Mike Michalowicz | Using "Profit First" in Your Private Practice | with Kasey Compton

Hello folks, I'm Gordon Brewer with the Practice of Therapy. And I'm so glad you've joined me for this special episode and special edition of the Practice of Therapy podcast. This is the first time I've done it in video and I think once you watch this, you'll see why, because the visual is great and being able to see the guests that I had on these on this episode. My guest today is Mike Michalowicz. Mike Michalowicz is the author of Profit first and his more recent book is called Clockwork. And I was so excited when I found out that Mike would agree to be on the podcast. And so this is a big deal for me that he is here and agreed to be a guest. The other thing that is a big milestone for the podcast is that this is the one year anniversary of the Practice of Therapy podcast. So I was so excited that all of the stars aligned, if you will, and that Mike was able to join me for this, this milestone and this, this particular episode. Also in this episode of the podcast I have Casey Compton and Casey was in the, one of the earlier podcast episodes, episode number 47. And Casey was really very instrumental in helping me learn about Mike Michalowicz and Profit First. So let me tell you real quickly the backstory on this. So Casey Compton and I have been involved with Joe Sanock over at the Practice of the Practice and we've been involved in some of his mastermind groups. And so Casey had done an interview with Joe on the Practice of Practice podcast where she talked about how she built her practice. And Casey has built a multimillion dollar private practice with multiple locations. And she did it over a three year period, which is just phenomenal. And so needless to say, I wanted to learn how she did that. And in that interview that Joe did with Casey, she mentioned this book, Profit First. So I made a mental note of it, said I'll get that book. So I bought the book, put it on the shelf, had really, quite frankly forgotten about it until I was going to do some volunteer work this summer with the youth camp that I'm involved with and took the book with me. So I started reading the book and just absolutely could not put it down. It was one of those books that just made the light bulb go off in my head and really understand the financial side of my private practice so much differently and help me see some of the many things I was doing wrong with the way I was handling my, the financial side of my private practice. So when I got done with the book I thought, well, what the heck, I'll contact Mike's organization and see if he'll be on the podcast. And lo and behold, he, he said yes right away. And so I let Casey know. And Casey was just beside herself that I was going to be able to meet Mike Michalowicz and, and do this podcast episode with. With him. And so I had to pull Casey in on that one. I knew how excited she was on that, and I knew she was a person that had as much farther along in her implementation of the Profit first system. And so I wanted to have Casey a part of this as well. So thanks to Casey for joining me and interviewing Mike Michalowicz. One other thing I want to mention is depending on when you're watching this video, I doing a little contest or a little giveaway to give away the two books that we talk about in this podcast episode, I'm going to give away a copy of Profit first and Clockwork to two people that will enter the contest. And along with a little tumbler that I have Practice of Therapy Tumblr. And so go over and enter the contest. Just Simply go to practiceoftherapy.comcontests contest with an S and enter the contest and get a chance to win the the two books along with the Tumblr. And the good news about the contest is that you can enter more than once. And also the more you share the contest with others, the more entries you get. So get out there and enter the contest and share with all your friends and on social media and hopefully you'll win the books Profit first and Clockwork. So without further ado, here's my interview with Mike Malowitz, along with Casey Compton joining me in the. In the questions. And I hope this is, I hope this will blow your mind. Well, welcome folks, to the Practice of Therapy podcast. I am so thrilled that this day has finally come. It's kind of like Christmas, in a way. And I'm so happy to have my guest today, Mike Michalowicz. And also we've got as a repeat guest along with this, because I know she's a big fan, is Casey Compton. But Mike Michalowicz, for those of you that don't know him, I'm going to tell you, you've got to get to know his story. He is the author of Profit First, Surge, the Pumpkin Plan, and his newest book is called Clockwork. And by his 35th birthday, Mike had founded and sold two companies, one a private equity and another to a Fortune 500 company. Today, he is running his third multimillion dollar venture, Profit First Professionals. And Mike is also a former small business columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a former business makeover specialist on msnbc. And over the years, Mike has traveled the globe speaking with thousands of entrepreneurs, and is here today to share the best of what he's learned. Mike, so glad you're here.

Gordon, thank you. And Casey, thank you so much for having me. This is an absolute joy to be here.

Yes, yes. And you know, and we were talk chatting before we started the podcast and it's really true, Mike, that you have made an impact on several hundreds, if not thousands of mental health professionals that are going into private practice and really trying to learn the business side of things and figure all that out. So just thanks for all that you do and your generosity.

