Thinking Like Mike Michalowicz: A Deep Dive into Success as we go ALL-IN

Mr. Mike Michalowicz is somebody that has influenced me and Bruce Lee in many ways that he will never, ever know. I've had the pleasure of meeting him in at the STI wealth event a year, a couple years back, and I've followed him, podcasts, books, you name it. Probably watched every interview that Mike McCullowitz has ever done. And I'm very fortunate that I'm able to get him on the podcast not once, not twice, but thrice. And this time on his Hatrick appearance, we talked about the all in book. I got hold of the Pre release number 52 of 250 and absolutely loved it. We've implemented a lot of it at Boost Lee. It's currently ranking top number one on Amazon. Obviously there's, there's a big promo around it and you know, you go on any good podcast and you'll see his face popping up and yeah, we're one of the lucky ones to get him for, for the Boost Leap podcast. So without further said, we only had 30 minutes with him. Busy, busy man. But he'd spared that time and we, we dug into some really cool questions. I really wanted to ask him three questions that he hasn't been asked before, especially around the book. And I hope we did that. I mean, you can see his, his brain wearing as we're going, and he's somebody who doesn't want questions sent to him before. Sometimes when you get guests, they ask for like questions beforehand. He said, no, don't. His team said, don't send him. He's, he's good on the fly and he is. And he was. And yeah, he's a, it's a phenomenal interviewee and hopefully I'm getting better at being an interviewer. So there's only one way to find out. Stick to the very end because he gives you a domain and a website to go to for some special stuff. And he gave a sneak peek at the very, very end and you're going to have to watch all the way through or listen all the way through to get this of what his next book is going to be. All right, let's have a chat with Mike. Okay, so the book is all in. Obviously this book we're going to be discussing. I was one of the very lucky people to get hold of the. What do you call it? Like the manuscript?

Yeah, it's a manuscript pre release that you have there.

Yeah.

So number 52, which was out of 250 total. So thanks for getting that.

No, I loved it. Absolutely. Really good. It just you keep, you seem to bring books out, like from a selfish point of view, just when I need them the most.

Good, good. You're the guy I want to serve, so that's awesome.

So, yeah, with Boostly, we've just passed 50 members of the team. I'm approaching into 60. And you know, Clockwork was, it was a big influence and obviously I did the program run like clockwork with Adrian and the team, and that was phenomenal. And then I came across other, other books like Traction and, and all of those which are just, it's just all come together in the right place. But I felt like something just was missing and this was just what was there. We've implemented so many things that the one that I personally do now is the weekly meeting.

Oh, good.

I was.

How's that serving you?

Yeah, good. You know, it's one of those weird things, you know, when you don't know what you don't know. Right. And you're so working in the, in your own bubble of your own business, you sort of don't get a chance to sort of look at it from like a 50,000 foot viewer oftentimes. And I was reading it and, and whenever I read a book, I like to just take one thing and implement it straight away. And the one thing I did was that, that weekly meeting and it, it's good, you know, it's, it's, it's really good. And I feel like I've gotten, I'm 100% virtual. The whole team is virtual. I don't see this. And so we're very much that sort of Dropbox Sor. And so to be able to have that weekly connection, get a chance to talk about the personal wins and all that stuff and we, and we, we go over our, go over the rocks and other things that we discuss, you know, we sort of merge everything together to like put it all in the world of Boostly. So really like that.

It's so important and it's interesting. You know, the idea of a weekly meeting is overwhelming to many people. Like, I can barely meet with my team once every six months and they're saying do every week. Yeah. What's interesting is if you're meeting with your team infrequently, say once every six months, it's usually for big corrective action. And here's all the problems I've accumulated in all these situations, we really need to fix this. It's these weekly meetings, which can be just five or 10 minutes, where there's first of all that human connection and with the remote environments, we need this to spend a little time just talking to build that. I call it the transfer of trust, that rapport. Secondly, we can do micro adjustments. Hey, can you also do this or can you change that? And we can get micro feedback. Hey, as a leader of the organization we really could do this or that. And now these adjustments are happening dynamically. We don't have to wait for six months to make massive corrections. It's a great retention mechanism, it's a great elevation mechanism because you're doing these small incremental improvements along the way and not waiting for a non specific delineation or period to do it.

