Build a Profitable and Scalable Funnel Business | Mike Michalowicz From Run Like Clockwork

This is what you lead your business on. And it's the thing that you must serve and protect. Meaning if it's the owner who's doing it, the owner has to be all in on this. Any distraction where you're pulling files or checking in patients is a problem. Every other employee must remove that from you and allow you to do the one most important thing, which is the qbr.

Hey there, funnel builders. Mike here from Sell your service. I'm extremely excited to announce that in this episode, I'm going to be interviewing Mike Michalowicz of Profit First Serge. His new book, Clockwork. At its core, Mike is going to teach us how to not only get more of our time back and how to scale the business, but also how to become profitable before that so that you actually have enough money to scale the business. It sounds too good to be true. One of the exercises that he goes through I've done myself a couple of times and it makes me kind of sweat when I do it because it's a real tough one. But I absolutely love talking to Mike. Let's jump into the interview and I'll see you at the end. Hey there, guys. Mike here and I am with Mike Michalowicz. Mr. Michalowicz, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, Mike. It's good to be with you.

Yeah, I'm really glad that you're able to join. So for those who don't know, this is Mike Michalowicz's book that I discovered you through. We'll get onto that in a little bit. For those who don't know who you are, what is it you're doing, what is it that you do? Who's Mike Michalowicz?

So you can see I have a strategically position, right, Mr. Marketer. I am an author. I'm a full time author. I have a passion for entrepreneurship because I've lived through it. I've had the good fortune of starting companies, selling companies, had the bad fortune, which actually is a good fortune of losing tons of money too, out of pure ignorance and arrogance. And I operate businesses today too, but formally or the majority of my life right now is dedicated to entrepreneurship and the teaching of it and the learning. So that's what I do. I write books for small business entrepreneurs. My hope is to help everyone take big steps forward in achieving their vision of success.

Yeah. And so the way that I discovered you, as someone talked to me through, they said you've got to check out Profit first and basically it turns your business profitable overnight. I was like, yeah, all right.

Yeah, sounds pretty a big promise, doesn't it?

Right, right. And so first of all, in fact, if anything, I've got a bone to pick with you because I've given away two printed versions of the book. Never get back.

Oh, you're the guy doing that.

That's me. And so I had to buy the Kindle version and somehow that's been worn through as well. The, the method of being able to manage your money, it was so pragmatic and I know you know tons of people, it's genuinely changed the way they take the business. And then you get into things like the Pumpkin Plan, a toilet paper entrepreneur. You pick hell of a titles, I'll give you that.

Right.

And yet there's something very pragmatic about what it is that your books offer, which is kind of quite removed from some of the other stuff on the market. I know all our guys are funnel builders, but entrepreneurialism in general, it seems to be that you want to offer like really pragmatic plans that people can follow repeatedly as opposed to kind of like the high level strategy stuff. That's quite difficult to wrestle with.

Yeah. Because. Well, that's because what I need, like when I write my books, in all honesty, every book I've written in part or mostly in its entirety, is to solve a challenge that I am facing or have faced. I struggled with finance for years while growing my businesses, had no idea how to make it work and was very frustrated at following traditional accounting. Then developed a method that just worked for me and I thought it was a lone island and I found out far from it. There's a lot of people that struggle with the finances and said, I get the word out on what I found. The Pumpkin Plan surge, all these books. When I face a challenge in different elements of my business, I write the book. But the other thing is I'm like a simple guy. I can try to digest intellectual stuff, but it just bounces around my head for a little bit and it confuses me and, and it frustrates me. So I need to take complex stuff and make it really digestible and simple. And so that's why I try to perpetuate the book. I understand many people are capable of dealing with the theoretical stuff. I just, I think at that. So I just make it very practical, very pragmatic. Here's step one, here's step two. Here's what you should expect as you do each step. And yeah, that's how I write.

And I think what's interesting is that's you might say that that's how you write. I know from experience. We've got a book out and a couple other books on the way. It's actually very difficult to put your money where your mouth is and say, well, here's the model. Like I can draw this out for you. Here's the model. But it does give a weight of, okay, well this is a plan that I can follow now. And that's what people want. They want to, they want to follow the structure and the process as opposed to kind of make it up as they go along. I don't know what one thing that's.