Thank you. That means the world to me to hear that because, well, I think, you know, it's such a, such an important service that our community, our world needs is therapy. And I also realize that so many people go into this space knowledgeable about the profession, but not knowledgeable about the business aspect. So it just enlightens my heart to hear that my books are being of service.

Yeah, great. Yeah. And what I'll do is, of course, in the show, notes have links to everything. So for people to connect with all that. So, Mike, I guess maybe a good place to start is for those that aren't familiar with it, can you kind of give, in a nutshell, this whole idea about profit first. And also I know that a big part of the profit first idea has as much as anything to do with your story and your journey in business. So tell folks about all that.

Yeah, so I'll tell you a little bit about the premise first, because I think that's the juicy stuff that we need to know. I remember meeting with my accountant and him mandating effectively that I understood how to read an income statement, a balance sheet, cash flow statement, tie those things in together. He told me to know my KPIs, which is the key performance indicators, my budget, this thing called the ocr, which is the operating cash ratio metric, which he implored upon me to understand. With all these things going on, what I did was whenever I was in the office or wherever I was traveling, I would hop on my phone or my computer, log into my bank, and I had a really simple system for managing my numbers. Instead of looking at all that stuff he told me to look at, I would just log in the bank account and follow a simple system. If I had money, I could spend it and if I didn't, panic would ensue and it would frustrate him because he said the worst thing to look at is your bank account because it does not reflect the state of your business. It's an understanding of these other documents. Well, I've come to believe is that many entrepreneurs, perhaps even the majority of entrepreneurs, actually follow the similar system to me, this bank balance accounting. We trust our gut and our instinct. We're very good at serving our clients, at our profession, maybe selling our services. But when it comes to the monotony of the numbers, that for many of us is not our gift. So we revert to this very simple system. What I've come to believe now, instead of changing who we are, we should channel who we are. Meaning if you log into your bank accounts and see how much money you have, let's have a system that sits there, and then let's channel that existing behavior to get the result we want. It's a simple behavioral technique. Maybe. Actually, I'm not too familiar with therapy industry, but me as a technique used is kind of redirecting an energy as opposed to trying to stop it. So what we did, what I did with profit first is we. The first step is we literally take your profit first. As sales come in, revenue comes into your therapy business. You take a predetermined percentage of that money and allocate it to another account called profit. So instead of having that one account where all the money's going, we're now starting to sliver that money or cut the money up into different accounts, profit being the most important in the first one. Also, there's another one called owners pay. This is to reserve money for the owner themselves to pay yourself a reasonable salary. Then there's one for taxes, because sure enough, April 15th rolls around and many of us get caught, you know, unexpectedly, with no money and panic ensues. So the business is going to reserve that for us. And there can be other accounts too, but the one other account that's mandatory is operating expenses. And what you'll see is if, say, $1,000 comes in this week, or whatever the number is, $1,000 comes in. I used to think, oh, I have $1,000 to run my business. That's not true. 10% of that 100 bucks, for example, may go to profit. 30% or 40%, let's say 40% may go to paying myself a salary. So that's $400 I reserve for taxes, maybe another 10% there. So it's $100. So now four plus one plus one is six. That means there's only 400 left to operate the business. We don't have $1,000 to run our business. We have $400 to run our business. And so that's the basic premise of the system. But I will tell you, because you asked about my story, I before this, and you were kind enough to share in the introduction, I had the good fortune of building and selling companies. I had the misfortune, which is not on my resume, of those companies not being healthy financially whatsoever. I was actually lucky I sold them. That's where I made my money. I also had this then belief that we make profit as an event, that if you can stick this business out long enough, profit will happen. And so I said, well, okay, I sold two companies. Clearly, I just got to build, build, build and then sell one day. Well, my third attempt was a disaster. I was an angel investor in a mix of companies. I was totally full of both ignorance and arrogance, which is like a deadly combination. And that failed miserably. I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I lost all my money. I had to restart. And that triggered subsequently this new understanding that profit does not come last. That's what we've always been told, by the way. Profit is the sales minus expenses equals profit. That's how we run our businesses. And I believe that to be a total fallacy, because when profit comes last, we are saying it can wait. You know, it's like saying, my health comes last. Like it means my health isn't important. When your health is important, say my health comes first. So that put this new notion my mind. And now for 10 years, I've been living it. And the new book, the new version came out about a year and a half ago. I have there strategically over my shoulder, you know, well positioned for marketing purposes, but that in the last year and a half, over a hundred thousand companies that we're aware of now are doing the profit first method.