Yeah, no, I mean like I say, it's so fun when you read books like this. And the, the advice is so actionable. That's what I love about all of your books is like you read it and you go oh, I can do that. And we go into it's been cool. But there's two things that really sort of hit me. So one of them was in the book you talk about the importance of the all in assessment and age, general interest and commitment. So can you share how this concept can be applied in hiring and personal development and ensuring one's commitment to their business and goals and basically vision?

Yeah, I'll lean into one component of which I mentioned, but it's very important. It's basically the analysis of someone's ability. And I argue there's three forms of ability foundationally. We all have experiential abilities or talents. And what these are is what I've done in the past is indicative of what I can do in the future. Then we have what's called innate ability or innate talent. And this is often analyzed through tools like Myers Briggs or Enneagram or strengths Finder. It shows our wiring, our natural tendencies. And most organizations actually just look experientially run interviews, some not enough are doing these analysis of innate talent. We all should be doing it. The big one, the 80 percenter that almost no one is doing, which is the biggest indicator of how someone will perform is the best indicator of how they'll integrate your firm. The best indicator of how they'll perform in the future is their potential. And I know that's obvious, but if we can identify someone's potential and they have massive potential in the role that we need filled, gosh, they're going to crush it. So then the question that comes out of that is how do you find someone's potential? And it's really easy. Potential always reveals itself in Three distinct stages. Someone's potential will always first be curious. They may not even know they have potential. They're just like, oh, I've always wanted to pick up a guitar or try to pick up this guitar. Then the next level is desire, desires, wake up. I want to keep doing this. I want to learn more. This is really interesting. It's engaging. For some reason, I can't put this down. And thirst is where you just can't quit it at all. Like, this is who I am. I must do this. And the reason I use the guitar as an example is, say you and I, we go back to the 80s. We're like, we're going to form the coolest 80s rock band. Maybe neither of us play guitar well enough. Maybe we can do the backing up, strumming, but we can't lead. We need Eddie Van Halen. You know, if he was still around, it would be absurd. And this is what most businesses are doing are saying, well, let's just hire Eddie Van Halen. If we call an Eddie Van Halen said, hey, you want to join our band? He would laugh at us. He'd say, I already got my own band. I'm making millions and millions. So sorry, I'm out. But if we found Eddie when he first revealed potential, that's when he was 12 years old, he may have joined the band. He was just discovering guitar. So the question, of course is, how do you find Eddie when he's Eddie, before he becomes the real Eddie? And how do you know he's going to be the real Eddie? Well, here's how you do it. You do workshops. So what you and I could do, Mark, is we say, hey, we're putting on a educational class for upand coming guitarists. And maybe you and I don't even play guitar. We just hire a guitarist to teach it. But we invite kids in between 10 and 15 years old. We say, come on in, learn guitar. Our job then is to educate everyone and in the process, observe for curiosity, desire and thirst. And Eddie will differentiate himself pretty early on because he's the one who's asking the most, doing the most experimenting and trying. And he's the one who's coming back with bloody fingers because he can't stop it. He's thirsty. That's the guy who's going to crush it. So what we can do for our organizations is run these workshops. What I mean by this is I want to hire, pick a random position. I want to hire a salesperson to sell my real estate or whatever. Okay? What I do is Run a course saying learn how to sell real estate and the people who are curious about this will show up. I then teach the process and look for people that have the desire asking the most questions and the thirst can't quit it. Maybe I need someone more advanced, maybe I need someone that already has skills. Then I put on an advanced course and I have prerequisites saying have to have five years of real estate selling experience. Learn the triad ladder, financial strategy for real estate investors or whatever it is like I of course made that up. But you'll get people in that are looking to grow because the top candidates are are always looking to expand themselves. The best talent's looking to get better. Interestingly, the best people are not necessarily looking for a job. They're not looking on platform du jour saying I should look for a job now. But they are doing, say I want to get better at the job I already have. Those are people the most potential. So put on education and you'll attract people that are looking to get better. Those are the A players. Typically then you go through this vetting process and cherry pick the last thing. I want to share in this because I'm so, as you can tell, passionate about this. This isn't just like a theory. This is how the entire sports industry is run in the US sports is over half a trillion dollars, $500 billion of sports revenues generated. And they don't run interviews you get on the field or they observe. They have camps where you're learning skills and they're cherry picking the athletes. Businesses are doing this. A big business here in the US is Home Depot. And Home Depot runs these workshops where you can build a bird house. So clients come down, customers at Home Depot, and you build a birdhouse. You're having a pleasurable experience learning a new skill at Home Depot. But at the same time, they have one employee who's observing participation, who has the most desire, who's the most thirst, who's asking other parents what to do or teaching, who's asking the most questions, who comes the earliest and stays the latest. Who's really into it. They tap in the shoulder and say, you get the talents to work here at Home Depot. We'd love to have you consider a position here. It's a recruiting platform. So if you want the best, educate them to be the best and you'll find the best.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint, are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds. You can grab both of those books right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the blueprint. And then for 101 marketing tactics, that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon. Now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the Book Direct blueprint and we'll see you on the other side. You've just laid out the framework for any Boostly member who's watching this. And you get a tap on the shoulder for me in a couple of years time, say, hey, do you want to become a coach on diary bookings at Boostly, you'll just, you're doing it, you're doing it.

