of FixThisNext!)

One. What's up, everybody? It's your boy Mark Evans, DM here, coming to you live. I'm out of Parkland, Florida. We got Mike. Mike Kalowitz. Did I say that right?

Mike, you nailed it. Yeah, it's not easy.

All right, man. I was laying in bed thinking about that last night. Hey, man, I appreciate you being here. We're gonna have some people coming on. We got a lot of people that'll be popping in here in a second. But first and foremost, man, thank you very much for being here. I'm super honored to have you. I know we got a good friend, Mike Aguilaro, that introduced us, and your books are changing people's lives. My first question for you, man. Why didn't you write the book called Profit Last? That's what all entrepreneurs do.

Yeah. Because it wasn't working for anybody. That's what we were all living by, and it doesn't work.

Yeah, it's funny, man. I used to. I swear, I barely graduated high school, no joke, and never went to college. And I'd fight my accountant. I'm like, I have to make a profit if I don't make money. This doesn't make sense. Why would I do this? That's not how it works. This is how. I'm like, this is not how it works. And then I read Profit first forever ago. When did that book come out?

Actually, Profit first came out about five or six years ago, so I think 2014.

Yeah. I literally sent that book to my accountants, like, everyone that works for me, because I have, like, four different people. I was like, I am not the crazy one. You are. Please read this book, because I still have to fight them still today.

Yeah. It's amazing how people get stuck in tradition, right? Because this is what the schools teach. You know, your accountant likely has spent a lot of time and a lot of money to get a certification. That just drives home. Profit comes last. And it's so pervasive. It's in the bottom. It's in the vernacular. We call it bottom line. We call it year end. All those words mean profit is something for the end. And to your point, it's. It's very simple. It's very rudimentary. If you take your profit first, you'll have it. And. And what's left over is what you can run your business off of. It's that simple.

Yeah. Well, it seems simple. I think it's simple. And I. It's my biggest. It gives me the most anxiety in my companies of everything, like marketing, simple, everything's simple. And then I get to this and I'm like, it seems simple. We sold her for a dollar. We bought it for 50 cents. Didn't we profit something? They're like, at the end of the year, we'll come up to the number, the bottom line rev number. I'm like, no, I can't. I can't do that. So anyways, man, appreciate you being here. We got some people still popping in here. I'm super excited, I think. I mean, I almost feel like you predicted this with your new book, man. Fix this Next.

Yeah, so here's the weird insight. So I wrote Fix this Next specifically for business crisis and more. What I call micro crisis, where, you know, a competitor pops up mark and starts taking your clients. How do you respond to that? Or an employee leaves and hurts the business. But we have what's called macro crisis going on. There's massive economic shifts like we've never experienced before. I'm actually very concerned about how this will affect the world economy for next decade or two that'll play out. But I also see this as the greatest opportunity. So with. With macro shift, it triggers micro crisis. So businesses have to respond a new way. But. But economic shift also causes consumer behavioral change. So the businesses that watch what's going on in the shift and adjust accordingly, stay within your core competency, but delivered in new packaging are the ones who are actually going to have magnificent opportunity, I think.

Yeah, man, I think I love it. My businesses are actually thriving. I'm involved in a bunch of different types of companies. Real estate, media, supplements and such, E comm. Which is. You know, it's funny, my parents have never ordered anything online. This all goes on more people ordering stuff online than they ever have. They're forced to.

Yeah. My dad surfed the Google just last week for the first time and he's like, I need. He needs to get. I don't even know what he was trying to do, but he surfed it. And you're right, it's mandating a new behavior. And if you think about the last economic crisis, the 2008 Great Recession, for most of us, it changed our management of money significantly. We're like, wow, money isn't far growing from trees. And we. You can see in the economy how people were actually much more cautious in purchasing for a decade. And now we're having this punch again. So this will trigger a permanent behavioral shift. But that also is an opportunity. This is the petri dish for entrepreneurship. Like, let's identify what people need now in the new way and let's serve it better than anyone else and we can have explosive growth. The last comment is in recessions, inevitably the most successful companies come out of this period. It's the ones that maintain and sustain the other ones that grow. But as long as we get through this period, there's going to be a drop in competition because a lot of competitors are going by the wayside. There's going to be a new degree of demand, pent up demand, new forms and the people that service service that are going to, you know, jump up and skyrocket.

I'm so excited for what's about to happen over the next 10 years. I think it's going to be very interesting, you know. Mike, how long do I have you for tonight? I didn't even ask you. 30 minutes.

I actually, I want this interview in Sandy. So we have 45 minutes. I've done eight interviews a day on average for the last month. And this is a total joy of mine because there's just so many questions around how we navigate the recession. What do we fix next? So 45 minutes. We got.

No, it's awesome. And I was hoping you're going to be shooting this video from over there by the rocks with the water running, drinking wine over there with your wife, man.

Oh, you saw. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you saw a video so far.

I'm stalking you, man.

This is the, this is the, this is my home office. Not the most glorious thing. It's a, it's a mess right now.

But this is what we got successful people. To me, I, My office is a mess. I'm too busy being successful. I don't have time to clean up my office.

Yeah.