Wow. Wow. Well, it's been a. I know it's been a game changer for me. And it's just, you know, I'm still getting my head around it a lot. And I know as I mentioned to you before we started, Casey, who's on the podcast with us, actually introduced me to it. I was listening to Casey on another podcast with Joe Sanock, and she mentioned profit first. And so I said, okay, I've got to find out about this because Casey's superpower falls in line with your. Your most recent book, Clockwork, about getting systems in place to have your Business run itself and Casey has built a multimillion dollar counseling and therapy practice. And so. Yeah. So, Casey, I know you've probably got a ton of questions for Mike, so I'm going to let you jump in if you want to.

Oh, goodness. Okay. I'll give it a shot. There's so much. You know, one thing I guess I want to say right off is that I really admire your perspective on just business and the way that you look at finances and the way that you look at companies and the way that you look at systems and it's almost like flip opposite of what your common sense would tell you to do. Yeah. And that's kind of how I am. So, like everything in business of what I was supposed to do, I just did the opposite. And most of the time it worked. And so go ahead.

Thank you. There's a saying, like, I don't know if it's about horses or whatever, but if all the horses are going for water this way, the likelihood of finding water for you is much better when it's the opposite direction. And I found that to be true in so many principles. It's this contrarian effect, effectively. And so I'm happy you see that. And it does seem to work.

It does. Yeah. I was on a Q and A yesterday. I do some Q&As in some mastermind groups in the mental health field and someone was asking me, you know, when should I hire? And, you know, I kind of have a few systems in place or some different metrics to help people identify when that's a good idea. But in your new book, Clockwork, you know, you're like, if you think you should, then do it. And you know what I mean? And so it's just been really. It's not like it's just me saying that now that I feel like I've got this backbone and this corner of what you're doing, it's like, oh, yeah, well, if he says that's right and then Casey's telling me, then it's probably true, you know, So I appreciate that part of it as well.

Oh, it's my pleasure. It's funny, it's interesting. There's this weird shift that people have when they read something in writing in a book versus just hearing it seems more credible when it's in a book. Now, I did just to give you some background for Clockwork. It was six years of research. I wish I knew of you back then because I would have interviewed you. I interviewed about 100 different experts in industry, agnostic across all industries to find the common thread of business efficiency, what I call organizational efficiency. And one of the things Gordon was horsing around earlier with the acdc. I love that band. I couldn't believe I didn't recognize the song right off the bat. But there's a business flow that has the same acronym ACDC as the band. Maybe it's not as awesome as the band, but it's still pretty amazing. Every business goes through four distinct phases. Not necessarily all in the same sequence, but these four distinct phases. And if we identify where we're struggling or where slowdown is, if we fix that one phase of the business, the entire business will elevate. So the phases, it's an acronym ac, dc. The first phase, every business experiences is called attract. That's where we need to attract production prospects, clientele for our therapy business. The next phase is called C, which stands for convert. This is where that prospect who inquired about our services now becomes a customer. The third phase is called deliver. This is where deliver our offering. And then the final phase is C, which stands for collect, which is now the exchange of money. And some businesses reverse around. Sometimes you collect the revenue before you deliver service. But knowing that every business goes through this four stages of flow, what we do is when we look at our business. Well, let me kind of give a counterpoint. First, most business owners try to fix everything in their business, right? We're not growing fast enough. Things aren't as good as we want. We don't have as much money as we need, and they try to do everything. But in this model, the ACDC model, if we identify where the weakest part is of the business and simply elevate that, we'll see that the entire business elevates. It's kind of like a chain. If you want to strengthen a chain, you don't strengthen every link. You actually find what the weakest link is. And by just strengthening that, the entire strength of the chain has been elevated. So we look at our business and say, you know, we have very few people who are becoming customers. Well, then we likely have a conversion issue. So we look at conversion. Say, are we not selling to people's real challenge or what will motivate them to sign up? Or do we have an attraction issue? So it's that struggling point or the point before it that's causing the problem? Do we have not just enough prospect generation? We have a marketing issue. Just encourage people is look for the slowdown in your business in that model, then see if the problem is at that Point or somewhere preceding it. Fix that one spot and the entire business will elevate.

Yeah, and that's kind of what Profit first does as well. I mean, because I view profit first as a system to increase your profitability. I mean, you may disagree or I'm sure you have a better way to describe it, but a lot of times I'll look at a practice's financials and everything's in line except the profit and it's off. And you know, that's the easiest thing to fix. And so, you know, what would you say to someone that is doing mostly all of the right things but the money is not where they want it?