Here's the beautiful thing. The 60 or 70 people you have Boostly, they're all getting better. So everyone wins. In traditional interviewing, if I'm looking to hire someone or whatever, I bring people through. And the vast majority candidates, I say, not a fit, Sorry. And they go home and say, I don't know why I didn't get the job. They didn't like me. In this workshop environment, everyone comes through and everyone's improving, everyone gets better. And then I get a cherry pick who's the best fit. And I can observe them in action. Do they have the behaviors we need? Are they cultural? Fit and so forth. But everyone comes out better.

Love it. Okay, this is cracking on. Lovely. The next one I wanted to talk about was the deep dive interview. So you advise candidates about asking about their personal and professional future. So how has this approach influenced your personal business decisions and shaped the way you envision future projects or ventures?

Yeah. So I asked my team, as I recruit and bring people on board in particular, about their personal vision. What I realize, Mark, is that the job a leader of an organization is not to set a corporate vision. I always thought it was like, what's the corporate vision? The job of a leader is to set the collective vision. What's the collective vision? The collective vision is an understanding of what everyone's looking to accomplish in their personal lives because we all have a vision for ourselves. In fact, what I've discovered is the corporate vision is not the corporate vision and it's the vision of the leader or the owner. This is what I feel achieves accomplishment for us if we hit this revenue target or so. And so I feel some sort of sense of accomplishment. Maybe I get some direct benefit from it. But my team, they may not feel associated with that. And so what happens is a lot of these leaders stick down this flag and say, that's where we're marching. Let's go. Is everyone as excited as me? And they may feign and say, let's go, but why? And everyone's not motivated by the same thing. With my team here, I ask people about their personal visions when. Not only when they come on board, but every quarter, we sit down and say, tell us about your personal vision for your life. We have one person here who's overcome cancer, but it's always a concern. She's like, I want to be six years cancer free. There's another person who wants to spend more time with her family. Another person that's looking to move from a house they live in to a new home. Another person who's just looking to learn Spanish. Someone wants to play guitar. All those visions are absolutely important to each individual that states that claim. And they're of equal importance. Someone that wants to overcome a disease or someone that wants to play guitar, or someone that wants to achieve a new revenue target. They're all equally important because it's that person's personal desires for themselves. So my job as a leader is, first of all, recognize what all the visions are. Secondly, to realize they're all on this equal plane. Thirdly is, can we set up a way that we collectively achieve them? And now I want to be clear about this. I. This is not Make a Wish foundation. I don't go out and say, here's your house and here's your guitar lessons. I simply say, that vision's important to you. Are you marching toward it? And as you do the work that we need you to do here in this organization, is it supporting you and moving towards your goal? That clarity is now magnetic. Moving towards some arbitrary flag in the sand that someone else set out there is not appealing. But the flag you set, I want to march toward it. So my job is to line all those flags so we're all marching in that same direction. We meet every quarter and we talk about not just the new vision, but the visions we've accomplished. We have a system. It's actually a tree kind of looks like the one behind me here, outside this room that you can attach leaves to. And we call it the blooming tree because it's blooming with all these leaves. And people write their individual visions on. On leaves, paper leaves. And when they achieve them, you paste it or tack it to the tree. And now this tree has bloomed massively. It's. It's recognition of our individual accomplishments. The last thing I noticed is for me and also for my colleagues here, when we come in, it's dead center in the office. You see this tree? There's a sense of accomplishment. Like, you look at it like, wow, I achieve all these dreams. It triggers the remember when moments. Remember when? You know, three years ago I was hoping to learn my first song on guitar, and I did. It's up there. Remember when I spent, you know, a week out on the Appalachian Trail, hiking the trail with my family? It was crazy. I did it. That was a personal vision. The remember wins are happening here at the office. So people are coming in and saying, oh my gosh, I achieved my vision for myself. And it's centralized here in the office. It builds that reciprocity, the understanding that the office, the corporate environment, is supporting them in their personal environment. And how reciprocity is, is the more the leader supports their team in achieving their personal visions in their personal life or business or both, the more likely those people will support the dream of the owner or the leader of the business achieving their vision.