And not only that, I know exactly where everything's at, as crazy as that is.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's true. There has been studies around that. But I put the. You can't see it. My camera won't show. Behind you is the most important things. I have this massive cork board that goes the entirety of my wall, but I have only five significant things up there. And so that's my goal is always in front of me. And then there is a shit storm behind me.

But.

But there is. And maybe that's the definition of entrepreneurship, right? We see forward. We. We do amazing things and then our colleagues behind us like, oh my God, the shitstorm they left that we got clean up.

This is.

I don't go in the office, man. I haven't.

I've not been going to an office since 12-31-05. I've been virgin. So I was virtual thing. So in a real estate investment type company where it's hands, you know, chest to chest, selling and buying and whatever. So for me, like, if I do go in the office, I mess it up, man. I'm a terrible entrepreneur like that. I love people, and I get in there and my blah, blah, blah, blah. And the directors are like, get out of the office now. Everything I just told him, you just undone. So it's like, I heard that. And so I'm like, all right, cool. I know where I look. I stand in this company.

And one. One of the best strategies heard from our mutual friend Mike Gallerio, who literally, I was just talking to about three hours ago. Him and Jennifer were driving down to their shorehouse, and we're just talking about the economic shift. We talk regularly, Michael and I, Mike and I. And he goes. He said to me one day, he goes, the day I stopped asking, how am I gonna get the work done? And who is gonna get the work done? Was a day of a fundamental. It was a fundamental shift. It was no longer about him carrying the business on our back. And that's what many of us do, right? It's about, you know, how about how much do we can tough this out? How much of a hustle and grind can we have? And the problem is that becomes a trap. We're limited by our energy, and what we need to be is unlimited by our mind. And in that simple shift of who can do this? Starts forming strategy. And that's a far more sophisticated way to grow a business.

Yeah, no, absolutely, man. And only that it's more fun. And you can actually. You can grow. You don't have a glorified job. Right, right.

Yeah, exactly.

Is what we're talking about. Again, this kind of a abnormal interview, because I didn't really tell, like, your story about why people should even be here listening to, I guess you.

Yeah. So, well, I got a little graphic, believe it or not. And so I'm gonna hold this up to the screen. Anyone that wants a screenshot, it can grab it. I call it the business crisis trend. And there. Oh, thanks for zooming that up. So just if you want to do a quick screenshot, you can grab it. It's on this website, too. It's no sign of bringing that crap. So if you want to download it, you can get all these resources here. But what I found is there's five stages that businesses go through in crisis, and you'll see the opportunity, Mark, that you and I are talking about on this side and I thought with fix this next and what we're talking about today, I can share a little bit about this. So real quick, and I've been through, this is my third recession as a business owner. So the first stage there, this little dotted line represents a already destabilized economy. We, we've gone into this situation right now with massive debt in the US but global economic destabilization, destabilization. We then have a shock event. So this happened in 2008. 2001, 2001 was, you know, the terrorist attacks.combust and we have recession. 2008, the great recession that was triggered by housing collapse. Now we have 2020. It's Covid. It's triggered economic collapse. And while the government and governments have not defined it as recession yet, all indicators are this is going to be a massive recession. We'll see. But it looks like it's gonna be massive. It usually takes them a year to say oh yes, we're in a recession now.

So yeah.

Okay. Here's what's interesting about this first phase. The shock phase is in the shock phase businesses get startled. So when the terrorist attacks happened, when the dot com bust happened, you saw the stock market tank, but you saw small businesses collapsing because of this inaction says right there. And inaction brings us to a business collapse. You also see this in just human behavior. So this is in a macroeconomic case, it's herd mentality. We replicate behavior. But when it comes to personal crisis, think about like if you were ever in a car accident. You go in a car accident and you have shock, you don't even feel the pain of the accident. Sometimes for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days. The reason is the mind is trying to process all these inputs and it can't. So it starts shutting out elements, causes that freeze up. Well that's what we're seeing and we're pretty much through the shock phase right now. So many businesses just froze up and collapsed or they, they did the next move which is called desperation. So we saw some businesses already collapse. Then the decline actually starts speeding up. When you see the desperation phase, the desperation phase is kind of a stampeding effectors. This overreaction. We saw it with toilet paper Mark, where people are, I need toilet paper. There's a guy supposedly in, in this area who has a garage, a garage, two bay garage full of toilet paper. He's got a 50 year supply to wipe his ass. And the guys, his new problem is like he needs a dehumidification system. He needs 24 hour surveillance, a guard out there to defend his two ply. It's insane.

It is.

