Mike Michalowicz: His Mission to Eradicate Entrepreneurial Poverty Featured Article

Everybody starts their business at a stage I call entrepreneurial poverty. You start it up and the world thinks you’re wildly successful, sitting on the beach drinking beers. The perception is of immediate success with little effort but the reality is that it’s an extraordinary amount of effort, rarely successful, and fraught with financial struggles or even depression.

The gap between where the world thinks you are and where you really are is what I call entrepreneurial poverty and I’ve devoted my life to closing that gap and helping entrepreneurs achieve their definition of greatness.

I truly believe the world is starving for entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurs drive the economy. We are providers for our colleagues and our families. We do so much.

And I’m devoted to this because it’s my journey too.

I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire adult life and I now put more significance in the journey versus the end results. The journey is everything. I think the most important part of my journey so far was my third business,an angel investing company. I sucked at it. It was a calamity. I called myself the angel of death. I actually started ten businesses and they all failed in short order. I was paying bills for businesses that didn’t even exist anymore and wiped out my savings. My ego was in the way and I thought I knew everything.

I remember facing my family at dinner one night and having to tell them we were about to lose our house. I had to look at my nine-yearold daughter and say, “I can’t afford your horseback riding lessons. I can’t afford anything.” I remember her running to her room, grabbing her piggy bank and then running back to say, “Daddy since you can’t provide, I will do it for us.”

That hurt. It was a wake up call. It was a punch to the gut. But I didn’t wake up right away. I started drinking and was severely depressed. I became an insomniac and was angry at myself and the world. But that all did become the impetus for change. Over a year or two I began to challenge all my thoughts about business ownership. I devoted myself to learning everything about business ownership, profit, work efficiency, managing employees, and making sales.

Every book I’ve ever written was based on a challenge I had and

“I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire adult life and I now put more significance in the journey versus the end results. The journey is everything.”

needed a resolution for. I devoted five or six years of research to each book. I’m constantly researching and learning what I need to. And I still operate businesses as an equity owner. I have a president who runs the business and I function as a shareholder and participate at a very high level by giving them strategic direction and planning. I think this is what an entrepreneur should really do. These businesses became a testing ground for me and I’m now devoting my life to being an author and providing the knowledge that simplifies the entrepreneurial journey.

Back when I sold my second company, a Fortune 500, part of the acquisition deal was that I stay on and work for the company for a certain period of time. But you know, once you become an entrepreneur you can’t go back to being an employee. You really render yourself unemployable. I had to follow all these clauses in my contract. I look back on that time at my office on the Avenue of the Americas, sitting facing the Rockefeller Christmas tree with my six-figure salary. I hated it. My father said, “Mike finally you have a job. Just do your work.” But I couldn’t. There was a point when one of the employees came to me to say, “Hey, we’reout of toilet paper.” Well I called corporate because I didn’t know how we were supposed to pay for toilet paper and the response was, “Who are you?”

This was all very hard on my family too. I think as entrepreneurs it’s like asking our spouse to take a ride in a race car with you. You’re the entrepreneur and they are not. They don’t know what they are signing up for. So you get into the driver’s seat of the car as the entrepreneur and you say to your loved one, “Honey, here’s the deal, we’re getting in and I’m going to drive, but there’s no steering wheel, only a gas pedal. And I’m going to floor this puppy. Oh and by the way, there’s no seatbelt.”

So here you are, the spouse of your beloved entrepreneur and you’re sitting in the car without a seatbelt knowing they only have the gas pedal and no control. I think we bring terror upon our poor spouses. The only thing they can do is bark out orders like, “Slow down!” Or, “Hit the brakes!” Thank goodness for them.

Every entrepreneur is on a similar journey. In some of my videos you

can see I have a bracelet with an infinity symbol. This is constant reminder to me because there was a time when I thought I was better than other people. I thought I was higher up than them. But we’re all on this same path, no matter who we are. When I had my darkest days, lost everything, and hit rock bottom the value in that journey, in retrospect, was tremendous.

The most valuable day on that journey was probably in the darkest period of my life. So when I look at others and think, they’re higher up, they’re doing better, it’s really not true. There may or may not be learning happening in those moments. The infinity symbol helps me remember there’s not a single person in a better position or not.

We’re all in this together. This is true for the destitute homeless person with drug addictions as well as the person who is living in the lap of luxury. Each is part of a journey and there’s always something to learn.

When I started writing books about my journey it was partly that; my personal experience, and it was partly about the reader’s journey. When I wrote Toilet Paper Entrepreneur I was re-starting my own business and wanted to write a business that could start itself. It was the definition of bootstrapping; no money, no resources, no contacts, etc…It was about the lack of resources being your advantage.