Yeah. So there's a term for that that's called being a human being. Very common. It's very human. And I want to first say that if you, someone watching this right now or listening in, struggles with that exact problem, I want you to know you're not alone. It's very common and it's very easily fixable. I think the first thing to understand is there's this thing called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Actually you all are probably extremely familiar with it. It was relatively new to me, this Maslovian hierarchy of needs, but speaks to human needs. And my understanding of it is foundationally, we need oxygen, for example. If we don't have oxygen and nothing else will matter unless we get oxygen is the foundational, most important need, we very quickly revert to that. If we are suffocating, we will gasp for air, we'll do whatever it takes. Then we move up to nutrition, shelter, love and acceptance, all the way up to self actualization. I believe this same hierarchy of needs exists for a business organization. Now I believe the oxygen level is sales, meaning if I have no inbound cash flow, if no one's engaging my services, I'm out of business. That's the oxygen for a business. The next level up, what I call the nutrition, the food for a business is profit. So if I don't have profitability, I. My business actually starts starving to death. We wilt away. The sad part, to your point, Casey, the sad part is many people, when they don't have profitability, actually revert to pushing more sales. Like we're not selling enough, we need to sell more. Which if we do the analogy that's gasping for air when your body is starving for food, it's not going to solve the situation. So the process at this next level up is to start taking little chunks of nutrition cash for your business as money flows in. The simple Solution is take a predetermined percentage, allocate it, hide it away from yourself, and run your business off the remainder. And when people hear that, by the way, they said, well, that's, that's totally crazy because there's no money left. Right now you're saying if I take it first, there'll be money left. It won't be. It's a shell game. And the thing is, it's not a shell game. It's a behavioral shift. There was a study documented by a guy named Parkinson, and it's called Parkinson's Law. And it was really. His first essay was really more of a cynical essay about government and so forth. But the core point was this, that as a resource increases in its availability, the more we consume of it, and as it decreases in availability, wherever that resource is, we consume less of it and we become innovative and conservative in its consumption. For example, and I write about this in the book Toothpaste. Like, if you can understand just basically how toothpaste works, you'll understand how money works tonight. Anyone listening in right now will experience this. When you go to bed to brush your teeth, if there is a full tube of toothpaste, you know, we take our toothbrush and we just put this long bead on there. It's like, right? And if it's. I travel a lot. I'm actually this afternoon heading out to Las Vegas. I am always shocked when I visit a hotel. You just never know what's anticipating the water pressure. Sometimes you turn the faucet on and like little dribbles come out. Other times, like in Vegas, often in the middle of a desert, you turn that water faucet on and it comes out with such force that the toothpaste like slingshots across the room. But I don't care because I have a new tube. So I put it on, which is the first part of Parkinson's Law, full supply of toothpaste. We use it excessively. I mean, it's just toothpaste after all. If the scenario tonight for people listening in is that shriveled up prune like tube where there's nothing in there, it's unbelievable how our behavior changes. All of a sudden we become this herculine super being where we push and we grind as hard as we can. That vein you never knew who you had on your forehead starts pulsing and we extract the toothpaste. But now we use a little droplet of it. We find a way to get it out, and we use very little. And we will then brush our teeth with that, the point is, a full tube of toothpaste lasts for most people, I don't know, three weeks, four weeks. An empty tube of toothpaste seems to last three or four weeks, though. It's not the amount of toothpaste, it's how we use it in business. The same way when we allow all the money that comes into our business, we use all that money to run our business. We have a full tube of toothpaste, we use it excessively without even knowing because it's just a little bit of money, after all. But when we intentionally constrain the amount of money available to run the business, we've taken our profit out and hide it away. Now it's the empty tube of toothpaste. We all of a sudden have these Hercules strengths. We become very innovative. We twist and turn, if you will, our business to extract more value of what we're doing, and that profit starts accumulating. The final point I want to make too is a mental shift. You won't become rich overnight, but a mental shift will happen almost immediately. When you see even that you've tucked away a small percentage of money, maybe there's 50 bucks net profit account, you'll start feeling this empowerment going, oh, my Gosh, I got 50 bucks in profit. Wow. What if I keep doing this and you see the money accumulating and starts becoming very empowering to see profit accumulating on the side. And we inherently now operate our business more effectively.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's the thing that just really resonated for me is, you know, I think in business, especially if, you know, I'm one of those business kind of podcast geeks, listen to a lot of stuff, and there's. There's usually a lot of hype or really around just making money, acquiring this big amassing of wealth. And the truth of the matter is, I think most of us, both therapists and anybody else for that matter, we really just want to maintain a lifestyle that fits who we are as people. And, you know, being able to take the profit first system takes the pressure off of trying to do a whole lot really quickly. It's just really about the consistency and persistence that we put into our businesses and practices.

