Mike Michalowicz: The #1 Financial Principle for Building a Profitable Business | Finance | YAPClassic

Entrepreneurs start businesses in pursuit of financial freedom, yet many struggle to generate consistent profit even as revenue grows. Mike Michalowicz has seen this pattern play out time and time again. While traditional accounting trains business owners to treat profit as what’s left over, Mike flipped the formula. He created Profit First, a cash management system that prioritizes profit from day one and has since been adopted by over 700,000 businesses worldwide. In this episode, Mike reveals how entrepreneurs can prioritize profit, build wealth, and finally turn revenue into true financial freedom. In this episode, Hala and Mike will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:45) Why Profit Must Come First (09:17) Profit First Cash Management System (14:14) Target Allocation Percentages for Profit (21:14) Handling Debt and Profit Distribution (24:44) Protecting Profit and Tax Accounts (27:57) How Spending Less Drives Innovation (33:32) Choosing Profitable Customers Strategically (40:17) Managing Profit for Financial Freedom Mike Michalowicz is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and creator of the Profit First cash management system, used by over 700,000 businesses worldwide. He has built and sold multiple multi-million dollar companies and authored influential books, including Profit First, Clockwork, and Get Different. A sought-after keynote speaker, Mike helps entrepreneurs build profitable, sustainable businesses using behavior-based financial strategies. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Spectrum Business - Keep your business connected seamlessly with fast, reliable Internet, Phone, TV, and Mobile services. Visit https://spectrum.com/Business to learn more. Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful and production-ready websites. Go to Framer.com/profiting and get 30% off their Framer Pro annual plan. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Working Genius - Take the Working Genius assessment and discover your natural gifts and thrive at work. Go to workinggenius.com and get 20% off with code PROFITING Experian - Manage and cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reduce your bills. Get started now with the Experian App and let your Big Financial Friend do the work for you. See experian.com for details. Huel -  Get all the daily nutrients you need with Huel. Grab Huel today and get 15% OFF with my code PROFITING at huel.com/PROFITING. Resources Mentioned: Mike’s Website: mikemotorbike.com Mike’s Book, Get Different: bit.ly/GetDifrent Mike’s Book, Clockwork: bit.ly/Clocwork Mike’s Book, Profit First: bit.ly/-ProfitF1st Mike’s Book, The Pumpkin Plan: bit.ly/TPumpkinP YAP E386 with Mike Michalowicz: youngandprofiting.co/YAP386 Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Personal Finance, Wealth, Stock Market, Scalability, Investment, Risk Management, Financial Planning, Business Coaching, Finance Podcast, Saving

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by Northwest Registered Agent, Whatnot, Mod, and AG1. Northwest Registered Agent gives you the tools and guidance to build a complete business identity. Start using free resources at northwestregisteredagent.com/ yapfree. Whatnot helps sellers grow through live shopping, community, and real-time connections with buyers. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store, download, and you can start selling right away. Mod connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers for modafinil to support sustained energy, focus, and alertness throughout the day. Visit mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping

• 0:43Hala Taha?

  with promo code PROFITING. See their website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen supports your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. Go to drinkag1.com/profitting and get a free immune support bundle with your first subscription order. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com/deals.

• 1:20Hala Taha?

  What's up, Young and Profitters? Today, we're unlocking the archives of Young and Profiting to revisit one of my most impactful conversations on building real financial freedom as an entrepreneur. My guest today is Michael Michalowicz. He's a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and the creator of the globally recognized Profit First Framework. Now, this is the first time that Mike came on the show, this replay that we're about to get into. Now, Mike has been on the show several times, three or four times. I recently interviewed him on Monday. We talked about his latest work. It was an incredible conversation. If you guys want to check out his most recent work, check out Monday's episode, or you can watch on YouTube. We actually did the interview in person. So Profit First, which is today's topic, is a globally recognized framework that helps

• 2:03Hala Taha?