Worked, I think, to my advantage while writing these books, I think in traditional authorship. Traditional authors, I assume, don't necessarily own a business. They're studying the theory. Me, when I write my books, I start testing on my own businesses and I'm like, oh, this is too high level. So like clockwork. That's my new book coming out. It's taking me six years to write it. There's been four years of testing theorems and actually I threw out the entire book halfway through because I'm like, this is crap.

Wow.

And then started again. Profit first to profit first. I've been doing 10 years now and I actually even wrote about it, my first book, but had to further develop it before I felt I could write a book.

Yeah. And it's kind of what I want to talk a bit about today. So I did your T4 program and the two big things that came out of that were this queen bee exercise, which I'm desperate for you to share with my guys for me. I was like, it's one of the rare moments where I've done an exercise and I've been like sweating because I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like what it's demonstrating to me. And it's a really interesting way of looking at it. But also the thing that I wanted to start with right at the top was as marketing service based businesses. A lot of our stuff is kind of custom developed and custom built, whether it is or isn't. And I think a lot of people feel that you have to manage your money differently depending on the sum that comes in. Maybe you do $100 coaching call, you know, one on one concert, and then you do a $10,000 product or service. And a lot of people feel that they have to treat the money differently. And your argument is actually every dollar has the same job. It's. It's about scaling that out. Right. Could you just talk a bit through that.

Yeah. So when I develop profit first, it's based on a percentage based system. So it's regardless if you take in a dollar or $100,000 or anywhere in between, is every dollar does have a different components it must serve. So I bring in say $100 of a sale. A percentage of that needs to go toward profit. I dedicate 10%. A portion needs to go to my tax liabilities. By the way, I've traveled a lot internationally. I've yet to find a single country where the government doesn't like to stick its hand in our business. So, you know, we all have to do that. A percentage needs to go to pay us. A percentage needs to operate the business. So it's regardless of what you make, we have to be consistent with these percentages because it also forces us, if we're always taking the same percentage, it forces us to really consider, is that a hundred dollar product really working for me? Is it really generating that $10 or $20 of profit every transaction? And if it can't support it, that means there's a problem with that product. We need to change it. Ironically, sometimes it's the reverse. It's a $10,000 product with where we lose so much on commission, we lose so much on other things that there's no profit left over. It even costs us to take on those clients. But if we take our profit first, it becomes very apparent what's working, what's not.

So this is so richest man in Babylon, Rob Kiyosaki. They've got these concepts of paying yourself first and it's very easy. I mean, richest man in Babylon says just take 10% and save it. But that's from such a general person to person perspective when it comes to running a business. People think, well, I've got all my suppliers, I've got to pay my hosting company, my marketer stuff and you know, then I've got to pay the actual project costs and the bills and the overheads and yeah, if there's anything left over, I'll save that and that'll become profit. And if anything's left over from that, I'll pay myself. And your argument is actually, let's flip that. Let's make sure that every dollar is profitable and then work backwards down to your expenses.

Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, the first example you shared is traditional thinking. We've been trained on this. But the formula is real simple. Sales minus expenses equals profit. Everyone knows that formula. We even use words to say that profit comes last. It's the bottom line, it's the year end. The thing is, it's human nature. When something comes last, we are telling ourselves it's insignificant. Like I would never come out of the hospital and say, oh my God, I had a health scare. I'm now going to put my health last. I say I'm going to put my health first. You know, what is priority comes first. So we've been told that sales and expenses come first in the formula and get what we do. We say we got to sell more, we got to sell more, we got to grow, we got to grow, we got to hire, we got to spend. And profit is something that keeps on getting delayed. What I'm saying is we flip the formula. You have to sell. So it's sales now minus profit equals expenses. And when you start taking your profit first, you start looking at the healthy component, the profitability first. And then you have to reverse engineer the expenses. All those contractors, all those things you have, they may not even be appropriate. Your profit will actually guide you. If you take your profit first first, it'll guide you on what you can afford. And if, and by the way, if you can't afford to pay your bills when you take your profit first, your business is in no position to sustain those bills. We have to find a new innovative way to grow.

Yeah. And you know, I make this argument all the time that we actually have a moral obligation to be profitable. If you want to continue serving people, continue helping people, continue paying our stuff, we have a moral obligation to be profitable.