But we see this same behavior happening right now in businesses in this desperation phase as they're starting to pursue these loans which already the loans been maxed out. The ppp, the CARES Act. If, and this is our kind of first warning here, if you need a, a relief through a debt, the question is why do you need that relief in the first place? There is something fundamentally flawed with your business. You're incurring too much cost, you've lost your margin, you've lost your sales. But we not need to fix that core issue. So that's the desperation phase. You see businesses overreacting in inappropriate ways. They do big wrong actions here and results in business collapse. My hope is in our, our conversation is we can move to the evaluation and deliberate, deliberate action stage. Evaluation is where we consider what's going on in our business. And I don't know if it's zoomed in well enough, but yeah, it looks good. Oh, it looks good. Okay. So there's two things. There's, there's consideration and there's also stagnation. So the evaluation phase is where we look at our business and say, what's working? Let me do more of that. What's not working, let me do less of it. So some businesses get into stagnation though during this phase and they do analysis paralysis. They're like, you know, I could do this, I could do that. And so you start freezing or taking small wrong actions and the business goes out. So my goal with fix this next is to help you through evaluation and move to deliver action. Deliberate action is where we start taking step after step in the appropriate direction to move our business through the challenge and out here. Here's an example. Restaurants are shutting down. So I did a call with restauranteurs about two weeks ago and many of the restaurateurs like we're out of business, we've lost everything. And I'm like bullshit. You've lost the old form of business. But you still have your client and prospect list. What can we offer them? And we started ideating using a technique we call one step back. I can share how to do that, but we came up with this concept of do cooking classes. You have a pent up demand from the past of people that had your 10 favorite menu items. Let's now do a cooking class for this those prospects and sell them a cooking class on how to prepare your 10 menu items and do it over 10 weeks and now you have a recurring revenue stream. So that's the kind of deliberate action we need to take. And the, the starting point is evaluation. What's working, amplify it, what's not working, decrease it or diminish it, and then move forward with singular direct action. The final phase that we talked about is called the surge. Sometimes it's called the burst, but the surge stage. And this moves you onto business continuance and growth. The surge stage. There's an interesting phenomena happening. There's gonna be pent up demand, but also many customers use this moment as an excuse to stop doing business with us. About, I don't know if it's 10 or 15 of our customer base, but there's a small percentage of our customer base that's always been on the fence. Like I don't know if I'm getting value. Now that there's a excuse, there's a trigger event. Covid they say, you know what, and maybe this is subconscious, I'm done with this vendor and they leave us. So I will lose say 10% of my customers. I have 500 customers in one of my businesses. I lose 50 customers. The mistake businesses are doing are looking downstream and saying, oh my God, I lost 50 customers. How to retain 50 customers. The opportunities actually turn in the other direction and look upstream. My cumulative competitors may have say 20,000 customers. Well, they're going to lose their 10%. That means 2,000 customers have gone into the free market. I've lost 50. So stop looking at 50. Look upstream. And how do I sell to the 2,000 entering the market because they weren't satisfied with their vendor. They have potentially the means to make purchases now. But even if they're not going to purchase now, they're looking for the know like and trust they're seeking for who's the new vendor when I am ready to buy. So I have a responsibility to market upstream right now, aggressively through educational marketing to, to make people aware there's alternative vendors out here that are going to serve you. And that's what I'm doing. And, and if you do that, you get into the surge stage. And now your business is positioned to be one of the remarkable stories at the end of this recession.

Absolutely. Man, I love it. You know, again, you're so much more like strategic than my brain thinks because it's like you outline it and understand the consumer behavior, the business owner behavior. It's funny, I live in this complex here in Parkland. Super, you know, very nice area. And they food truck here. The problem is I'm kind of pissed off because it's not a local food truck. They actually did a chick fil a food truck here. There was a three hour line in this. People are just stir crazy.

Yeah.

Literally these guys cleaned up and I'm thinking like, why is it someone here once a day minimum.

Yeah.

Just because people get out of the house, get a food truck. It doesn't have to be amazing. Put it in a trailer, like just something simple and local restaurant and be so. I mean they could sell 3, 4, 5. They might make more money actually with this pivot moment.

Totally. I'm going to show you a technique. I got to go right into this. That's genius. So. So bless them for doing it. I hope other people copy it. Here's a technique. I got my last slides here. I call it the one step back technique. And again, I'm not trying to push it, but if you just want to download these Recession. Right. Recession response. So you can Google, you can go to the Google for recession response and find it. And here's his final offer. In every other blocks is one step back. Here's an example of restaurants, and I love your example, Mark, because that's what we can do too. The final offer is historically, what's the last thing you do in your historical offer? As example, a restaurant. A restaurant places food on the table. That's the final step. And the customer consumes it. We then ask ourselves, going through these blocks, what happens historically one step back from that? Well, one step back is the carrying of food to the table. And what you're going to notice as we continue to rewind here is that our final offering for almost all businesses is an accumulation of many offerings on the way. So carrying food to the table, the waiter carries the food to the table. That's a new offering. Carry out and take out. Now, most people, most restaurants, it's so obvious, are doing that. Sadly, some have frozen up and done nothing. They're out of business. Some businesses to your point, are doing collaborations. There's a restaurant also in our neighborhood who teamed up with a food truck. And the food truck is doing deliveries, simply deliveries to neighborhoods. And the former restaurant is now a cooking center. They're just making food and burning it out. That's an opportunity. Well, we continue this one step back. So what happens one step before we carry food to the table? Well, here's the offer. One food to the table. One. One step before that is the preparation of food. Like we cook food in the kitchen. Well, you have popular menu items as I shared earlier your 10 popular menu items. Why not share or sell the 10 most popular recipes you have? Why not do a cooking training on your 10 recipes or be the restaurant that invokes a cooking class where now you have over 10 weeks you're doing cooking classes. That's a brand new offering. It's actually probably more profitable than being a restaurant in the first place. What, you know, what happens? One step back and we keep rewinding. Well, right before that, you know, you have to procure the meats, the vegetables, the, the condiments. Why not become the blue apron for your town? Now you can sell this and people can cook at home. So every business has this opportunity. If we Simply spend the 15 minutes really looking at the flow of how we get to our final product, you'll see all these mini offerings that assemble to get there. These new mini offerings can become your new offering.