  hundreds of thousands of businesses become consistently profitable. Now, we like that at Young and Profiting. And what made this conversation so eye-opening for me was Mike's ability to completely flip the traditional business formula and explain why profit can't come last. A lot of us entrepreneurs, we don't pay ourselves. We reinvest back into the business and we pay ourselves less. But he breaks down how prioritizing profit before expenses creates sustainable cash flow, reduces financial stress, and actually rewards entrepreneurs for the risks that they take. Now, I walked away from this episode with a completely new perspective on profit and cash flow. I actually changed the way that we handle our bank accounts at Yap Media and the way that I pay myself out as a business owner

• 2:45Hala Taha?

  because of this episode. The Profit First framework is something that thousands and thousands of businesses follow, and it's a framework that even though was launched years ago, is super relevant today and still used till this day and highly regarded. So I think every entrepreneur should be listening closely to this episode, and I think you guys are going to get great value out of it. All right, Yap fam, let's dive right into the Profit First method. Here's my first conversation with Michael McCallewitz.

• 3:15Hala Taha?

  So, Michael, I'd love to dive right into the topic of today. You've got a classic business book. It's called Profit First. It was released in 2014, and since then, it has totally taken the business world by storm with hundreds of thousands of businesses using your method to drive profits. And fast forward nearly a decade after its release, I still have many extremely successful entrepreneurs who come on my show and they reference your book. So we've mentioned your name several times on the podcast, and there's so many businesses that handle their cash management using your system. In fact, my company, Yap Media, uses your system for accounting, and it's actually considered a bible at Yap Media in terms of our cash management. So let's start off with a basic question. Why do you believe profits come first in a business?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Well, because it is human nature when something comes first is prioritized. And when something comes last, it's ignored or it's the Mignana syndrome. And so the analogy I use, Hala, is imagine you love your family, which I know you do. And you imagine saying, I love my family so much, I decided to put them last. I mean, it's absurd. I love them so much, I put them first. I put my health first. Things that are important come first. And what I noticed while studying the standard formula, the GAAP, the joint accepted principle for counting, is that profit comes last and it's called the bottom line in the year end. And with execution, what this means, and maybe it's a subconscious response, but most entrepreneurs wait until the end of the year, you know, it's April 15th now. And they're like, I don't have any profit, maybe next year. So profit is only considered at the end of the year.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  When we fail to get it, we wait till the next year. Why I teach them profit first is that profit comes out of every transaction. So profit is not an event, meaning eventuality. Profit is a habit.

• 4:54Hala Taha?

  I'm going to dig deeper on all of these things. But let's first start about the traditional formula. So it's usually sell as much as you can, take away your expenses, and then the rest is your profit. But you say this doesn't work because like you just said, it goes against human instincts. Because if we are saying that profit comes last, we're going to think of it last. We're not going to think of it first. So talk to us about the Parkinson's law and the primacy effect and how that actually impacts us from being able to use the traditional method and get our profits.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  You did your research, yeah.

• 5:25Hala Taha?

  Of course I did, Michael.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I love it. Those two things are such important behavioral components. So Parkinson, quick history lesson, he's a theorist from the 1950s studying human behavior and finds an interesting phenomenon. As a resource expands its availability, the more time we have, for example, the more we consume. So if you and I are discussing an agreement and I say, I'll get to you in one week, it'll likely take me a week. If you and I discuss the same agreement, the same people, the same parameters, but I say, I'll get to you in one day, I'll likely get to you in one day. So as we constrain a resource, we become more efficient. It's true for time, but it's also true for like food. The more food put in front of us, the more we consume. And it's true for money. And that's why so many businesses, as they see their sales increasing and revenue increasing over time, they get really excited, but almost uncanny. Finally, expenses are increasing at the exact same rate.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's a natural human response, subconscious response. We don't even realize we're doing it. But more cash means I have more to spend. We keep on spending. So most businesses get stuck in this loop of constantly trying to sell their way to profitability and success. And they never will get there because of Parkinson's law. Now, the primacy effect means the next thing we see has a heightened importance. So as money comes in, those deposits come in, we look at it and say, oh, I got some money. Finally, I can do, and whatever that do is, is the next important thing. We need to get new technology. We need to hire that employee. And we deplete the account immediately. So those two things in that scenario work against us. By taking our profit first, when sales comes in, we take a predetermined percentage of that money as revenue and remove it away. It constrains the supply of cash.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Now Parkinson's law becomes our ally. Because we're like, oh, I don't have $10,000 deposits. I only have 6,000 available to operate my business. And we constrain and control our spending around that. And that 4,000 has been reserved for profitability. So now we're making Parkinson's law our beneficiary, or benefactor, I guess is the word.