Wow. So, okay, so the next question would be, how does a leader or how do you recommend entrepreneurs and leaders balance their personal growth aspirations? But also at the same time, leading a company and adopting the all in philosophy because it could be a bit of a juggling out, right?

It can. We'd be clear that the only way the company can sustain its mission that is set by the person that founded it as leader is, is by generating revenue by being in business. So if we're out of business, we're all losing the impact this business can have on our personal dreams. So there's no clarity about this. This isn't. Like I said, it's not a make a wish foundation. We're not coming here. And everyone, let's go after your own wishes and let's do this. What we're saying is the company puts equal significance in what you see in yourself and the necessity for you to fulfill a job here that supports what we set for the corporate plan. And so there's. It brings about this automatic balance. But we also talk about the finances. We have open books here. I noticed this is quite a few years back and in. In a prior business, I had. I didn't have open books, but I did share one time. I said, hey, we just achieved a million dollars in revenue. I had five or six people working there. And someone came up to me afterwards and said, hey, Mike, that's great. By the way, congratulations on being a millionaire. I'm like, I'm not a millionaire. I said, we achieved a million dollars in revenue. I'm actually going broke. Are you kidding me? There was no understanding, there was no correlation for my colleagues. I said, my gosh, I need to make this publicly available for them to understand. So we have open books here. We show our revenue numbers, we show the costs we're incurring, we show our profitability, or if we're struggling with it, where we're not profitable. So our team knows what's going on. But here's what's interesting. There's more than just the knowledge of the business operations and effectively their influence over supporting that, like their work brings in revenue or profitability. What's also interesting is a sense of security. What I found is when my colleagues are clear of how we're doing financially, they also understand the stability that it represents to them. And so when the business is healthy, they know it's supporting them. But interestingly, and this happened last year, we went into a struggle state. We had this unexpected situation happen and it put us in a financially unexpected state. The team didn't panic or anything. They said, oh, okay. It's interesting how this situation's affecting us. We need to fix this. We're going to double down our efforts or go into a sprint mode for as long as we can, but we're going to push forward, we're going to see through this to get back to that stable state. So it didn't scare people. It gave them understanding and confidence that they had an influence in moving us forward. So this automatic balance does come about. It doesn't lopside itself. If you focus on personal people, don't ignore the business. At least that's what I found. Yeah, nice.

I mean, I love talking to you because every time I do, I just. You. I can feel my brain going from. From side. And I'm just thinking, how do you ask your cfo, how do you. How do you persuade your head of finances? You know what we're going to do? We're going to give it open book. I can just know.

I know their mind explode right now.

My lost, my Laura is watching this, going, don't you dare.

