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💡There is power in knowing your numbers and how you can use that data to create a profit-first business.
What does it look like to create a profit-first business? Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First, joins us on the show to talk about the financial strategies we need to be implementing to create a successful and sustainable business. Throughout this episode, Mike reminds us that there is power in knowing your numbers and how you can use that data to create a profit-first business.
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Defining a profit-first business
Simply put, a profit-first business is a business that takes its profit first. While it sounds simple, it’s actually hard to build a profit-first business.
With traditional businesses, we’re taught that our profit equals revenue minus expenses. While this makes logical sense, it doesn’t make behavioral sense. It’s human nature that when something comes last, it’s not a priority. Most businesses wait until the end of the year to prioritize their profits.
A profit-first business flips the formula. In this model, sales minus profits equals expenses. Every time revenue comes into the business, you take a predetermined percentage of it and hide it away from the business, and then run the business off of the remainder.
By doing this, you reverse engineer your profit. Your business will adjust to run on the remainder, just like US employees adjust to living off of their net incomes instead of gross incomes.
The psychology behind building a profit-first business
There is a behavior propensity called loss aversion, which is when we incur more expenses as we incur more income. The second that our income starts to dip, a theory called Parkinson’s law sets in, which compels us to continue spending at our new lifestyle. We try to sustain our spending habits despite our income decreasing, which leads to debt.
The vast majority of small business owners experience this pattern because our income is volatile. Flipping the paradigm and operating with a profit-first business model is the way to get out of this pattern and see success in your business.
Common resistance points to a profit-first business
Some independent business owners resist building a profit-first business because it feels opposite from what they’ve been taught and doing in their business. You have to overcome thinking that this model is wrong before you can make the switch, and part of that process is noticing the flaws in the bottom-line business model.
The next resistance is the fact that you have to change your own behavior to move to a profit-first business, and behavioral change is hard. You have to break out of your regular routine and be disciplined enough to do things in a new way.
Lastly, business owners don’t want to interfere with their bank to set up a profit-first system. Many say they would rather keep track of their profit themselves in a spreadsheet. However, setting up the system at the bank level is the best way to establish a profit first business that you don’t have to think about.
Creating profit-first systems
Set up a bank account called Income Account that you only use for deposits. Set up an automatic transfer so that every time your business receives revenue, a portion of it goes to your income account. This income does not pay any bills or expenses, but it has multiple purposes. It pays your taxes and compensation.
Once or twice a week, check your income account. Have a number in mind that you expect it to be on a weekly or biweekly basis. If the account balance is lower or higher than that number, you need to investigate it. If you have a bookkeeper, ask them to explain what happened.
The four principles of a profit-first business
- Set up your envelope system so that your profit is automatically taken from your revenue before your expenses.
- Sequence matters.
- Remove temptation — make your profit account inaccessible to your business so that you aren’t tempted to pull from it to cover your bills.
- Get into the rhythm of checking your balance every week or every two weeks.
The biggest differentiator between the businesses that succeed and the ones that fail
Mike believes that the biggest differentiator between the businesses that succeed and the ones that fail is that entrepreneurs who care for themselves, physically and mentally, have healthier businesses.
Important sections of the conversation
- [1:40] Defining a profit first business
- [5:45] The psychology behind building a profit first business
- [8:54] Common resistance points to a profit first business
- [15:48] Creating profit first systems
- [21:18] The four principles of a profit first business
- [26:30] The biggest differentiator between the businesses that succeed and the ones that fail
Connect with the guest
- Website: https://mikemichalowicz.com/
- Profit First book: https://mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first/
Episode Transcript
Akua: What does it look like to create a profit first business? Well, today on the podcast, you are going to find out Mike Michalowicz, who is the author of Profit First joins us on the show today to talk about the financial strategies we need to be implementing to create a successful and sustainable business.
Throughout this episode, Mike reminds us that there is power in knowing your numbers and how you can use that data to propel you forward to create a profit first business. Now let’s get into the episode.
Hey everyone. This is your host Akua Kanadu and you’re listening to the Independent Business Podcast. More people than ever are working for themselves and building profitable businesses in the process. So on this show, I get to sit down with some of the most influential authors, entrepreneurs, and creators to break down the signs of self made success so that you can achieve it too.