You know, there's these sayings of hustle and grind. Very popular right now. What's your hustle like? You got to grind it out. And I actually believe it's hurting us. I'm not a fan of that language now. I understand the intent behind it. I think it's appropriate we can't just sit back and drink margaritas and hope our business is going to grow. But I think how it's being interpreted by many entrepreneurs is for my business to be successful, I have to put in more and more effort. My progress is linked specifically and exclusively to my effort. And that's not true. What it's linked to is your ability to think about your business and organize and coordinate the resources that you have. You being one of the resources, but the other resources you have. I also believe that this, the popularity of having a bigger and bigger business, which I bought into myself, I wanted to have that big billion dollar company. I believe it's a misnomer. I now believe that the right size business can find you. You know, we're running these businesses to provide ourselves with comfort, financial freedom to be of service to others. And there's a certain point the business can become unwieldy. And now we're not being of service. We're too distracted, we're too overwhelmed and stressed. A business can, can grow in revenue, but the profit can struggle. And that is horrible. You want to talk about a horrible lifestyle? I've had friends who have these multimillion dollar businesses, people I met through interviews too, that aren't making a penny. What I now have concluded there's a saying that revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. I've changed that. I think that revenue is a stress factor because what revenue is, is an obligation. Every dollar we take, we have an obligation now to deliver a service in return. So as revenue grows, our sense of obligation grows. And that's good, that's fine. But, but it can become overwhelming. It can come so overwhelming, it becomes stressful because more and more obligations comes more and more stress. The serum to this is profit. Profit reduces that stress component. And if we try to grow our way into success, we actually often grow our way out of business. So we need to balance profitability throughout and allow the right size business to find you what feels good is right.

Yeah, yeah. And I know what's resonating for me in your book Clockwork. And I'm, as I mentioned to you, I'm about a third or almost a half of the way through is. And I think a lot of people, especially therapists, we struggle with this, of being able to delegate things, thinking that we can. We're the only ones that can do all the stuff. And you know, I think that's one of the things that I'm learning for myself is learning how to take more and more off of my plate. So I can concentrate on the stuff that I really love doing and passionate about of doing.

You know, all us entrepreneurs are like that. Like we, it's called the superhero complex, at least that's what I call it. And that we can dive in and fix anything. And of course we can. We started the business, we know it inherently, we own the business. So we're highly vested in a successful outcome. So we have this superhero complex where it's like, oh, that's a problem. Dive in, fix it back out. Satisfies my ego. I'm like, yeah, back to my work. But that also undermines the ability for the business to defend and protect itself. It undermines our ability for our colleagues, whatever level they play at, to be empowered and to elevate themselves. So one of the extreme things, and you'll get to it in clockwork is I found the ultimate test for a business that can run independently is to commit to a four week, four consecutive week vacation. And this is a gutsy thing, but I believe it's the ultimate test. And here's what the four week vacation is. I encourage every reader to declare not for like tomorrow. I'm not saying like tomorrow, just abandon your business. I'm saying a year and a half, maybe two years from now, we declare a four week vacation. What happens during a four week cycle, I found, is that a business will experience every element. You may have new patients come in for services. You may have a new employee that needs to be hired. You may have administrative responsibilities. They all happen usually within these monthly cycles. If we can disconnect from our business for a full month now we've created a business that can run independently, fully on its own. What most entrepreneurs do is if we do take a vacation, which many, sadly we don't, but if we do, it's often like a week's vacation. And then the game we play is the week before I leave for that week's vacation, I go into the cramming mode. I just cram as much work as I can in. I work late at night hoping that will bridge me for the week I'm out. Then when I turn return, I scramble to catch up. So it's this cram and scramble approach that is not a business that's getting independence as a business that's still very independent on you. But if we can remove ourselves for four consecutive weeks now, the business for it to sustain, has to survive without you in this process. I don't say, by the way, declare four week vacation for two years out and make it happen. We go Through a sequence of steps of testing and assuring that we're getting closer and closer and closer to it. And will the business run perfectly after four weeks? No, there'll be problems, but. But those problems that present themselves are the things we need to fix so that the next four week vacation, it can run seamlessly. And by the way, I'm not just preaching this, I'm living it. My next vacation, I'm just going on the calendar here is three months from now, I'm heading out of the office for a full month and I'm an author and I'm a speaker. And so how do I do it and how do I keep speaking when I can't be speaking right? I now have 30 different people who are teaching profit first. In fact, just yesterday there was, I think it was four profit first presentations and I didn't do any of them. And that's what I'm transitioning to is I, I've empowered other people to do it and it's now given me the freedom to do what I want when I want both my life, but also back in my business. And I think that's the freedom we all want to have.

