In this segment of the YouTube interview, Mike Michalowicz challenges the common advice that small businesses should pursue multiple revenue streams from the outset. Using Taylor Swift’s career as a high‑profile example, he explains that while a superstar can afford to diversify across tours, merchandise, endorsements, and film rights, her success was built on a single, dominant product—a hit song—that served as an anchor. Michalowicz argues that most small businesses lack the scale and brand momentum to replicate this model; early diversification dilutes focus and hampers mastery of the core offering. He parallels this with Amazon, noting that even large companies start with a single, strong value proposition before expanding. Michalowicz cites his own books—Profit First, All In, and Clockwork—as his anchor products, emphasizing that these core assets must be nurtured before adding ancillary products or services. He suggests a practical threshold (e.g., reaching roughly $50 million in revenue) as a point where diversification can be considered safely. The overall message is a cautionary, measured call for entrepreneurs to master their anchor product first, then diversify strategically.
Number 7, diversification and multiple revenue streams. Don't rely on just one income source, diversify. So in addition to her music, Taylor Swift has made millions through tours, merchandise, endorsements, and more recently movie and streaming rights, including the Eras Tour film. She's constantly exploring new ways to monetize her brand.
I, I have a yes and no to this. Here's why Taylor Swift as a model does not serve small businesses. Mm-hmm. Taylor Swift can diversify 'cause she makes hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. And so we're like, oh, look at Taylor Swift, she does all these different things, therefore because she does so many different things, she made $1 million. Mm-hmm. No, you know how Taylor Swift started? We just talked about it. She started off with one hit song. She didn't have that hit song and come out with, check out my calendar and check out these magazine articles about me and buy my sweatshirts and join my YouTube channel or my paid Patreon channel. She just came out with one hit song and she got really good at the song components and then she expanded from there. I think small businesses, the mistake they make is they say, I gotta diversify when I start. I gotta do all these different things. And it dilutes your ability of being excellent at anything. Taylor Swift nailed songwriting, narrative telling through her songs, and catchy songs. Freaking nailed it. And that builds this platform. She has an anchor product, anchor tenant, if you will, and it allows you to do all these things around it. What we're doing here is our anchor tenant is the books. Profit First being the most notable one, but All In probably my best written one. Clockwork may be the one I'm most proud of, but they all are the best of what I was able to do at that time.
Right.
We have other things we do, but without us pushing and caring for the anchor tenant, everything else will start to collapse. If Taylor Swift says, you know what, screw songwriting now, I'm just going to go full-time actress, she actually may pull it off because she has so much effort and momentum she's built in that anchor tenant. But we small businesses, we're not the size yet. So I encourage people, master that anchor tenant, build such a strong reputation on it. And then maybe once you're doing $50 million in revenue, then maybe add that next song of yours or diversify a little bit beyond the anchor tenant. So I think that's where we get distracted. And, and I'm picking on Taylor Swift here. It could be Amazon or any of these companies we look at and say, look at, you know, I want to be the next Amazon.
Yeah.
Amazon started off by just selling books. I think we forget that. And he got really good at selling books. And once they did that, then he said, well, let me add more products. They didn't start by doing all these different products.