I love it, man. I think the biggest thing is, is I think people are so consumed with what they think their business is as opposed to what it could be.

Yes.

It's like if you just step back kind of what you're doing and showing them like, rewind, rewind, rewind, you'll realize you probably have three to seven different opportunities to profit from this opportunity. This is an. I truly believe this is most, the most amazing reset opportunity that we've ever seen.

Clearly.

I mean, it really is.

Yeah, it's scary because, you know, things have been ripped away from us and, and we're starting anew. But, but it's a brand new race. I mean, everyone is equal, on equal footing again. So the people that move, not just. It's not about racing forward, it's moving decisively and thoughtfully. So, you know, we, we. It feels like a sprint, but we're back in a marathon. I realize a lot of us are trying to recover and that's the sprint sensation, but life will continue for another thousand years. We got time. We don't have time to be inactive. We can't stop. But we also have time to give ourselves thought. We had to be deliberate in it. So one thing, another chart here just to keep it going. This is directly from Fix this. Next is. Is this map the business hierarchy of needs. And I hope from our session together that you get the most value from this. These are the needs that a business has. And if sales, for example, the base foundational need of a business, if sales have been ripped away, if we have no sales, that's where we got to start our business again. But once you get sales flowing into your business, it simply needs to be adequate. You don't need tons of sales, but just adequate sales to drive profit. Once you get profit going, then we start focusing on the efficiency or order of an organization. While all these elements play out simultaneously is where we concentrate our efforts. But before I dig into this in detail, I want to do a little demonstration that we can try in our heads. Or you can do a piece of paper to point why businesses get stuck. And here's what it is, Mark. If everyone listening draws the letter A on a piece of paper, or do it in your mind and put a circle around it right in the center. And what the letter A represents is where our business is right now in this moment. Right. It's point A. And for many of us, it's crisis challenge. Maybe it's opportunity, but it's where we are now. Step two is draw an arrow in any direction you choose away from A, and it's just a short distance. And. And what the arrow represents is us escaping the crisis. It's getting out of crisis. Now draw like two more hours or three or four or five, whatever you want, but draw arrows in other directions. And what each arrow represents is a choice we could make to escape a crisis. The final third step, draw the letter B in the bottom left corner and put a circle around it. And that represents the vital need your business actually has. That's the one thing your business is saying, I can. I need you to do this to get me out of crisis. But most of us don't consider B. So I don't see what you drew map, Mark. I don't see what other people mapped out, But I strongly suspect very few arrows pointed to B. Maybe none. And I suspect for many of us, an arrow points in the absolute opposite direction. And what this illustrates is that when we are in crisis in the moment, and we make decisions around escaping crisis, we simply go to a new crisis, a new point A, and then we try to escape again. So what we need is simply to give ourselves that temporary contemplation. We got a situation going on, but what does my business really need me to do? Then? We make decisions that are getting us out of crisis, but also consistent with moving our business forward. That's the deliberate action. And this, which we can go into if you want. This is the point B. This will tell you where you need to go. This map.

Okay? Yep.

Okay. So this is called the business hierarchy of needs. It's right out of the book. Fix this. Next. And these are the five levels of hierarchy of Needs of a business. Now, just to give you a sense, this is translated from what's called Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is a structure of human need. Maslow, I'll show this again a second. But Maslow argued that for human needs, we have a base level need just for survival. It's called physiological needs, Mark, just as much as you do. I do, I need to breathe air. And if we're not breathing air, we suffocate and die. So the number one priority, secondly, we need food and water. Once those elements are addressed, we need shelter, protection from the elements. You know, we can't handle body heat loss. Once we have that addressed, then actually needs go up to. It's called belonging, the necessity to be in community. That's actually why so many people are struggling right now saying, get me out of my house. Because they're, they're not experiencing other human experiences. And that's a real problem. Goes all the way up to self actualization. But what Maslow argued, if at any given time a base level need is not satisfied, we always go to the most base level need. So if I was outside right now I'm in New Jersey, and this winter was mild, but some winters get brutal, like zero degrees or Fahrenheit. Like I could be sitting here and outside in a T shirt, and all of a sudden this freezing temperatures are coming in. My body will respond by shivering and I will seek shelter right away. But if some, some guy comes up, some goon comes up behind me and puts like this plastic bag around my head and wraps duct tape, which admittedly in New Jersey is quite possible. It sounds totally like New Jersey. So where I live that's possible. But if that happens now, the priority is tearing the bag away from my face over getting shelter. Because oxygen prioritized is prioritized over shelter. But once I get that bag off my face, then I'm bolting out to get shelter. Well, that is something that we're biologically wired into. You know, Mark, when you're thirsty, you know when you're cold. So we have an instinct saying, something's not right. I need to warm up. I better throw a shirt on or something. Well, we are biologically wired into ourselves. We're not biologically wired into our business. The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is trusting their gut and trusting your gut alone on their business. So you know what? I think we need to sell our way out of this. You know, I think we need to get that loan. And we re. We overreact and we're not backing it with what's called empirical data. Now, I'm not saying you got to be this analytic. I'm simply saying your gut is a beacon for your business. We need to back it with a couple questions. So this is how you navigate the business hierarchy of needs. I saw Joe's comment. Dirty Jersey. I love it. You're from Jersey too?