• 7:15Hala Taha?

  Something else that you teased out is that taking out profits is not an event. It should be a habit. So can you talk to us about how we can actually make this more of a habit rather than thinking about taking our profits out five years down the line?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  I think we look at profit in chunks by default. Like, oh, you know, if I get one more client or I get the big sale, finally we're going to get a chunk of profit. But the reality is profit is something that means, needs to be a habit or habitual. We build at it. It's kind of like saying, I'm going to go transform my body by going to the gym one time and work out like an animal. And I'm going to come out with a perfect body. We know that to have transformational effect on our body, we need to exercise regularly for a sustained and perpetual period. Well, this is true for the fiscal body, if you will, of the business. Never, it rarely, rarely happens that you have that huge client and all that money comes in. And now you can reserve it and sit back and go on Easy Street. What we need to do is every transaction, every time there's a deposit, a predetermined percentage goes to our profit.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  What happens is we start reverse engineering profit. If I want my company to have a 20% bottom line profit and I get $1,000. I know 20% is $200. $200 is hidden away. And now I'm reverse engineering that profitability. I have 800 left. That's why I have to work with to run my business. So by taking out every deposit. Now, in practice, I wouldn't do every single transaction. We usually do it once or twice every two weeks. We allow the money to accumulate. So every couple of weeks accumulate money. Then we take our profit first and then go through these allocations. So it's much more rhythmic. But nonetheless, by taking the profit first, it becomes this habitual reverse engineering of profitability and it assures profitability. You will always be profitable because you took your profit first.

• 8:54Hala Taha?

  And this is really important, guys, because this is actually how you build financial freedom as a business owner and entrepreneur. It's why you got into entrepreneurship in the first place. You didn't get into entrepreneurship to build a job for yourself. We're just on a hamster wheel. This actually allows you to get rewarded, pull out money from your business and build financial freedom.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  You know, I was doing a keynote two days ago. I just got back and the large audience night. I asked the audience to say, why did you start a business? And they all shared the same two reasons. And I hear all the time, I started my business for financial freedom. I don't want to worry about bills and I started for personal freedom. I want to do what I want, when I want. I said, who's experiencing that in this room? And there was 1,500 people in the room. I would say six hands went up. No one's experiencing it. We all have this dream of financial freedom and personal freedom, and none of us have it. It's the reverse. Most businesses are so financially strapped that you have to work your ass off just to get through the day. To reverse this trend, we simply need to take profit first. And by the way, this is nothing new. It's new to business, but the belief of the pay yourself first principle has been around forever.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  So I simply took it and established concept in personal finance. Pay for your retirement first, reserve for your savings first, live off the remainder. I simply applied it to business and it works.

• 10:07Hala Taha?