It's sustainability. It's a cheesy example. They talk about the airplane, though. They say put the oxygen mask on first before you put on others. Well, the reason they say that is if you're dead, it's really hard.

Yeah, real difficult.

If your business is dead, it is really hard. But you know, something worse than being dead and it's being crippled. There are so many crippled businesses out there trying to provide service, but they don't provide the best service. They provide marginal service because their mind is constantly stressed, like as they're working, like, I got to get more work. They're not focused on delivering great value. They're focused on survival. Businesses that are in survival mode, I think are the most threatening to clients because they're barely getting by. Therefore, if we are profitable, we actually bring back our focus, our concentration, our ability to deliver our best. And that's what our clients deserve.

And this is, this is quite a difficult thing for some people to swallow because I believe that a lot of Businesses, particularly in the marketing funnel world, we say, I just want to deliver Facebook ads, or I want to do landing pages or squeeze pages or content marketing. They get really hit up on the delivery of the product. Then when they are forced to look at it through this profit first viewfinder, they actually discover that some of their products aren't as profitable or there's so much effort for the same amount of percentage return, and it forces them to go, actually, this might not be the right thing to be in.

Yeah, you know, revenue. They say revenue is vanity, profit, sanity. Yeah, this. We're so focused on revenue that I know, and I'm a big part of this. In the past version of me pounding my chest saying, hey, man, I surpassed a million dollars in revenue. Oh, you did 2 million. I got to go up to 3 million and start counting my chest. My focus was so much on the vanity number that I was dying behind the scenes. I've now relabeled it. I think revenue is a stress factor. The more revenue you make, the more stress put on your business, Meaning you have, the more obligation. The more revenue you generate, the more you have to do for clients. So it is a stress factor. The antidote to that, the balance is profit. So as my stress level increases, I need to increase that balance. The good healthy fiber and vitamins, and that's what profit is. If we ignore profit, we will simply stress our business out. We have to bring that balance.

So I'll tell you what. So this is segueing beautifully. It's almost as if we had a brief conversation before.

Maybe we did.

And when we've done this exercise and we've helped our customers go through it, and we say, look, this is from the book Profit first is the exercise. And they look at their expenses and they go, okay, well, how do I get someone else to do this then? If I'm proportioning 30% of the income to getting someone else to do it to help leverage my time better, how am I going to do that? And that was when I was kind of like, I'll be honest, I don't really know. And then we came across partly surge, but also your queen bee exercise.

Yes.

There is a way to protect your time, which, in my opinion, is the profit. That's what I want to protect. And I want to leverage out the income that comes from projects out to other people to protect my time. How do I determine what the most important role my job is within the business?

Yeah, this is a wonderful question. And it came out from a discovery I've Had. I believe that Maslow's hierarchy of needs translates into business. And I believe there's at least three primary needs I'm exploring. There may be more, but the foundational is profit. Meaning if I'm an entrepreneur and I don't have money, I'm desperate to make money and I will compromise everything else, including my time. I will work like an animal. You know, forget my family, forget everything, forget my life. I got to make money. Once that's satisfied, the next level is time we started realizing the next asset is like I want freedom so I can do what I love within my business, but also do what I love within my life. Then the next level above that I believe is purpose. Maslow calls it self actualization. And I think we can do in our business too. But time is the next level. So profit first. My hope is addresses the financials. How do you recover time? Well, you do this thing called a qbr. It stands for the queen bee role. It's something I discovered as I was researching of all things beehives and discovered that beehives prioritize the most important role in the sustainability of a beehive, which is laying eggs. The queen bee happens to do this. But don't confuse the queen bee, that bee with the most important person in an organization. They're just serving the most important role. A queen bee at the end of days is dispensable. If she's not producing, they spawn a new queen bee. But every bee knows a two rule process. Once you know what the most critical role is, protect it with your life. So I don't care if you collect pollen, if you defend the hive, if you heat or cool the hive, if you you're a drone. Whatever your role is as a bee, your first role is make sure the queen bee is producing eggs. If she's not, the entire hive is done. Once that's protected, they move on and do their secondary role, which is collect pollen and whatever their job is. In our business, we need to identify what's the one thing we're willing to hinge our business success on. Everyone must know what that is and defend it. Here's an example. A doctor's office, that's a business. You know, a doctor won't check you in when you arrive in the waiting room. A doctor will not pull your file. A doctor won't even do the Pre exam. The doctor comes in, pokes your, prods you for 10 seconds, goes and renders a prescription and then goes to the next patient. So much so that a doctor's office, they'll have like five examination rooms for a doctor so they can queue up the patients. Because the most important role for a doctor's office, the QBR is examines examinations, prescriptions. In our business, you're a small business. Usually it's the owner or the most expensive, highly paid employees that are serving the role. Here's the quick way to find it. Write down, as the owner of the business, what are the six most important things that you do for your business that you want to hinge your business success on? Are you, you know, is it. Do you have a reputation for. For communicating well with clients? Do you reputation for extraordinary good marketing? What? What is it? And if it's not you look at your highest paid employees, then through deductive logic, take those six lists, those things, six things on a list, and start crossing off one at a time saying, if I can only do five, what would be the five? If I only do four, what would now be the four? Go backwards until you find the one thing. That one thing is your qbr. I have discovered that a business declares their qbr. It's not forced upon you. Yes, you pick it. This is what you lead your business on. And it's the thing that you must serve and protect. Meaning if it's the owner who's doing it, the owner has to be all in on this. Any distraction where you're pulling files or checking in patients is a problem. Every other employee must remove that from you and allow you to do the one most important thing which the qbr, once a business, by the way, was a business does this, the entire business will elevate.