He's a Jersey guy too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're calling me the Jersey General, by the way with this Covid. I mean, look at me. I look like I'm from the Civil War, for God's sake. So here's how this works. Level one is sales. This is the creation of cash. That's what it says here for your organization. If you have no cash coming into your organization, your business is suffocating. This is equivalent to oxygen. Second level is profit. Profit is a creation of stability. This is the shelter for your organization. If you don't have shelter, your business will freeze to death and will kill you. Sadly. A lot of businesses historically have had a lot of sales. They haven't focused on profit. Now the freeze of or of the new economic shift has come upon us and. And those businesses instantly died. So you need to have some kind of stability for your organization. And even if you're trapped right now, you can navigate through it by increasing profitability. The next level is order. Order is the creation of efficiency for an organization. The ultimate acid test is if you don't need the business owner to operate the business, you probably have a high degree of efficiency. Once you have that, then we move on to a level called impact. Impact is the creation of transformation. This is where your business is not about the transaction as much as is of changing people's lives. The highest level is called legacy. Legacy is the creation of permanence. What's so fascinating I found out at this level is as I was interviewing entrepreneurs that have achieved this, they say, you know what? I realized that was never a business owner. I was always a business steward. That I brought something to life of significance that's more important than my involvement in it. It's about this thing, the business continuing on to perpetuity. So question, of course, how do you navigate this? Well, you always start at a base just like Maslow's Harky. We can ask two simple questions. Question one is, do I have any. And question question two, is it adequate? So question one is this. Do I have any sales right now? If you have zero sales suffocating, we need sales immediately reinvent you. Now they know the one step back Technique you can use that. Step two is this. Do I have adequate sales to support a degree of profit? So if you have some sales coming in, the question is, how's it linking to profit? Are you extracting profit from it? If not, you probably have a profit problem. So you always ask, do I have any? Is it adequate? Do I have any sales of adequate sales to generate profit? Then I look at the profit level. Do I have any profit? Well, if you have no profit, then you have a profit issue. If you do have some profit, then you ask yourself, is it adequate to support organizational efficiency, order. And you continue to ask the same thing. Any are adequate as you climb up. But this is not a ladder. It's not about getting to the top and waving to your buddies. What happens here is we'll go up and we'll go down. We have to address, you know, the economic shift that's going on. A lot of businesses right now have a sales challenge or a profit challenge and are reverting back to the base. And listen, this isn't a small business like ge, Proctor Gamble. Those companies have to reinvent themselves. Some of them do you know, the airlines, they are effed. Something big has to shift and change. So many of them are focusing on the base levels again. Two. Two words of warning. Some businesses right now are trying to jump to impact. They're like, I want to change the world. I got to serve my community. I got to give till it hurts. It is a beautiful, noble thing, except that hurts part because they're putting themselves out of business. I've seen some businesses now who gave away everything they had to serve their community. And they're out of business. And that's the ultimate sin because. Because that company, it's a giving company, can no longer give. It's exhausted itself. So we have a responsibility to be of service through selling. You have to care for others by also caring for yourself. It's the only way you can sustain. So the number one mistake I see is people leaping to impact and ignoring the foundation down here. The second most common challenge I see is people just saying, I gotta sell my way out of this. They're building this massive foundation of, you know, this huge basement, and they're putting like a little tool shed of profit above it, and it collapses in. Those businesses are very precarious. They're selling, but they can't satisfy because they have no profit. So be very careful about a raw sales focus. Be very careful about a raw impact focus. We have to work this stuff in relation. So that's the essence of the business. Hierarchy of needs.

No, I love it, man. A lot of stuff you're saying. It's like I've had mentors over my life, you know, I still do, but you know that save yourself before you save the world. You know, you got these businesses, like you said, trying to do that. Listen, our job is to be a steward, not to like, if we can't steward and deliver, we can't give an impact and do everything else we're trying to do. Therefore we're going to suffocate, die, and what we're trying to accomplish goes away. And I always say, if not us, then who? Because the people, you know, like, if not us, like, I know where I'm I want to go, but if I can't survive today, I can't get there tomorrow, etc. So.