  It does work. This is why hundreds of thousands of businesses use it. So at the end of the day, profit first is really a cash management systems. And one of the most innovative parts is the fact that you say you actually need to split up your bank accounts into smaller chunks. And this is something that we've actually adopted at YAP Media. We love it. It's really helped improve the things that we do in terms of the transformation before we were doing this to after. After, these things are running a lot smoother and peace of mind as a business owner for myself as well, knowing we have like money for taxes, money for this. It's like, I'm not constantly worrying about stuff. So for people who are unfamiliar, what is the advantage of actually taking all your money and splitting it up into different accounts? And then we can get into the types of accounts and everything.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So the technical definition of this process is called fund pre-allocation, meaning we're taking money and assigning it a responsibility before we spend the money. So the concept is that we set up multiple accounts at your bank, and I gotta underscore this a million times. That is fundamentally the key. We do this at your bank because it's a behavioral intercept. So most entrepreneurs manage their business by logging to a bank account. We have accounting statements, but we don't read those. We have a simpler system for most of us. Log into the bank account and see what we have and spend accordingly. By having multiple accounts at the bank, determined or designated for different responsibilities, we know what that money is intended for, and it will, before we spend it, we know how to spend it, and that's the key.

• 11:33Hala Taha?

  And to your point, it causes an extra layer of friction where it's like you actually have to pull money out and put it in different things, where if you did it like on a spreadsheet and you just bucketed money in this way, it's so easy to just not be disciplined, wouldn't you say?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  First, yeah, I don't even look at the spreadsheet. I know what I'm doing. Or I look at the spreadsheet and say, well, let me just play with the numbers and we unwind the whole system. Now, the reality is for most entrepreneurs, if they don't have profit first, is they have a single primary checking account at their bank. They have another one for payroll or something, but they have one or two bank accounts. What happens is all the funds go in there and they pay all the bills from it. And what I equate this to is imagine Thanksgiving dinner and you cook a turkey or something, and then instead of carving up the turkey, you say to the guests, everyone fight for it. Whoever wants it most wins. Everyone for themselves. And that's absurd. We instead carve the turkey so everyone can get a piece of turkey on their plate. Well, the same thing is with our business. If you have one serving tray of cash

• 12:29Speaker 01

  and you tell your business, whatever needs it next, we need a hire, we need computer technology, fight for it. They will consume the whole turkey and the rest of the business will starve to death. So what we're doing in this system is we're setting up plates for every guest at the business table, which we have all these different accounts for. We carve it up and that way everyone, the entire business is fed and healthy.

• 12:49Hala Taha?

  Awesome. So, speaking of these plates, there's really five plates or five accounts. That's main income, profits, owner's salary, taxes, and operating expenses. So I think my listeners are really smart. All of these seem decently straightforward, except for profits and owner's salary. What's the exact difference between those two? Because especially if you're a solopreneur, you might think profits is the same thing as your salary.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  It's owner's comp and it's not, yeah. So profit is a reward for taking the risk of starting a business. Here's the scary statistics. Only 17% of the population will ever take the risk of starting and operating a business. And only 20% will do it successfully for at least five years. So that means 20% times 17%, which is roughly 3%. Only 3% of the world population will ever run a successful business. 97% of the population is looking to work for a successful business. Our job as entrepreneurs is to be a creator of jobs. And the profit account is a reward, is a thank you for taking on this risk that only 3% of the people ever pull off. So, just like if you invest in private stock, I have, or public stock, I own some Ford stock. Ford sends out a distribution check, profit distribution.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I don't run to the Ford factory and say, "Oh, I gotta earn this now." And I definitely don't return it to them and say, "Oh, this is a plowback. Let's go Ford." I say, "I've taken risk. I want the value to increase, but it could decrease. This is a reward for doing what almost no one else will do. Our business, we hope the value will increase over time, but we've taken the risk. It may collapse. Profit is a thank you for supporting our global economy." Now, owner's salary or owner's compensation is the pay for the work you do within your business. So, most small business owners work within their business. And if, Hal, if I had to replace you, I suspect you're the best salesperson for your organization. You're the best spokesperson. You're the most knowledgeable. You work your tail off for this business. What would I have to pay a person to replace you? To do the same thing? $100,000, $200,000, $1 million? It's a big freaking number. That's all I know.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's the number you deserve to make because your company found you. It has you. So your company must pay you. And if it doesn't pay you appropriately for what you're doing, it's a matter of time before we resent it. Most business owners say, "Ah, screw my salary. I gotta pay everyone else." And years later, like, "I hate my company. I am starving here." So owner's salary is to pay you for the work you do. This is what your lifestyle should be adjusted to. Profit is the bonus for taking on risk that almost no one will do or take on.