Hello, Mike. How are you?
Mike: I’m doing well, Akua. How are you?
Akua: Great. So excited to have you here because we have heard your name thrown around in the entrepreneurial community. And so
Mike: I’m so excited that you were sharing that off air. And we both are cacklers. So we start co cackling. Thank you for sharing. It gets me excited.
Akua: Yes, absolutely. Because you are impacting so many business owners. And so we were like, we have to bring you on the show and know more about you and know more about your book, Profit First. And we are just so, so excited. So thank you so much for being here.
Mike: That’s my joy. Thank you for having me.
Akua: Absolutely.
Okay. So let’s just hop in and give us a quick rundown of what a profit first business is.
Mike: Okay. It’s a business that takes its profit first. It literally is that simple and also that hard traditional business we’ve been told. I know who you know, this is our revenue, our sales, my expenses. Result in profit.
And while that makes logical sense, it doesn’t make behavioral sense. It’s human nature that when something comes last, it’s not a priority. Uh, you know, if you love your family, a coup, I suspect you don’t say I love my family so much, I’m putting them last. It’s absurd. You say, I love my family. I put them first.
I, I care for my health. I put it first, but we’re told profits the bottom line or the year end, which is vernacular for saying it comes last. So for most businesses. We wait till the end of the year. It doesn’t present itself or maybe next year, maybe next year. And it’s this constant struggle. We hope we can sell our way out of it.
It profit first business flips the formula. It’s sales minus profit equals expenses. And what I mean in practice is every time revenue comes into your company, we’re going to take a predetermined percentage, five or 10%, whatever it may be, hide that money from the business. And run the business off the remainder.
So it’s a form of reverse engineering profit. The last thing I want to share about this is the greatest savings mechanism in US history has proven so far to be the 401k. The reason it’s such a great savings mechanism is we receive a gross income, but prior to receiving the net, the actual check. Our savings are taken out.
So we ultimately don’t miss it. We adjust. So will our business. And if you take your profit first, you assure permanent profitability.
Akua: That is true. We always do put profit last. And so naturally you just do, it’s like the traditional, like I think in your book, you call it the traditional business accounting.
And so we do look at it that way, but it’s, it’s such a great mind shift of, you know, taking that money and putting it aside easily because then it also makes it a lot easier to manage your money. So that actually makes like a lot of sense where you’re like, Oh. Why am I not doing that?
Mike: So I used to, you know, for my business, say a thousand dollar deposit would come in.
I’d say, Oh, okay, I got a thousand dollars. I need to buy a new computer. I can use it here. Or maybe I can hire someone else if I can keep this up. So what we do is we look at the total amount and then we make assumptions on how we can spend it. But the reality is that 1, 000 has multiple responsibilities.
A portion is to give you profit. I will tell you, if you started a business, you are an extraordinary human being because the vast majority of the world will never start a business or run a business. The majority of the world is looking for good jobs with good companies. And so our job is to build a good company to give good jobs.
In fact, I say the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the work. It’s to be a creator of the work. So when a thousand dollars comes in, some of it’s to profit rewarding you for contributing to our society. Secondly, we got to pay you a normal compensation. Like for the work you do, you deserve a salary if you’re working in the business and then taxes, you know, these taxes come up.
And right when we’re recording this, we’re approaching tax season. Those bills are going to comment on historically. I was like, well, uh, how do I do this? I have to have a fire sale and some of it is to cover expenses. So a thousand comes in. You may realize after we carve this up, maybe 500 is available for expenses.
So it changes this paradigm. And what I tell people is if you take your profit first and account for these other components and you can’t pay your bills, that’s your business saying you can’t afford these bills. If you want to be profitable, if you want to pay yourself, we must work with these confines.
So increase margin, have better quality clients, reduce expenses, unnecessary things that you’re incurring, ditch those, but we’ll reverse engineering profit. That’s how you do it.
Akua: Oh, I love that so much. Another thing, because you share a lot of just psychology and some of the science. I think a little bit of what I saw was that people who lose money, we have this need to want to spend more or something like that.
Like, can you elaborate more on that? And just some of the cycle, it doesn’t have to be specifically that, but just some of the psychology that you have seen as to, again, why traditional like business accounting doesn’t work, why we struggle to make a profitable business essentially.