And this is, for me, it was such a moment of clarity when I did it because I realized that the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, I do maybe once a month, the queen bee role, maybe once a month of presenting to customers and getting everyone on a webinar and getting excited and frankly making conversion. I was like, yeah, this is what I like to do. It, it works, it's profitable. If I look at the conversion rates, actually, even if I have less traffic and I'm not writing blog content, I can still do those calls. First of all, it was very stressful eliminating roles because as human beings, we have a fear of change inherently. I suppose I'm into that, yes. But what was really important to me is as soon as I started eliminating those roles, I was like, well, they still need to be done. So I had to actually go back to my pricing model and think, am I generating enough profit and Sharing enough of the revenue that comes through to get other people to do those roles. And it basically was like, oh, this is how you scale a business.

Yeah, exactly. Well, wow, wonderful. You got a plus for you.

Thank you very much.

Is we start reverse engineering. Once you figure out this is the primary thing we need to do, then you say, well, how do I get it done? But then the question becomes, not how do I get it done? How do we get it done?

Yeah.

And then we becomes, how do they get it done? And that's where business independence happens.

Yeah. And it's so liberating when that finally happens because you do become quite, very protective over this queen bee role. And like you said, it's.

Yeah.

Here's an interesting question, actually. Does the queen bee role ever change over time? Is it something that we would change as the business grows and develops? I haven't been doing it long enough and I've only been running a business for like three or four years. So I don't know if that changes over time.

Very rarely. And it requires a massive rebranding of your business because your business will become known for your queen bee role.

That's interesting.

Amazon, for example, their queen bee role, I'd argue, is their convenience. So at a certain point, Jeff Bezos, when he found founded Amazon, he was trying to make book purchases very convenient and he was the guy serving it. As the organization grew, people were serving, and now it's to the point where the computers actually serve the queen bee role. Extreme convenience. If Amazon says, you know what, we're going to change things, we're going to be the luxury provider. Only they could declare that it's such a massive shift that it's going to disorient the customer base that's buying based upon that queen B roll. It does shift occasionally, but it's got to be very deliberate and you have to be very cautious about that because you may alienate your past customers.

But this is why the person, and we're just speaking in colloquialism, the person, the bee itself is actually expendable. Like I said, the queen bee can actually replace with another bee. The person is expendable. It's the role that serves the customer that has to be protected.

Bingo. Flamingo. And you know, as I was writing Clockwork, the book, I've interviewed entrepreneurs who are not willing to let go of the queen bee role. It is tied into their ego, and I'm not saying ego in a negative way here. Their definition of themselves is what I mean. It's tied into them. And they said, I'm deliberately. I know that the day I stopped, the entire business stops. But to me, this is where I get my significance. I decided and declared I'm always going to be the exclusive queen bee. So that's a choice.

Yeah. So, okay, maybe that's. Maybe that's what I meant by does the role change? The person doing the role can change.

There's no question about it.