Yeah. Well, you know, I was telling Casey that I was little bit Facebook stalking her this, this morning and she had a post. Tell them your post, Casey.

Yeah, I read, like I said, I read Clockwork. I took a picture of the page that you said book that four week vacation and I posted it and made it public and I'm going. So I just, I think it's really cool and I think it was, it was really nice to see. It was kind of validating for me some of the things that you talk about in Clockwork that my business is doing maybe not to the level that it needs to do. So we have a meeting tomorrow with all of our administrative team and we're going to do, we're going to figure out what that queen bee role is and we're just going to work straight back through it.

Love it.

Yeah. And see, and I love the concept of, you know, I've always been a very creative person and down in my heart of hearts, that's, that's what makes me happy. And so I have like totally shifted. I'm not the owner of Mindsight, I'm the designer of minds that, and that's change on every single thing that has my name on it.

You're giving me goosebumps.

Yeah, I know. I mean I just, I loved that perspective. So I'm so thankful for that.

I'm Very, very proud of you. You know, I. What I hear is you're managing your ego. And we all have ego. And I don't even mean ego as a negative thing. Ego can translate to pride. You know, I associate. I did associate my pride with doing the work, and now I've rechanneled my ego to, like you said, to be a designer, someone who's empowering other people. We have to realize as business owners ourselves, we do something that's very odd. We run a business. The vast majority of the world has no interest in running a business. No desire, no aptitude to do it. They just want a job. And that is the majority of people in this world. That's their definition of contentment. We as entrepreneurs are in a very privileged position to give people the opportunity to live in this contentment. Unfortunately, what I was doing was inserting myself in the business, micromanaging, jumping all in. And that fed my ego. And then I finally one day realized, oh, my gosh. And I turned my ego on itself. I said, what would also satisfy my ego but empower my colleagues? And it was to be a designer, to be someone who helps orchestrate organization so that everyone can elevate. So very proud of you. And when you go on your four week vacation, if you want to swing by New York City, I'd love to give you a high five.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Tell me if you're in town. I just want to give you a high five and buy you a cup of coffee. I mean, that's just amazing that you're doing that.

I will hold you to it.

That's a deal.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. It's. You know, one of the other questions I know, Mike, that I had was for. For people that are really trying to think about scaling their business, what's in your mind? What's the best approach to that? I mean, I know you hit a lot, a lot of that clockwork. But I think I know one of the things that. Just to confess with my own business, I realized after reading Profit first and going through your analysis and doing all of that, is that my business is not a bad business or not a bad practice. I'm making money, but I flatlined. And, you know, and it's kind of like, well, I'm not really growing, but I'm uncomfortable kind of thing. So I think that maybe there's some people out there, that same situation.