And the good guys got to win right now. Like, like the folks are here, Mark. These are people that care about their business. The people are attending right now want to improve themselves. I define that as the good guys. There's also an unscrupulous sit out there that's saying I'm going to be opportunistic. And what opportunistic is, is where the customer's disadvantage and I come in and offer something that's to my advantage. Even though it's to their disadvantage, I take advantage of them. An opportunity is different than opportunistic. It's how can I serve my community by growing myself and growing them. It's a win, win. Now I'll give you an example. I got an email. What did I consider opportunistic from Chevy. I own a Chevy and Chevy sent me this email, Mark. It must have been like 15 paragraphs long as this diatribe, it opens up with the biggest bullshit line ever. We're all in this together. I'm like, oh, here we fucking go. Like, lay it on me now. What are you gonna try selling me? And it goes, you know, I'm sure you're hurting from the COVID virus. Like you have no idea who I am in your blanket email. And then it says, you know, but we stand tall, we're ready for you. Do you need to change oil in your car? I'm like, for what? So I can drive to another infected town? Like, no. And then it continues on, says, maybe you need to buy a new car, we can deliver to your driveway. And I'm like, it's been a real. I've really reconsidered my loyalty to Chevy. Now here's the Reverse United, who I historically don't like, I've been very impressed by. I fly United because I'm in New Jersey. We have a hub here. And United sent me an email. It was one simple line, it says, or one simple paragraph, it said, hey, here at United, we, we can only imagine how this is affecting you and your life. We just want you to know that you've been a loyal customer in the past. We've actually extended your loyalty. We hope that serves you in some way. And that was it. And I'm like, holy crap. They just reached out and said they're going to be of service to me without even asking me, go United. Then they email me again a week later. It says, we see you have a flight booked. A lot of people aren't flying right now. We just want to make sure you want that booked. And if not, just simply cancel it and we'll refund everything. I'm like, oh, my God, I forgot that flight. Thank you, United. The greatest. Believe it or not, the greatest customer service lesson is coming out United, at least for me right now. And what it is, is we all have an opportunity to be of service to our customers. And what we have to do is bite sized, tangible pieces. Right now we must communicate more, but with smaller bite pieces. Not the Chevy Diatribe, just little tangible bites of service to your customer. And if you have no way to be of service, here's a great email. Simply say, hey, we hope you're okay, but we can't fathom what you're going through. We just want you to know that we are open for business. But we also know that business has shifted. If you need us in a new way, tell us and we'll see if we can be of service to you. Authentic, genuine, caring, short. That's the type of communication we need to have. Plus, it's a great way to survey your audience for what they need now by asking them, what do you need now?

Yeah, I mean, do crowdsourcing at its finest. It's an amazing thing. It's a great way to give back. It's a great way to listen. Right now, it's more acceptable to even ask these questions. And more importantly, people have time to be heard. They want to be heard. They're gonna reply back and say, hey, Mike, thank you very much for the message. Hey, man, listen, I'm just trying to figure out how to survive tomorrow. Hey, I'm trying to figure out how to keep my team above water. You know, Mike, that's one thing we're dealing with we dealt with initially when it first came out and, and then I kind of let it slide for a minute. Cause I wasn't thinking about it. But the team is listening to the news, right? We have a lot, I have a lot of employees and staff members. They're listening to news. Our businesses are doing great. We're hiring people. Things are happening and they're like, hey, are we still stable? This like two and a half, three weeks later, I'm like, what do you mean? We're like, we can't keep up and you're in the front line. But what happens is negativity takes over. It almost like consumes them and they're trying to prove themselves right, why it should be bad.

And I'm like, yeah, it's amazing. I actually have some more tools I want to share with you, but permission. Mark. I love just to ask our audience something. It's a bold ask, but I have two reasons for it. So my new book Fix this Next is coming out in just a couple days, but I want to ask the audience right now, if you're willing, would you buy a copy on Amazon as we're talking and maybe even post in the chat? Actually, not we you post in the chat.

Yeah, please do.

Here's the reason I asked. First reason is it is the greatest way I can be of service to you at the most affordable price point. The book is, I think it's 25 bucks on Amazon. It is my life's work. I spent five years developing it and I designed it for this moment, not knowing this moment was coming. So my promise to you is this book is life changing, will serve your business. That's one reason I ask. The other reason is quite selfish. If we collectively, if you are willing to buy the book right now and post in the chat, because I want to thank you for that. If you go on Amazon and buy just one copy, print copy, be wonderful. What happens is the Amazon algorithm tracks it and when they see what's called search purchasing, meaning there's 20, 50, 100 people buying it, even just five people buy it simultaneously, it starts kicking off the algorithm and they start automatically marketing it. So it's the best way for me to gain the exposure to other entrepreneurs who don't know of the stuff that we're talking about. So if you're willing to, I'd be really honored if you purchase a copy of everyone does right now. I'll fix this next and just post in the chat and I'll give you a thumbs up and thank you.

So Mike, they could go to Amazon.com very specific action stuff. Go to Amazon.com we're not going anywhere. Type in Fix this Next by Mike Michalowitz. Yeah, there we go.

Well, fix this next. That's it right there. Yes.

Get the hardcover.