We can extra.

Yeah, it has to.

Yeah, yeah.

I myself am going through this. What we're doing, coincidentally, right now, for me, is my queen bee role. I call it messaging. The most important thing is to get the message out on business efficiency, what I call eradicating business, entrepreneurial poverty. I believe entrepreneurs are impoverished on time. They're impoverished financially. They're impoverished even on purpose. So this is my mission. And right now we're doing this is delivering the message. But I also realize I can only do so much before it starts to wane. I have slowly but methodically empowered others to spread the word. And it happened yesterday. Profit first is one of my books. Three speeches happened on profit first yesterday, and I did none of them. It's other people that are now carrying it forward. That's the transition of the qbr. There's also, though, my ego checks, like, oh, my God. But that's my invention, you know, and so something, you know, I got to get a really ego check and realize at a certain point, profit first is no longer mine. It is ours. And the bigger motivation I have now is to get the word out, regardless of my association with it. That's where I need to move to. And sometimes I struggle with it.

And so I suppose that again, comes back to a bit of a moral obligation. We have to feel sometimes that it's more important to share what we generally believe to be helpful with people rather than tying it to ourself. It's certainly something that I struggle with from a coaching perspective. I'm like, yeah, but I know this stuff. I'm the coach. And the reality is, if I learned it, someone else has probably learned, can learn it as well, you know?

Yes. I put it in a mechanism, a feedback loop, and I encourage everyone to do this. Once you start leaving the qbr, how do you know that releasing the QBR is actually serving a greater purpose? And how do you get the reward from that? For me, it's a simple mechanism. Every time someone reads my book, there's a call out in there to email me and tell me where you stand. I call it draw the line in the sand. Well, I get an email easily every hour, at least from an entrepreneur. And every time I get it, it's an ego boost. But I'm like, huh, yes, serving more people. Over time, it's increased and there's more and more coming in. So I can measure the impact in a way that feels very rewarding and that counterbalances my maniacal ego to want to possess and control what I created.

That's really interesting that the feedback loop actually getting proof that you're impacting more people. And it's. It's as simple as asking for it. Who'd have thought?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's my metric. Right. So. And as I'm looking here, actually, one just came in the last 10 minutes.

Awesome.

So I feel good. Right. So that's my feedback loop because it speaks also to the way I communicate. I'm a very verbal person. So to receive something that affirms, say, hey, this is a life changer, it lights me up. But for other people, we're much more, you know, measured and much more numerically driven. That's when, you know, some analytical measurement with some numbers may be more impactful than a word from a. From a customer. So we have to define, I think, what resonates with us.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. That's a big part of it, again. Right. Is there's this bizarre thing that a lot of people feel. There's nobility and struggle when actually you can still go after the things that you enjoy that you love doing and make sure again, it comes back to the profit first thing. That at its core, in some respects, you are the most important person, particularly if you have to pay yourself because you've got to keep it running. So. Yeah. Why not also make it something that you enjoy doing, that you connect with. It's.

That's why we're on this planet. Yeah. And I've been down that path of nobility and the struggle. I proudly called myself a workaholic.

Yeah.

One day I relabel that. I thought as a workaholic, I could outwork anybody. And I relabeled myself and said I'm the most inefficient person on the planet. I got to work till midnight every night. I want to be a productive, holic, you know, a result.

Yeah, that's good. Resultsaholic. Yeah, I like that a lot. Okay, so let's just recap quickly because there's been. There's been a lot here we've moved over, which is just awesome, frankly.

Very kind of you.

No matter what we are doing as. As our delivery, the dollars that come in, each dollar has its proportional. I think you need a budget says every dollar's got a job, and that's. That's their thing. Right. And we do. We say for $10 that comes in. For me personally, I know that $5 is going to go to profit, $15 is going to go to tax, $30 is going to go to expenses, and $50 is going to go to me. And our bookkeeper now just takes care of that. And that doesn't matter if I get a $10,000 project or even like, we sell like a little $19 book, right? Yeah, yeah. So. And also, just really quickly on the tax thing, your thing is that 15% is a pretty good indicator.

Yeah. I found this to be internationally true to the most part. But the percentages I suggest in the book, they're guiding principles, but they are not written in stone. We need, and we should, as we go along in the system, tweak it for the uniqueness of our business.