It's a great question. What I've experienced, Gordon, with business growth is it often is a step process. And when we get to a plateau, we're simply at a step, but we have to change our behavior in our way. We're managing our business to climb that next step. For most businesses that are at a plateau where they've hit a comfortable level but they can't grow anymore, it's usually they're not experiencing what's called alignment. I actually do talk about this in Clockwork. There's another popular phrase out there right now called pivoting. Pivoting is the idea of identifying what your consumers need most and adjusting your offering to match what customers need. And at first blush, it's a genius strategy. I mean, serve what customers want. That's the only way to grow an organization. And pivot is not necessarily a new term. I mean, it's a new term, but it's not a new concept. It used to be called paradigm shift, inflection point. It's just. Just the modernized term. Problem with this concept, though, of pivoting and inflection points is that it disregards the owner's interests. So I've seen businesses change their offering to match what customers need, but the owner starts to resent their business, like I'm doing the customer wants, but I hate what I'm doing. That is actually another roadblock to growth. So we need to do alignment. There's two things that are very important. First of all is I think we have to get very much in tune with our purpose or passion in business. I have a very clear purpose for myself. It's to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. I know why I'm doing it. I feel it's a calling from above, and I feel compelled to every day of my life serve this calling. The vehicle is by being an author. So I think we need clear on our purpose or passion, meaning what excites you? That's, I think, from my opinion, is just as good. What excites you. Then we identify who of our existing customer base. If we have an existing customer base, who of our existing customer base do we enjoy working with most and are delivering that passion of ours to those customers that we have the most joy serving, that we deliver what gives us the most joy. Now we have something that's in alignment of those customers. Which ones pay us the best? Which ones are the best revenue opportunities? And one important point here is if a client pays us well, that is the ultimate form of appreciation. You know, I can ask my customers all day long, how do you like my service, my books, whatever. And people like, yeah, I love your books, Mike. They're amazing. But we lie to each other. That's a social appropriate thing to say. The real definition of a reader is the person says, I just bought 50 more books yesterday because I'm giving it to every one of my friends. And every day of my life, I'm buying more and more books to give it to my friends. They're demonstrating their actions. They put a lot of value in me. So what customers give you the most joy? What gives you the most joy? And of those who are paying you the most, those are the customers that we need to clone. And I did actually write about the strategy in the Pumpkin Plan. So it's a detailed strategy, but the very simple strategy is once you identify who your best customers are, we need to find what's called the congregation points. Congregation points are where your best customers are hanging out with other people just like them. You know, for me, is my best customer a female entrepreneur who's reentering the workforce after raising children and now wants to be an entrepreneur, which as I started as an author, that was a community that I was talking with. I then said, well, I met with these readers and said, where do you hang out? Like, where do you find other people like you? And there was like two or three conferences specifically for women entrepreneurs. And I was able to access those communities, which, by the way, when you're the only guy in a audience of all women and you walk in, people think you're a little bit creepy. So just, just as a warning. But I became acclimated to this community and understood how to serve them. And it's they on their shoulders, grew the exposure of my books and carried me to a much greater community. It spawned tremendous growth. So in your case, Gordon, I'm thinking, who are your best customers that you pay you the best? You love working with them, you love the work you do for them. Let's identify where they congregate. And maybe it's not a conference. It could be podcasts they listen to, it could be magazines they read, it could be a Facebook page that they're on. But where are they congregating? And then we need to have you present there, because then once you start appearing in front of this community repeatedly, they'll start flocking to you and now spark growth. This, by the way, is not an overnight strategy. It's not like tomorrow morning the business is taking off. But if you stay persistent in front of a community, it's usually within a 12 minute cycle that they've seen you enough times that you start getting a flood of new opportunities. Your Way.

Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad you said that, Mike, because I think with two points that just really stood out for me with that, and it's something that I know my audience hears a lot from me about is, number one is know your why, know why you want to do, do what you're doing. And number two is serve your ideal client. Find, find the people that you enjoy working with the most. You know, find that niche and, and, and concentrate on that. And that will just automatically it. And it's almost a mystical kind of magical thing. People will flock to you.

And I would even say, give them preferential treatment. My mama used to say to me, mike, all people are created equal. Treat everyone the same. And I hate to say this to my mom, but she lied to me. At least from the customer's vantage point. Our best customers, we must give preferential treatment. We must prioritize them because that is what will make them raving fans. So if the best therapy sessions are, you know, time slots, say between 8 and 10am in the morning and again between 5 and 7 o' clock at night, protect those exclusively for your best customers. Now this also means that you're not devaluing, but you're reducing the quality service for the other customers. But by giving preferential treatment to your best customers, they will become raving fans and carry you on their shoulders. That's the hardest thing I think I see entrepreneurs make. They say, I know who my ideal customer is. I know exactly how to serve them. They give me joy. I know what my why is, but I'm going to serve everyone the same anyway. And that's the problem. We need to channel that strength of ours to our best customers and really cater to them above and beyond everyone else.

Right, Right. Yeah. And I think it's the other thing that, that reminds me of is just having more of an abundance mindset than a scarcity mindset.

Yes.

I mean there's, there are more than enough clients for therapists out there, people that want and need our help. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that and we, we let fear rule.

So I was working with, we do. I was working with a chiropractor which similar in some regards that, you know, in the town that he worked in, there were seven other chiropractors. It's a population of 4,000. So that's a lot of chiropractors. And so they're hoping to draw from all over. He was struggling and I talked with him because he happens to be in a neighboring town and we said well, who's your best customer? Who do you love working with? He said, it's these teen athletes and youth athletes. He said, because these children athletics are being pushed down to younger and younger ages, and the injuries they can sustain are more and more severe. I feel really called. He's a young child himself. Feel really called to protect these athletes. And so what he did is he would start doing chiropractic services for these ideal customers, which, by the way, he's a unique circumstance. The benefactor is the child. The true customer, though, was the parent, usually the mom, who's bringing their child in and wanted their child to perform athletically, but wanted to protect their child from injury. Of course. He then asked them, said, where are other parents like you talking about children's development and injuries and stuff? They said, well, we're on the pta, the Parent Teachers Association. We're all on the sidelines for the soccer game or the football game. We're all talking there. Well, he started to go to these events and showing up and saying, listen, I will do a free chiropractic examination for the team. He went and met with the head coaches and. And said, before we do a game, I will do a chiropractic examination of children with a parent's approval. Well, very quickly, he became known as a performance chiropractic doctor, which was, there's no such thing. He just became known for this. And then he started getting droves of business because he became a perceived specialist, which he truly was. He started to learn things about this community that they needed. That other chiropractic doctors who are serving the general community, we've never known because they're serving everyone. So it just speaks to your point is if we go with this abundance mentality and focus on a community, it can open a wealth of opportunity.