• 15:08Hala Taha?

  So let's talk about how we actually get our TAPs. So you call this target allocation percentages. So again, the five buckets are main income, profits, owner's comp, taxes, operating expenses. And we have to put percentages for each one of them. So why don't we start with profits? How do we determine the ideal percentage that we should allocate towards profits?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  So what I did, and I'm not trying to be pitchy here, is in my book, but you can get it online for free. I and my team analyzed a thousand businesses in all different industries. Media industry, restaurants, manufacturing, professional services. We found that there is a percentage that the fiscally elite, the best performing companies in any industry will do. Now, it's based upon different revenue ranges. So a smaller business, say you're a brand new startup, you make 250,000 or less in revenue, which in the service industry is typically a single person operation. If that is your case, you will probably take a diminished profit of maybe 10%. You'll take an expanded percentage of owner's salary, maybe 50%. You'll reserve 15 for tax.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  The tax account in a business is your business can reserve your tax liabilities and responsibilities regardless of your formation. So you can have an LLC or sole proprietorship or an S corp. And your business can pay your taxes and talk with a tax professional. How you distribute it is unique and different in each case, but the percentage will change. So once you hit a million dollars, you're not putting 50% toward profit or owner's compensation where you take a $500,000 salary. It may be reduced, maybe now it's 20%. Once you get to 10 million at our company, maybe the owner's compensation is 10% with about a million dollars a year. So the percentage is adjusted. What I suggest people do is look at the resources, what we analyze, but don't necessarily start there. If you're an established business, a target is simply where we're headed. You have what we call caps or current allocation percentages. This is your starting point.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  If your business has never paid a profit before and we're suggesting you can get to 20% in profit, let's not start there. Let's start next month by going to 1%. After a quarter, let's go to 2 and 3%. Maybe the rollout takes us a couple of years to get that 20%. It allows your business time to digest and adjust to the TAPs that we're targeting.

• 17:14Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap fam? If you're building a personal brand, you already know how hard it is to stay consistent with content when you're also trying to actually run your business. I love creating content, but realistically, I'm not trying to sit in front of the camera every single day. I need time to work on my business. But the problem is consistency matters. The more people see your face and hear your voice, the more familiar you become. That's why HeyGen has been such a great tool for me. You can record just 15 seconds of footage, create an AI avatar of yourself, and use it to make videos on demand. So instead of constantly filming from scratch, you can create more content, stay visible, and keep showing up without making your entire life be about generating content. And you guys know I'm always looking for tools

• 17:59Hala Taha?

  that give entrepreneurs more leverage. HeyGen is definitely one of those tools. 30 million people already use it, from solo founders to 85% of the Fortune 100. Your first three videos are free at heygen.com/profitting. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash P-R-O-F-I-T-I-N-G. Heygen.com/profitting.

• 18:25Hala Taha?

  Yap fam, you know October hits different. The season shifts, and suddenly, when your alarm goes off in the morning, your body's like, absolutely not. But when you have the business and a million decisions waiting for you, you cannot start the day already feeling behind. And that's why AG1 has earned a real spot in my morning routine. AG1 Next Gen is a daily foundational nutrition drink with 75+ ingredients, including vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and superfoods. AG1 Next Gen is backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials and key nutrient levels improved within three months of consistent use. Plus, it's formulated to support immune defense, which is really important this time of year. Yap fam, if you want to start your mornings off right,

• 19:08Hala Taha?

  go to drinkag1.com/profitting and for a limited time, get a free immune support bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/profitting. Drinkag1.com/profitting.

• 19:33Hala Taha?