Yeah. And that's, I think, really important as well, because again, I feel for a lot of entrepreneurs who, they'll read a model and they go, well, if this model doesn't work, that's it. I can't use it.

Yeah.

Yours is very much. Yours is more about, let's make sure that the proportions are paid out and in the correct order. It's the formula that you flip first and then you say, here's some example ones that we find have worked, you know, at the different income levels. So it's important to tweak that to your own actual business. Yeah, yeah, I wholly agree with that. And it's about revenue as a stress factor. Yeah. Which I love. I love that.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, stress isn't necessarily all a bad thing, but too much stress will put us in the grave, and we have to see it that way. The thing is, we. We herald revenue. We brag about it. It's the number we put out there. When someone says, you know, how big are is your business? I say, hey, let's ask a new question. Let's ask how healthy my business is to reset people. And that's the balance between revenue and profit.

It's the same thing when you kind of meet up with colleagues and peers. Bit like your workaholic resultaholic thing. People go, how are you doing? Yeah, really good. We're so, so busy. And I'm always like, man, that must suck. Right. How are you doing, Mikey? I'm really good. I'm off to Salzburg for a couple of weeks and my business is going to continue.

Right. Isn't that funny? We are champions for stress and overwhelm. Yeah, yeah. We got change that everyone's got changed. I hope that people listening into the show right now say, you know, I'm going to draw the line and start promoting the healthy stuff in business.

And this comes again. It's about flipping those traditional models. I've got a big thing about what we're traditionally taught about money in general. We've got some really funny things about like, money is evil, rich people are, you know, unpleasant people, all this kind of stuff and, and all these traditional models and we're like, okay, well now I'm going to run a business. I don't want to work in a job. That's usually what people think. They go, I don't want to work for a manager. But I'm still going to follow all these traditional things that everyone else has taught me. Like why, man, it's, it's your business. You don't have to do that.

Right, right.

You know.

Right. I don't really have much. Right.

Cool. No good.

You nailed it. I have not much more to say about that.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So we've talked as well about this queen bee role and ultimately it's about how do I determine the most valuable task in the business. How would you word that?

Yeah, I would word it as responsibility or job. I think tasks can be considered a little bit more Microsoft. Yeah. So that's how I define it. And what we really need to do is protect the people who are serving that and avail them to do more and more time on that. And it's the concept of the tide rises all boats similar to if we took a chain between me and you and we're pulling as hard as we could. At a certain point the chain will break at the weakest link. But if we strengthen only one link in the chain, that weakest one, the entire train chain has become stronger.

Yeah.

The QBR is the most critical and usually the weakest link in the entire business chain. We strengthen that and many people are blown away how powerful the business the chain becomes.

Yeah, I know Rob Moore, who's a UK entrepreneur over here. He has what he calls his income generating tasks. He just is a broader term and he said it's staggering if people write down what those key performance areas and those income generating tasks really are, how people don't do them. They're like, yeah, I should, I should really focus on you know, I should redesign the website. And yeah, you know, you've, you've got this method of serving people. Like you said, yours is messaging. If you were to ignore that bit like laying the eggs, nothing else is going to come out. You're actually choking your business, you know.

That's right.

Yeah, I like that a lot. And this was, this is really good. This is, this is beautiful. Becoming known for the queen bee role, the business becomes known for that role, right?

Yes, that becomes the distinguishing factor. And we can look at any. You know, one of the dangers of looking at these mega corporations, I just picked on Amazon, but we could pick any company. We become known for something. But then us small entrepreneurs, our startups, we look at the big guys and say, oh, clearly that's what they've always done. They've had the entire organization focusing on this one thing and the owner doesn't do any of it. Therefore, I'm going to abandon it and just have everyone else do my one thing. We have to understand, this is not a switch. You don't just switch over to a new business. This is a throttle, a consistent transition. So while we want to aspire to be like the big guys, I can encourage everyone to rewind on those big businesses, read about their history, see how they started, and you'll start seeing this consistent pattern. It's the owner who takes over the qbr, then it's a team of protected employees, and ultimately it becomes a fully automated process. And I see that same slow throttle happen over and over again.