Right? Right. Wow. Wow. Well, Mike, I want to be respectful of your time. Casey, do you have any other parting questions that you're just dying to ask?

I do. Really fast. Really fast. Okay. So in Clockwork, when you talk about the queen bee role and you have to identify that one role and you give everyone those great PDFs, those printables that they can use and work through in a service industry such as ours and mental health, do you ever find that there could be two queen?

No, I have not found that, and I don't believe it exists. So let me explain because even an acronym may be thrown some listeners off here. Queen B role is the core activity or function that drives your business forward. It's the most important the heart of the business. And this is an analogy from beehives, which we don't have time to go into. But it's the core function that the survivability or thrivability of any organization depends on. Here's a quick example. FedEx is a good example because it's a world recognized brand. FedEx has a brand promise, and we all need to know what the brand promises. What's the one thing you distinguish your business on? Meaning what are you known for? And FedEx, of course, is known to deliver packages on time. They say, if it absolutely, positively needs to be there, you know, tomorrow we'll make it happen. If we peel back the onion from the promise we're making and look at all the activities that support that, there's tons of activities. What is the one most critical activity to make that promise a reality? And what it is, is for FedEx is logistics. They, they focus on logistics and all the employees know the importance of it to the point where if FedEx says, you know what, we're not gonna do logistics anymore, like, who cares about the packages? Let's just have great customer service. Will people notice? Yeah, some people may say, wow, they're very friendly on the phone. But the moment packages are not being delivered or delivered on time, people will get frustrated and FedEx will go out of business. That's the one core thing. Everything else is important. But there's one thing that's elevated above all else. That's the QBR to the point where if it gets threatened, FedEx has to take immediate action to protect it. And it happens to get threatened every single year. It's around the Christmas holidays. Every single year, there's an influx of shipping demand. FedEx gets overwhelmed. The managers don't start yelling at the drivers and say, drive faster, you know, deliver quicker. Run. The managers instead say, okay, we got to step up. And the managers start driving the trucks too, and getting the packages out there. I would say, Casey, in your organization, my organization, all of us, we have to first know, what's that one thing we're known for? What's the great distinguishing factor? Our big promise to the community? Then peel back the onion. Yes, there's many activities you do that support it. But of all of those, if you could only do one, what is the most important activity that supporting that brand promise that is your qbr.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, thanks. You know, Mike, again, I want to be respectful of your time. Tell folks a little bit about how they can get in touch with you and, and like I said, I'm going to have links in the show notes here for your books and your website and all of that. But if folks want to reach out to you, what's the best way?

So I'll give two ways if Clockworks, since we spoke a lot about that, I've set up a site with all the resources. If you have a team like Casey working on this with you, and that's how we want to do it, there's videos, there's additional training. There's actually a coaching session I did on this site. It's called Clockwork Life. It's all free and so you can go there and get access to all the tools we have to support your journey in that four week vacation. The other site, if you want to explore all my books, I'm a blogger. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal. I have all my articles available for free. It's@mike michalowicz.com now here's the problem. Michalowicz is long and Polish. It's a horrible last name. So I found a shortcut. If you go to mikemotorbike.com here's the irony. I'd never driven a motorcycle, but that was my nickname in high school. Go to mike motor motorbike.com that we throw you over to my site. And if you sign up there, I think you'll, you'll find tons of additional resources to kind of the all encompassing tool set to growing a business.

Wow. Well, Mike, this has best been probably one of the best times I've had and I'm just gonna, I'm just still just soaking it all in and I hope maybe I can get, get up with you here soon again and do some more things.

I think it's your four week vacation. I think you're coming.

Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. It's, it's coming. I'm overdue, so I'd love to see you. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Mike, and thanks, Casey, for joining in. And we'll be talking with everyone soon.

See y'.

All.

Thanks.

Bye. Bye. Sa.