Mike: Yeah. So there’s this behavioral propensity called loss aversion, and this is my passion.
I’m not, I’m a behavioral psychologist. I’m not certified in this, but I study it constantly because when we understand how our mind works, we can understand how we manage all aspects of our life, including money. So loss aversion is this. As income increases, you may have noticed that we have a propensity to spend at the same rate of increasing income.
I suspect where you are today, Akua, in your life, where I am today, and many of the listeners, you have probably more income today than you did at a certain point in your life. There was a point when you had less money. Ironically, for most of us, as we incur more income, we incur more expenses, almost at the exact same rate.
But what happened, and there’s a reason behind that called Parkinson’s law, another behavioral To your earlier point, is the second we start feeling a dip, like our income drops, loss aversion sets in and we say, well, I can’t lose my new lifestyle. This is my new standard. So we actually try to sustain the spend.
Often the only way to do that is running up debt. Credit cards, loans and so forth. So now we have this gap. Our income is less than our spend. This gap increases debt and puts burden on us. The vast majority of entrepreneurs live in this situation because income is very volatile. It’s not a straight line.
Every time there’s a dip, we sustain our new standard. So there’s a funny saying that small business is on the brink of failure. Most small business and. I challenge that because most small businesses, while we go through these dips and struggle, we do sustain and we’ve proven many small businesses for years we can hang on the brink.
So most small business is not on the brink of failure. Most small business is on the brink of success. We just need a couple adjustments to capture our profit and start moving forward. Yeah, so even though we have loss aversion, we have an opportunity to skyrocket forward wherever your business is today.
Oh,
Akua: I love that. That’s such like a great mindset shift of right. No matter where you are profitability wise in your business, if you’re not necessarily hitting your goals, financial goals, like you’re on the brink of figuring out all it takes is literally looking at your numbers, adjusting, making some tweaks in your business.
And remember, I always like to remember too, like. Like our business where it’s all seasons, right? So there’s seasons where things are going really great and there’s seasons where it’s not to your point. So it’s like just adjust, right? Like I, what I love about just business owners, we’re so like malleable, we’re able to just, we’re stretched in ways that we just didn’t think were possible.
And so again, I think this is a lot of us struggle with our finances, but this is a great way to stretch yourself and learn more about yourself, learn more about your business in a much more intimate way, so then you can make more strategic decisions. So I absolutely love that. So, so good.
Mike: A hundred percent.
Right.
Akua: Absolutely. And this is such a new way of thinking. Right. I think just a little bit of what I’ve just gathered from your book is kind of it’s like, okay, you’re putting this money away. So like for certain things you’re putting money away. And I kind of thought of like the snowball effect in like terms of debt, right?
Like that envelope system. I’ve cut, I think a lot of us have kind of heard that similarly. It’s just, it’s a different way of thinking, especially in regards to your business. Where do you see independent business owners having? That resistance in terms of when trying to create this, this profit first business model.
Yeah.
Mike: So there’s two or three common resistance points. The first most common resistance point is hold on. This is totally contrary to what I’ve ever been told. So I’ve looked at, there’s literally thousands of accounting books that say profit comes last. It’s in our vernacular. We call it the bottom line year end.
And there’s this braggadocios component. If you and I were at a networking event. I’d say, you know, I got a business, I got three employees. We’re doing 400, 000 and you’re like, I’m doing 600, 000. I’m like, Oh, what was me? And there’s this. Kind of bravado around top line thinking. But the reality is I know business owners that are doing tens of millions of dollars and they are living in desperation, sadly.
But the reality is the top line does not translate to the bottom line without a system that captures The top line. That’s what first is. So the first thing is we’re taught. This is wrong. So that’s one of the things we have to overcome is simply saying if you’ve been doing something, it hasn’t worked for months or years or decades.
My gosh, it’s not going to work going forward. We have to try something new. The second thing is we think that we have to change ourselves. And the reality is we need to channel. Changing our behavior is very hard. So if you do something routinely, to now have the discipline to change yourself is very hard.
Most accountants and bookkeepers do try to force a new discipline. Read their P& L, your balance sheets, and so forth. I don’t. They’re important, but I ask my accountant to explain those to me. What I do is I log into my bank account every day. So what we have to realize is whatever we naturally do, continue to do that, but put the intercept, the system there.