Get the hardcover. Yes. $23 I can see. And I just ask if you're, if you're planning. Getting it. Getting it now. Even though it's a pre order, it won't ship till Tuesday. The reason I ask is this starts triggering the Amazon engine, starts moving it, and you'll get it promptly. So let me, let me keep on going on with tips if that's okay, because I got a couple more I want to share before we start wrapping things up. Okay. I want to give you another method. It's called the 10-10-10 method. And the 10-10-10 method, right here is something that I did not develop. This was prepared by a woman named Susie Welch. I have details on this document. If you pull it down, here's how it works. Most businesses and most people when it comes to crisis, think about the immediate impact of their situation. So for example, maybe you have to lay one of your employees off. You're considering that? Well, in the immediate moment, the next 10 minutes, it may feel me feel painful. You may say, I don't, I don't. You know, this person's been so loyal. They're good people. I can't afford to have them. But it's better just to, to, to, to go through it and stick with it because I can't, I can't compromise my morals. But then most people just look at 10 minutes. They make a decision based upon their feeling in the moment. The, the next consideration is the next 10 months. So in the next 10 minutes, how you feel. But in the next 10 months, say I lay off that employee. Say, well, by making that hard decision, my company will sustain. I'll still be in business 10 months from now. In fact, maybe I can even hire back that employee by making that decision of letting them go right now. Plus, right now it's the best time to let go people because the government has set up a system to really help people that are laid off. Well, how do you feel in 10 years? Well, 10 years, my business is one of the ones that are growing in the surge. My business is probably one of the strongest in the industry. So if I make that decision, the 10 month and 10 year is powerful. And by using a simple method of what's the consideration? 10, 10, 10. Now we get to see it from full perspective. And, and we don't put so all the significance in just how we feel in the moment we look at the full benefit. And the beautiful thing about that strategy, you don't need a piece of paper. You can just say 10-10-10 in your head. Joe, thank you, Sierra, thank you. Brandon, thank you for getting a copy. I promise you that book will serve you in such a powerful way. I promise you. And thank you for helping me. All right, another tip I got for you because I know, all right, I know we got a roll. This one's called the borrower lender mix. It's also recessionresponse.com and here's how it works. This vertical axis says sense of obligation. This horizontal one says time. And what happens, there's an interesting phenomena over time, as if the borrower sense of obligation decreases and the lender's sense of obligation increases. And there's a real danger at this mix. Here's example, Mark, if I borrow 100 bucks from you, I say, hey man, I need 100 bucks. And you're like, yeah, no problem, bro, just pay me back as soon as you can. Maybe next couple weeks. But yeah, no problem. I, the borrower, have a heightened sense of obligation. I'm like, mark, you hooked me up. Thank you. You, the lender, like, ah, no problem. Low sense obligation. But as time goes on, it starts to reverse. I'm like, he doesn't need that money. He's all his employees. He's got a nice business there. He doesn't care. I got other issues to work with. I gotta focus forward. Screw that money. So over time, my son's obligation decreases, but the lenders like, dude, I gave you a hundred bucks. You know, you said, you pay me back. Are you bullshitting me? And your sense of obligation increases. The danger is where the lender has higher obligation than the borrower. And when that happens, you're done. So we have an obligation right now to keep our, the people we borrow money to. And if, listen, if you give terms in your business, if you give payment, installments, any of that stuff, you are lending people money and you have to keep them highly obligated, particularly in this crisis, because you'll be forgotten very quickly. So the question, of course is, how do you do it? Regular communication, first of all, be regularly of service. But if they owe you money, there's a way to do this, and it's not by doing collection calls and saying, you owe me, you owe me. Instead, if they owe you money, call them up and say, listen, I know these are tough times. Just tell me what can you reasonably afford to pay me? And it's the key, on a weekly basis. So if your terms are once a month or once every six weeks or whatever, change it to weekly. And, and often the client will respond by saying, I don't know, I can owe you, I can pay you. You say, well, can you pay a penny? And they'll say, of course. And say, well, can you pay a dollar, whatever? And go up to the number, maybe it's two or 300 bucks. And I realize they may have a $30,000 bill to you. And 300 bucks is nothing but is significant because every week now they're reminded they owe you money. They owe you money. Now you call them, say, hey, we got the 300 bucks. Thanks for being integral with that. We appreciate you. And sometimes they'll say, well, you know what, let's just pay him for 400 bucks or a thousand bucks with extra cash that constant reminder serves them. So that's the borrower, lender matrix you got to use in this environment. Dylan. Thank you, Kristen. Thank you very much. I promise you that book will serve you.

Hey, Mike, before we do that, all that, I want to make sure I let you know I'm going to buy 100 of your books as well and send to my high level clients as well. My man.

Dude, you are a stud. You are a fucking stud. You already knew that, but you were a fucking.

Let me go tell my. Let me go get my wife so you can tell her exactly.

Give him a favor. Do a favor.

Yeah, I'll get that taken care of. But no, I appreciate it. You know, one thing interesting about this lender thing you're talking about, I'm actually a borrower and a lender in real life, interesting businesses. So one thing I've always told people, just tell me what's going on. I just need communication. You know, if you just tell me, hey, Mark, I got you for $100 this month and you owe me a million dollars. I'm good with that. When you go mia, when you don't communicate, I expect the worst and I'm planning for the worst and I'm looking to take you down. Now all of a sudden, now I got to defend my territory, not support your mission or purpose or what you're trying to accomplish. I don't want to put my arms around you. I want to punch you in the face.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, communication is king. And if they're going to mia, we got to communicate effectively with them. Because some people go MIA because they're frightened and they go into that shock mode, they freeze up and they feel they have no option. And if we communicate and say you do have an option and get them speaking again, it kind of starts greasing the wheel. Nick, thanks for getting a copy. Tom, thank you. Appreciate this. And Mark, thank you.

No, it's awesome.

I got a roll, man.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it, Mike. I wish you would have came with some value or something tonight.

Right?

No, but no, seriously, in all seriousness, I know you got stuff going on. I appreciate you being here, Mike. I'd love to have you back another time when you got a little bit more time, but, man, thank you very much.

I know it's my joy. Thanks for getting us together for me and for all of us and just wishing you continued health and wealth, brother.