Don't you dare. Yeah, you know, that's so funny. And that's the common problem that, you know, you're entrepreneurial, I'm entrepreneurial. We hear ideas, we're like, oh, let's do them all, because it makes sense. And then the people who are the implementers and those are different people, there's the innovators and the implementers the implementers. Like, are you kidding me? Like, we just barely figured out what we got going on. Yeah, yeah. So these ideas can have an impact. I just encourage people to roll it out deliberately and test it as you move along. Don't go. Don't go all in right away. Go in small increments. Do you go all in on your employees? I'm just saying don't try every idea at once. It could. It could result in a mine explosion.

Yeah, it's funny, like, when I come back from America and I get to go speak in America, which is amazing, I come back and, you know, going over to America, you come back with all these ideas. I mean, the team has this 72 hours of, like, whatever Mark says to us, over 72 hours, just ignore him.

Yeah, exactly. The hurricane's coming back.

Let him get it out of his system and then it'll be back to normal.

But, yeah, they hunker down and, you know, it's so funny. That's the common challenge of entrepreneurs and business leaders is we get all this collection of ideas and there's this enthusiasm around it, and we come back at a certain point, we can't sustain that enthusiasm anymore and we go back to our active state. It's often called the quick start. There's different kind of behavioral analysis, but a quick start, someone who gets excited about a concept can get the initial stages going, but loses the momentum very quickly. So they're quick at starting and they're usually quick at finishing, but the in between is where they struggle. We realize all these techniques I'm talking to you about require us to take the necessary time to properly implement it. So our job is come back with the ideas, then talk to our implementers and say, of all these ideas, which one do you think will have the biggest impact? And maybe it's easiest to do. Let's prioritize and sequence. Let's store the rest for the future. But let's start with one thing. Kind of like how you implement books that you read.

Yeah, 100%. Well, I have got this someday maybe list. And when we just basically put them all in there and there's a big. On my phone, the notes at the right at the very top, the pin note. It always says, how would this look if it was simple? So whatever idea we've got, it's like.

Oh, that's so great. That's so great.

Simple one. So we would love everybody, everybody who's listening, watching. Whenever you watch or tune in, please do go to Amazon or wherever you get Your books from and go to all in grab it. Mike McCallowitz, there are a plethora of books that are on there. When I put out to the audience that I'm going to be chatting with you, people were like oh, profit first, clockwork, you know, pumpkin plan, throwing them all out there. So people love, love you like you've made such an impact and now that you've come in more into the short term rental industry. Thanks. Obviously Bill who got you in to the short sti wealth event and, and all those cool people there and it's amazing to see and the, the, the main feedback that I saw from people who read the book fractional actionable advice which what I love and I know those people love focus on building a thriving team and leadership development and self reflection. So if that sounds like a little bit of you all in on the Amazon, go go and go and grab it. Mr. Mike McAllister, thank you very much. If, if ever any domains, you know, I saw all in by Mike. Is there anything like that going on? Where do you want people to go after they've got the book? Any resources? Yeah, where can people go?

Yeah, if you want to go to one place, I guess the starting point would be Mike Motorbike. As in the motorcycle dot com. Yeah, it ain't my name but no one can spell my name. So Mike Motorbike is a nickname I have and all the books are there. You can find your starting point. I hope it is all in but you can find all the other books and resources there too.

And you always seem to be working on the next book. This book you seem to be working on for quite a few years to get to this point. Have you got an idea of what the next one is going to be?

Have you? Yeah, I think so. Literally about five minutes before we went live here recording, I got an email from my publisher. It's going to be a profit first workbook and the challenge that many entrepreneurs have, they read Profit first and are implementing it totally wrong. They need the help of a profit first professional. So I'm creating a workbook that they can use in conjunction with an expert to navigate and really diagnose their business and implement it.

Right.

So it's not a traditional book in this case, but it looks like the workbook will be the next thing I come out with like that.

So there was one question that came in from Brandon which is a profit first question and basically the answer to that is wait until the workbook comes out because it was asking the question about how do you make a difficult decision to cut a business or property when it doesn't meet your profit first model?

So, oh, yeah, I'm going to be addressing those types of things for sure in the book.

There you go. So, as always, Mike, we really, really, really appreciate you and your time that you give up and all the cool stuff that you do. So thank you very much. Everybody go and grab his book and we will hopefully see you all again very soon.