I’ll give you an example. I wanted to start exercising. This was maybe 10, 15 years ago, regularly. I was looking at my future self and said, my God, this has to become a discipline for me. And so I said, I’m just going to willpower my way into it. And looking at it, back at it, I was working out maybe one day a week, and not even well.
But, I noticed a pattern. I’d wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, make a cup of coffee, scroll through the news, and skip another day’s working out. Every morning, wake up, go to the bathroom, I said, my gosh. I’m gonna put my sneakers on top of the toilet seat because the only way I can use the bathroom now is by grabbing my sneakers, which is channeling a behavior behavioral intercept.
I put the sneakers on my feet and momentum kicked in. So part two with your, your finances, if you log into your bank account every day or regularly to see your bank balance, a you’re human, that’s normal. B we need the accounts set up there. We need the envelope system set up there to carve up your money.
And then the third thing is. Many people say, well, I’ll do this in a spreadsheet or I’ll do this. My accounting system, I don’t want to interfere with the bank. It’s too much of a pain. Well, the reality is if you don’t naturally refer to your spreadsheet every day or log into your accounting system every day, it’s not intercepting your behavior.
So you need that too. And one last thing that came to mind is a lot of people hear about profit first. And they say, this might work, but I’m skeptical. It may not work for me, or it’s overwhelmed. So I challenge those folks, something real simple. Test it on yourself first, in a really small way. Set up only one account, not all these accounts, but one additional account in your bank.
Let’s call it profit. And then allocate only 1 percent of your deposits. Because if 1, 000 comes in now, I’m saying take 10. That’s 1%. And put your profit account. Because you can run your business off the 990 like you always have been I know you can do that But maybe for the first time you have cash accumulating ten bucks It’s not life changing but something the next day it becomes 20 and then over time Maybe you expand from 1 percent to 2 or 3 and maybe it takes A year or two and you get the full system deployed, but you need to prove it to yourself first.
Akua: Yeah. Oh my gosh. You just shared so many good things. Number one is, again, to your point, like it’s really hard to try to muster up willpower. So what you did was you just continued to do what you’ve been doing, but then you just Like you said, like you intercepted a specific behavior so that you can be able to get the outcome that you were looking for.
And I think that’s so key, um, as business owners, because I think a lot of the times we shame ourselves into, well, I need to be doing this and I have to be doing it. And you know what I mean? And then we shame ourselves if we’re not doing those things. And so I love how you Took that and you’re like, all right, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, but here’s our little changes that I can make to start slowly changing that behavior.
And to your point of, you don’t have to do this, don’t have to take everything in at all at once, starting with one account and just moving a little bit amount of money there and you like starting small, but it’s better than where you were before yesterday. It gives you more of an idea of how to move forward in your business.
And I think that’s so important. And I just love even what you shared of simple as like starting out. It’s just like. Checking your bank account every day. I absolutely do that. I don’t check my spreadsheet.
Mike: You’re human. You’re human. And that’s how most of us behave. I have had Akua, the privilege of speaking with hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, you know, and audiences and so forth.
And I rarely ask who here checks your bank account at least once a day. And I would say 90 percent of the hands go up. And these are businesses from just brand new startups to doing tens of millions. It’s the normal approach. But there’s one other thing I want to address. You said about the shame and it is such a.
There’s a shame around profitability. So I am now speaking to the one person that’s listening in intently. I want you to know this. This is the truth. Your clients, your customers want you to be profitable. Here’s the thing. They will never say, Hey, Akua, could you charge me a little more? Could you rip me off a little?
Of course not. But here’s what they will say. I want your undivided attention. I want to be your number one customer in this moment. I want absolute care. The only way you can be fully present for your customer is if you’re not worrying about bills. If you’re panicked to constantly be making money and serve the next customer, you can’t give undivided attention to the current customer.
And the only way to give them undivided attention is to be profitable. So your customers are starving for you to be profitable because they benefit along with your sanity.
Akua: Oh my gosh, I love that so much. Your clients want you to be profitable because I just think about myself. I’m like, well, my bills are paid and I’m good.