Likewise, man. Have a great day. See y' all later, buddy. Hey, guys, thank you very much for being here and supporting the conversation with what we have going on. Mike is a very professional, high level guy. Way smarter and way more professional than I'll ever be at a level where he's talking about this cool stuff and it's amazing. True story is I have a lot of notes myself and I hope you did too. I hope you took notes. More importantly, I hope you took this information and you take this information and you actually go implement this stuff. Understand, if you're a borrower, I'm in the real estate investing space and also media space. We're lending and borrowing money all the time. So just communicate. I know it's uncomfortable. Call your lender up and say, hey man, I'm getting smacked in the face right now. Can you help me out? A real lender truly wants to help you out. They don't want to foreclose, they don't want to go negative, they don't want to hit you. They're not waking up trying to figure out how to take people down. They're trying to figure out how to work with people so they can make a lot of money long term with them. I promise you, even though whatever you listen to, whatever people tell you, the truth is they want to help you. I know I do. And I can talk for myself and I know a lot of lender buddies, we don't want you to fail. We don't want you to lose because that means we gotta actually step in and do the work when we take your property back or for people that owe us money in the media side, we want to step you. We want to help you we want to, like, hey, tell us what you can do. 300 a week. Perfect. A hundred a week. Just something. Just show good faith. Biggest key here, though, is when you say you're going to do it, don't not do it. You must do it. And you got to stick to the plan, create the plan, implement the plan. But I hope you guys had a lot of amazing content and value from what Mike shared with you guys. He's an awesome guy. Make sure to check him out over at Fix this next dot com. Get his stuff, get on his email list. It's absolutely free. He's got great information. Check him out on Instagram. He has a small following, but he's working on it. He's building it. He provides great value. And again, guys, these are the people I'm trying to read and learn from and work with and do amazing stuff with. So hope you guys had a great time. If you have any questions. Does anybody have any questions here? I got a. I got another 14, 15 minutes before I go on a golf cart ride with my fan. Anybody have any questions here? You guys been amazing. Thank you, Teresa. Thank you, Darrell, Jeremy, Dylan, Mike, Nick, Manual, tk, Jeremy, Christian. What's up, my man? Braden. What's up, buddy? Anybody have any questions or comments on this? I know BK could give you a link to jump in here real quick if you guys have anything. But the biggest thing is here is a couple of notes that I had while you guys are thinking data, not drama, be a business steward, not a business owner. I think about that all the time. I talk about that in my event last year I was talking about, I just want to be a steward. I'm a steward of something bigger. We're bigger than a business owner. You understand that, right? Whatever you're doing, you're bigger than it. Seriously, you're bigger than that. So business stewards, very cool concept to think about. It's so much bigger than being a business owner. You want to steward a lot of stuff that's a very high level leadership conversation. Save yourself before you save the world. Right? Save yourself before you save the world. One thing interesting to me, human psychology, again, I'm kind of paying attention to that all the time, is why are so many people, when he was showing you the chart, that graph, you know, from this moment to that moment, to up the opportunity zone, you know, many people are trying to prove themselves wrong to the situation. They're trying to say, hey, yeah, you're right. It is tough right now. So you're trying to like, I Can do it. I can do it. Oh, no, I can't.

I can't. I can't.

But your actions are in alignment with the result that you don't really want so secretly, but you kind of do, as crazy as that sounds. See, in my world, zero fell. You can't fail. I swear to you, I would move on the street under a bridge to succeed. I'm not just saying it. I'm not saying it just to say it. I've done it. I've lived in an efficiency apartment with no gas and no electric in the freezing cold in Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, and First Street. I've done it. I could literally take a leak, wash the dishes and take a shower at the same exact time. In this house, no one knew I was pursuing my dreams. I was at the library daily. I was reading a book over a candle at night in the house, eating Chinese food. I'm telling you, this is real. Now is the time to create grit. Now is the time to see what you're made of, not what you're not made of. You wouldn't be here if you didn't think you could do this. You wouldn't be here if you weren't committed to the process. You have to step it up. You have to evolve. You have to become the person you want to become, not the person who you are. You know what I'm talking about. This is real. Pay weekly. Powerful. If you're doing terms on monthly, do weekly. I've been talking to my team about this on some stuff. Some of my companies, I could go on and on and on. But, guys, I know you're busy. Powerful stuff. Thank you, Daniel. Guys, if this audio, this video is very powerful for you and helped you, please share it. Not for my sake, but for the sake of the people that's going to listen to it. That could inspire them to guide them to and to steward them into another opportunity, to a bigger, better position, to not just better serve them, but to better serve their vision, their family, and themselves. Most importantly. And if we do this as a group, a unit, this is what it's about, folks. We're in this together. Truthfully, I have nothing. The truth is, this call cost me $2,500. I just bought 100 of his books. And I would buy more, and I will buy more. And I'll share this message because this is the time to share it. We have to get the word out. We have to develop. We have to grow. And we have to become business owners, not business wannabes. It's your time. I don't care what business you're in. I don't care if you're in business or not. If you know, you know people in business, get them this link Share this video Conversate about what we talked about today. I appreciate Mike Michalowicz coming here. It's awesome. Connect. It's now or never. Hope you guys are doing amazing. Have an amazing night. It's your boy, Mark Evans Diem signing off. Make today count. Talk to you guys. Happy Wednesday. Peace.