What do you do when you’re an entrepreneur and your first two businesses go swimmingly well, so much so, you start a third and end up bankrupt?

Do you admit defeat and go and get a ‘real job’? Or do you shake yourself off and decide you’re going to dedicate the rest of your working life to the commitment to eradicate entrepreneurship poverty?

If you’re Mike Michalowicz you do the latter. 

Mike is an entrepreneur and author. He built two incredibly successful tech businesses and exited them for a lot of money. But his third venture as an angel investor, didn’t go so well. 

However, it was off the back of this failure that he found his subsequent life’s mission, as an author. 

“I was making it [entrepreneurship] more complex than necessary and I was confused about what worked or not, so I endeavoured that day, that the rest of my life I’d devote to studying entrepreneurship and simplifying it.”

Mike’s latest book, Profit First, is what he talks about in this episode (although of course, he touches on his journey to get to this point). Because profit in a post-COVID world is something that businesses and entrepreneurs are really going to need to focus on to survive. 

Rather than putting profit last or talking about ‘the bottom line’, we have to put profit first. We have to extract value from our businesses and reinvest it in a really deliberate way. 

This is a really interesting conversation about a topic close to all entrepreneurs’ hearts. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. 

On today’s podcast:

• Why Mike wrote Profit First
• The advice Tim Ferriss gave him
• How Profit First can help small businesses
• The fascinating thing about consumer behaviour
• The business hierarchy of needs
• People speak the truth through their wallets