Oh, I’m the best person. You’re just like, right. Like the way that you move and stuff like that, especially when you don’t have to worry about the stress of it changes everything. So that is really such a good point because I know as business owners to even just making changes in our business financially can be stressful, even just as simple as raising our, our rates.
Like, I remember myself when early, when I first started my business and I was like, Oh my gosh, I need to raise my rates, but I don’t know how, like, are people still going to want to work with me and this and that, and I did it and people still want to work with me, you know what I mean? And so I think to your point, just really like people want to see you succeed and so do the things.
that you need to do to help you get there so that you can be your best version so that you can continue making an impact. So love that so much. How exactly can we have a better understanding of our business finances is what I was really curious about because you already talked about like checking your bank account every day, but what are some things that we can do to have Even like a better fork financial forecast essentially is what I’m asking.
Mike: Yeah, so I do everything on the cash basis So your accounting system is a great tool for understanding, but the question is when should you investigate it? So there’s a real interesting tool you can do with profit first again. We want to channel your behavior So if you’re logged that bank account That is the best thing you can ever do.
We’re going to keep doing that. We’re going to add one little component that will serve you every, I do this weekly or every two weeks. You can choose. So you can say every Friday or every other Friday, as an example, we’re going to see what the balance is in our income. So how profit first works as we fully deploy it is we set up one account called the income account, which is a deposit only account.
Money goes in there. We never pay a bill from it. What happens is money goes there and it gets carved up. I call it a cash Turkey. You can, we celebrate Thanksgiving. You don’t tell everyone at the table, Hey, everyone for themselves, fight for it. First one gets it. We carve it up so everyone can get a piece of turkey.
That income has multiple responsibilities. We talked about it. Owner’s pay tax comp, uh, uh, profit, of course. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to watch the cash turkey grow, and we’re going to wait for this weekly occurrence or biweekly occurrence, and we’re going to see what the balance is before we carve up that turkey.
Now our job is on that every Friday, we’ll say we’re doing this weekly. What is the common expected balance? I expect there to be 5, 000 in there or 10, 000 or 1, 000, whatever the number is, right? This is why normally expected to be. Then when it goes outside of our normal expectation, that is a trigger for investigation.
Sometimes, and this is a great situation, It’s not the thousand you expected, it’s $7,000. That’s when I look at my accounting system and honestly, I really don’t know how to read those numbers well. So I have a bookkeeper and I call her up and I say, teach me what, what? What do we do right here? I wanna do more of this.
Oh, collections were good. Or you made a sale or something. Okay. I want to amplify that, sadly. But it happens many times. The number is less than expected. It’s not a thousand, it’s 500. That’s also a trigger for action. That’s a, uh, cash change. I call my bookkeeper and say, what am I doing wrong? I got to fix this.
Ironically, this is what a cashflow statement is supposed to do for you. Cashflow statement shows deltas or changes in cashflow more than expected or less than expected. I don’t know how to read a cashflow statement. And honestly. I don’t think many people know how to read cash flow statement, including my own accountant, but I do know how to look into my bank account every day because that’s what I do.
So by looking for changes, that’s a trigger for investigation. And that’s how you get really in tune with your finances.
Akua: Oh my gosh. I love that so much. And just what I thought of immediately when you were talking about just looking for those changes where it will trigger some type of action is just, um, yeah.
I think sometimes as business owners we look at our finances like this weight of, you know, like a damning task, like, oh my gosh, I have to do this today, where it’s not really exciting and instead coming in from a place of curiosity of like, okay, what can I learn today from my finances? Right. Like what, what will it show me today?
How is this going to help me grow my business? And if you, again, you’re not hitting those numbers, okay, well, what changes can I make? Why is that happening? And knowledge is power. So when you look at it that way, you kind of detach from, you know, necessarily, right. You detach your worth of, cause sometimes we can look at our money and be like, Oh my gosh, like what am I doing wrong?
Like I’m a failure. I’m not a good business owner, but instead you can detach it in a way and just view it in a completely different perspective to where you feel very empowered to, Action essentially and finding the resources that you need because sometimes I was guilty of this too to be quite transparent Like when I first started my business, I did not have a plan.