That led to an experience after which I wrote The Pumpkin Plan, where I was taking something from nature and translating it into a human application; in this case business growth. I described colossal business growth, something I was experiencing by calling businesses that just hit it in their niche and were recognized brands. I then wrote a book called Surge, also about business growth. Then came Profit First, Clockwork, and then Fix This Next. Most all of this was my journey, but then what became important was what the reader was going through. I started responding to emails from readers who were saying things like, “Help me, I’m growing a business and not making any money.”

When I hear from others who are getting results based on what I’ve written it’s euphoric. There’s a book called The Five Love Languages written by Gary Chapman and it’s a foundational book for relationships, probably one of the most impactful books of all time, like up there with the Bible. I’ve used the information not just for my marriage, but for business. We have 12 colleagues here and we run our business according to each person’s love language. We call it their appreciation language. My own language is “words of affirmation,” which means when I hear someone give me specific appreciation using words, it lights me up. Other people respond more to physical touch; a pat on the hand or a handshake. Others are about quality time. So I set up a feedback loop that speaks to the employee’s appreciation language, and then I did it for my readers too.

I think every business needs to do this because it facilitates drive and momentum. With every book I write I ask the reader what they think and to email me and tell me how the information is serving them. I was legitimately reading every email. I nowhave a little help with that because I receive so many emails. Receiving words like this fuels me to come at this harder every single day. I planned to be an author from the get-go. And you never know what will happen on the journey. But I do have a vision for the outcome of my business and it’s not quite where I would expect it to be yet. But I have a clear vision for what I need to do. This used to be rooted in comparison, but now it’s rooted in impact. Sometimes I worry I don’t have enough breaths left on the planet to do what I want to do. So gaining massive exposure for these books and the work I do is necessary to have the impact I need to have. And I’ll tell you this, the journey was way fucking harder than I thought.

I remember getting my first speaking gig at a university. I flew out to California on my own dime from New York. I was told there would be about 200 people. I was so nervous but walked into the venue ready to talk about my first book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. There was one guy there; the event coordinator. He says to me, “I don’t know if anyone’s coming. There’s a frat party that’s happened down the street.”

I was crying inside but there was this little voice that said, deliver the speech. And I did. I was

“It took me years of thought and questioning myself but my purpose pushes me every day, more than others I watch. Being relentless about your purpose is powerful.”

embarrassed, delivering the speech to a blackboard with one guy, the event coordinator, sitting there texting on his phone the whole time. But that was the moment I realized I was committed to the journey. I realized that maybe I hadn’t found my people yet, but I wasn’t going to quit.

My mission now is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. There are 180 million active small businesses today. In this case small business is defined by the SBA to be a company that does 25 million in annual revenue or less than 400 employees. The vast majority of businesses that exist are small businesses. That’s 180 million of us carrying the load for the seven billion people in the world. 83% of these businesses are under a cash flow crunch, with overwhelming stress and can't be adequate providers for themselves or their communities. That’s a real problem.

For those entrepreneurs who have lost everything and are working to grow their business and succeed remember to get in touch with your purpose. What’s the greater reason and cause you’re serving? It took me years of thought and questioning myself but my purpose pushes me every day, more than others I watch. Being relentless about your purpose is powerful.

The other important thing to remember is that a corporate goal harms the progress of your business. A corporate vision is a vision of the owners, not the employees. The mission of a business should be to satisfy all of the intentions of the people who support the business. My goal used to be for our business to make 10 million dollars. Now that’s simply one of the objectives I’ve set for myself. Now the mission is about each of my employees individually too. We have a wall here at the office where every employee writes out their intentions for themselves for the year. I think this is a big key that most businesses are missing out on. It’s how you get full engagement from your employees.

My intention is to make 100% of the 180 million businesses financially viable and eradicate entrepreneurial poverty for them. I know I can’t do this in my lifetime. And that’s why I need to establish the legacy I have to develop the tools that are accessible to large amounts of people, easily, and without the necessity for my active input. Books are my greatest vehicle for that. I’m devoted to 25 or 30 more books, until my final breath.

Mike Michalowicz is the entrepreneur behind three multimillion-dollar companies and is the author of Profit First, Clockwork, The Pumpkin Plan, and his newest book, Fix This Next. Mike is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal and regularly travels the globe as an entrepreneurial advocate. To learn more about Mike and get access to a treasure trove of entrepreneurial tips, visit www.MikeMichalowicz.com.