Yeah, I mean, I think Richard Branson is a great example of that. That's, that's, that's what he did in the basement of some church, you know, was, was one queen bee role, and he made sure that was important. And then the team grew. And what was interesting, just like you said, the role itself, and at the time, it was Virgin Records and Virgin Media. His actual role was finding new talent, and that was the queen bee role. And wouldn't you know it, you know, Tubular belles and all these incredible bands come through Virgin Media. The business gets known for it. He gets to protect that queen bee role, but he himself is removed from it and he has a team of people doing it. That transition, I think, is so obvious when you see it from outside perspective, but it can get very difficult and murky when you're doing it yourself, you know.

Yeah, we got to look at the beginning days of these entrepreneurs. It's. Yeah, I think we look at Rachel Branson today and say, oh, my God, you know, I got to start out by buying Necker island for myself. That's a great. We got to start in the very beginning.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And this, that kind of leads us onto our final point here about this feedback loop. To make sure that we know we are increasing the number of people that we serve in this queen bee role is expanding, is finding a method to be able to get people to say, hey, Mike, you know much at this stage, it's clearly working. You go, right, well, I am serving more people.

Yeah, that's correct. And I think we have the ability to choose the path of how we grow our business. I think there's two methods. It's the breadth of our business or the depth of our business. We can impact a client, a customer, a patient, if you're a doctor, deeper and deeper by becoming a specialist, extraordinarily talented. Or we can choose breath, try to make millions by serving millions. And I don't think there's a wrong path. I do think though, some people try to go deep and broad at the same time and that's the mistake. Pick one path. Do you want to affect millions of people at a very basic level or do you want to affect very few people, but a very deep level? I actually personally have chosen to go the breadth. I'm trying to serve as many people, inspire them with things like profit first, clockwork. But I also know I can only go so deep. I'm not a consultant. I don't, you know, I don't work individually with people. But at a certain point I'll achieve the breath I want and try to go deeper and deeper. And that one two step process, if you will, is what makes us have the biggest impact. Choose your first step, breadth or depth, and then do the next step.

Yeah, and again, it's interesting about the breadth and depth thing. I also agree with the breadth thing partly because the beginner market itself, if I'm just going from an economic perspective, is the fastest growing market. It's always the biggest markets, always the one that's going to grow. And while it gets deeper, it becomes harder. Having said that, it's a really interesting way to look at my model and go, okay, well, I've served someone with the book, for example, if I want to go deeper on that customer, can I offer them a course? And then the coaching, the consulting, the done for you service. So you have options, but you also have a certain number of hours in the day to do everything. Yeah, that's good. I like that a lot. Mike. Thank you so much. We're out of time here, so I massively appreciate you taking us through that. Clockwork is out When? In the summer?

Yeah, it comes out August 21st. That book and all my other books are on Amazon. It's on. Actually. They're all internationally available. Hopefully at your local bookstore, too.

Awesome. Yeah. And if people want to reach out with you or get in touch with you, you got a website. You ought to call it your podcast as well. Of course.

Yeah, I'm a podcaster. I'm a blogger. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal. All that stuff is available on my website. It's mikemicalitz.com which is a doozy. Here's the shortcut. My nickname in high school, ironically, was Mike Motorbike. It's ironic because I never drove a motorbike, but if you go to mikemotorbike.com that'll bring you to my site.

That's great.

I used to write for the Wall Street Journal. If you sign up there, you can get all of my archived articles for free.

Awesome, Mike. Thank you so much for taking the time. And yeah, guys, I hope you enjoyed that. I know I sure as hell did. Thanks very much, Mike Michalowicz.

Thank you.

Bye now.

Bye.

Bye. What did you think? I mean, like, I kind of have to stop myself from getting a bit, like, over emotional. He was just such a lovely guy. So, so smart. He just cottoned on to what I was trying to get out in my badly worded questions. And he knew exactly how to answer it. Really interesting. About the Queen B roll, I highly, highly, highly recommend. In fact, don't just go and do the Queen B roll. Look for the Mike McCall T4 method. I'll link to it below because to me, it was genuinely revolutionary when I did it through my business. There's a bunch of videos. It's a small micro course that takes you through that process. If you haven't read Profit First, I highly suggest you go ahead and do it. In the meantime, I will see you on the next Mastermind when I can find even more people who are smarter than me. And I'll help you serve more of your customers. Cheers, guys. Keep building those funnels. Building those funnels, Sam.