I literally don’t recommend this Anybody listening mostly that I’ve talked to you have had like a plan and then you know They were able to leave I was just so unhappy that I was like, oh I’m just doing this. And I literally have one paycheck to make it work. And so for me figuring out my finances was the bottom of my list.
And so it finally eventually caught up to me. Um, and so now, and which was a great learning experience. And so, but I felt so much shame. And so like just ashamed at that time, but just to your point of everything that you shared, I’m like, It’s just asking yourself those questions, asking yourself those hard questions to be able to move forward.
And so, and having those systems in place, looking at where the gaps are and creating those systems to help you move, move forward.
Mike: What you experienced is very common. So many entrepreneurs start off with no plan, ditto, we follow the same path. Um, and many feel shame about not being quote unquote successful.
So we got to overcome that shame game. And I wanted to reiterate. If you’ve been in business for a month and sustained, if you’ve been in business for a year and sustained, if you’ve been in business for years, you are clearly on the brink of success. You figured out how to sustain and that’s the hardest part of entrepreneurship.
So let’s ditch that shame. You know how to sustain. Now we’ve got to change a few things. The final point is most success is already embedded in your business. It’s just an awareness of the things that work need to be amplified, do those better. And the things that aren’t working need to be adjusted or removed.
And if we stay in that discipline of amplify works, fix what isn’t or ditch, what isn’t. You’ll find your business starts shifting very quickly to the positive.
Akua: Oh, I love that so much. That’s such, such a great, again, like, I just love the mindset change. It doesn’t make money hard. Again, it’s just like really taking the time, taking the time, setting that time, dedicated time aside to be able to get a better understanding of your finances.
So you talk about, Exactly like the four principles and I think you’ve already just touched through it So if you could just summarize it beautifully so people can have a like understand like okay This is the next step of what I can do
Mike: So number one we already talked about setting up the envelope system, but it is rooted in this concept called parkinson’s law So i’ll touch on that really quickly It was a theorist in the 1950s.
Notice that we are driven more by supply than demand. We’re often told as demand increases, the more we’ll supply to meet demand, right? The more people want your service, the more to buy it. Uh, the Parkinson point actually reversed. He says, human nature, as supply increases, we consume more. You put more food on a plate in front of me, I’ll eat more.
So if we intentionally constrain things, We’ll actually work within the confines of that constraint. Money’s the perfect example. The more money we make, the more we consume, the more we spend. So the profit first, we’re immediately hiding away like the 401k some money. We’re constraining the money available to the business.
And what it does is it triggers us to work within that. It’s called forced frugality. But there’s also this beautiful thing that happens. It’s called innovation. We started thinking outside the box. There’s a team, a baseball team that you may or may not have heard of, but you will, if you haven’t, it’s called the Savannah bananas, uh, and they’re becoming wildly popular, their users of profit first.
They emailed me seven years ago when they were starting up and said, we’re implementing is from day one. They implemented it and there wasn’t enough money to pay to maintain the scoreboard. If they took their profit first, instead of saying this doesn’t work, they said, we can’t have a scoreboard. How do we tell the score without having a scoreboard?
And they invited people from the audience to hold up the score, kind of like a boxing ring or a boxing match. Then they actually invited the audience to be cheerleaders. They now call them the grandma bananas. Uh, yet the rule is you have to be 80 years old or over and teeth are optional. Like that’s, that’s the rule and the fans, Akua, they love this.
They, they’ve sold out every single game. They’re extremely profitable. They have 5, 000 attendees per game. They’ve sold out 2024 this year and 2025 next year’s season. The second principle is sequencing. We have to take our profit first, not just because it hides it away, but there is a dopamine and serotonin release.
When you see you’re taking a piece of money to reward you for taking the risk of starting that business, you’ll feel good. We’re going to also take your pay first. We guys are paying you a normal salary because you deserve it. And when we do this, you feel good. Instead of most businesses that spend and there’s a negative association.
First, we reserve and there’s a positive association. So lesson two sequence matters. Lesson three, remove temptation. I started profit first for myself, 14, 15 years ago. And in the very beginning, I had my profit to sitting at my one account and I logged into my bank. I look at my operating expenses. I didn’t have enough money to pay bills.
And instead of. Adjusting my business. I said, I’m just gonna borrow from the profit account. And that’s when I defeated the entire system. I stealing from one account to fund the other. So what I did was I hid my profit account literally today in our company. Uh, my, the president of our company, her name is Kelsey.
She has the username for our profit account and I have the password, but she doesn’t have the password and I don’t have the username. It’s like turning the nuclear keys. The only way for us to get in is three, two, one, we do at the same time. And the power is. It’s out of sight, out of mind, and it’s inaccessible.
I am forced to live off my operating expenses and the profit accumulates accordingly. It does get distributed to reward the shareholders. It never goes back in the business. The final principle, number four, is to get into a rhythm. That’s where I refer to doing this every Friday or every other Friday.
You must get into this rhythm so you can see the changes in cash flow. There’s one more component. Every 90 days, we’re going to take a profit distribution. So that money is piled up in that nuclear account, if you will, the vault. We’re going to take, not all of it, I teach in the book how much, but Some of it, usually about 50 percent and reward the shareholder.
The rule is this it’s used to celebrate. It’s used for your personal purposes, go to an amazing dinner, or if it accumulates more, go on a vacation, or if you’ve personal debt or personal responsibilities, it takes care of you, but never plow it back or reinvest in the business. Those are soft terms we use.
It’s actually meaning it’s an expense profit is to reward the shareholder, the person or persons who’ve taken risk to build this business.
Akua: Oh my gosh. So good. And you summarize that up so beautifully. I loved the story with the baseball team because they were like, okay, I don’t have the funds. Like you said, they didn’t quit.
Instead, they just innovated. They just innovated, which I think is so key in order to build a sustainable business. You have to be able to innovate to the point where now these aspects of it’s a part of their brand that these are the things that they’re known for, which was, they were able to do that.
How, by looking at the numbers, which is wild, right? When you think about it.
Mike: This is the best part. People say, Oh, if I take my private first, I won’t grow. And I’m like, we have over 800, 000 implementations of private first. If you take your private first, what we’re finding is you’ll probably grow faster in your competition because you’re forced to innovate and redefine the industry.
The Savannah bananas have made a whole new form of baseball. So the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball, it’s exploding. When other teams are struggling, we’ll do the same if we take our profit first.
Akua: Oh, I love that. All right. So I’m going to wrap this up with one last question that we love to ask everybody.
What is the biggest differentiator between the businesses that succeed and the ones that fail?
Mike: I’m going to start something crazy with you because you probably never heard this before. I find that entrepreneurs who care for themselves Physically, mentally, inevitably have a healthier business. I I’ve been studying so many businesses and like, what’s the common thread?
And the entrepreneur is willing to care for themselves first, which is sacrifice. It means you’re, you’re, you’re doing the exercise, you’re spending the time on yourself and they’re coming to their business, which much more strength it’s these all in workaholics maybe look good in the moment. But they’re not sustainable, healthy businesses.
It’s interesting this parallel.
Akua: Oh my gosh. I love that. Yes. That is so, so key being able to take care of yourself so that you can show up how you need to for your own business. And I think that’s so key to your point. I always like to say, I say it’s almost every single episode, like everything in life comes at a cost.
because it does, whether good or bad. And so like when you’re choosing to neglect yourself, that could cost you in certain areas. Like I think a lot of times people have been like, I’ve been able to garner so much success, but I’m not happy. And it’s like, if you didn’t take care of yourself and do the things that you needed to do in order to be at a good place to attain that, now that you’ve attained that, that it doesn’t necessarily like feel as good as you had hoped.
So I think that’s just, Mike. I have loved this conversation. It has been so impactful. Um, y’all please get profit first. We will absolutely be having the book in the show notes, but Mike, for people to connect with you, where can they find you?
Mike: I’ll give you a shortcut. My last name is so hard to spell McCallow.
It’s there’s a shortcut. You can go to Mike motorbike as in the motorcycle. It rhymes a nickname from grade school. It’s the only PG nickname I had. Mike motorbike. com. Uh, all my book chapter downloads are for free. I have like two or three chapters from each book. I also used to write for the wall street journal.
You can get that content there too. All about small business. And I have a podcast archive, Mike motorbike. com.
Akua: Oh my gosh. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Yes, absolutely. And everybody, thank you so much for listening. And until next time, that ends our episode of the independent business podcast.
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