  Hey, young improfitters. You know, hiring reminds me a little bit of dating. You can get a lot of potential candidates, but you still might not find your right match. And when I'm hiring at Yap Media, I don't have time to just hope the right person sees our job posts. And Indeed Sponsor Jobs helps me get in front of the right people. Sponsor Jobs boosts your job posts and search results so you can reach the people who actually help your business thrive. Plus, you only pay for results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all of your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed Sponsor Jobs.

• 20:12Hala Taha?

  And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help give your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, Young and Profiting. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsor Jobs. So I love that, and I want to kind of dive deeper on that point. So you're saying, take baby steps. Just start off with saying, all right, I'm going to allocate 1% to profit, 2%. At the same time, we should be reducing our operating expenses by the same amount, right? So explain to us why we should do that.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the kind of how the equation works is when you take a percentage away for or add something, you gotta take it away from something else. So in most cases, not all, but in most cases, we will compress operating expenses. What our research has found, and we have over 700,000 companies have deployed Profit First, to give context, most businesses run far too rich in operating expenses. They're spending upwards of 95% of inbound income was right back out the door to operating expenses, and there's a meager amount left for the owner. What we also found is that the spending is kind of aimless. It's just like, oh, I heard we should be running Facebook ads because other people told me I'll do this and I'll do that. And there's no concentrated effort in a certain area. What's interesting is we start constraining the operating expenses.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  So we allocate more toward profit and so forth, reduce that. OpEx from 95% to 90 and then 80 and so forth, that the business owner, their behavioral response is interesting. It doesn't reduce the impact that the business is having. Instead, what it does is requires them to focus more on what is having impact and they make bets on the sure things. Instead of just randomly testing stuff, they say, you know what? We've had success here, let's do more of that. Or let's bring in an expert that can tell us actually how to do Facebook ads. So we just don't blow money out the window. And they start becoming more focused. The greatest surprise for me, I never expected this, is businesses that deploy profit first and reduce their operating expenses, in the vast majority of cases, grow faster than their contemporaries who aren't doing profit first.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Which I'm saying is, most profitable companies grow faster than unprofitable or check by check surviving companies. So it's interesting, you think it takes money to make money, that's what we've been told, you need to spend as much as you can. And that's not the truth. You need to be innovative as much as possible. And as you control and constrain OpEx, you become more innovative, more prudent in how you spend that money.

• 22:45Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I definitely want to go pretty deep on that in a little bit. And it's so true, I think that everybody could look at their operating expenses right now and find 1 to 5% of like quick things that you can do to just streamline things, reduce your costs, and then allocate that towards profitability. Instead, it could be just cutting softwares that you don't use anymore, looking at user seats on all your different platforms and realizing that you're paying for 10 seats that you don't use, and just little things like that.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So true. So I started investing in companies again, and we just invested in a social media company. And the first thing we did is exactly what we said, we said, where's that? We said 10%, we said, where's the 10% we can cut? And we did it within a month. And the business has gone on unabated, and there was no damage, no nothing. It's like, oh, we had a subscription that we thought we were using, but we realized we weren't. There's so much of this stuff that is being spent automatically that we were able to cut it. And we all went to profit immediately. We brought cash stability to the business within a month, just by cutting unexpected or unnecessary costs.

• 23:44Hala Taha?

  So a question for you. I've always known that when you're running a business, you really should have three months of safety net money in case something goes wrong, three months to cover all of your operating expenses so you can pivot, figure it like, like, let's say COVID happens again and your whole business goes under. So where do we keep that money?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  So we call it the vault and the vault is a bank account that we have with a secondary bank. So these bank accounts, we call them the foundational five that you're talking about. We keep it at our primary bank. We then set up other bank accounts with other institutions with the intention of making it hard to access. So we don't have online banking typically. We don't have starter checks ever. We don't have an ATM card. And so in our case, we go to the extreme. We have six months of reserves for full operating expenses. And here's something that's interesting. With three months or six months reserves, that can stretch far more than three months because if COVID happens, you don't just sit here and just keep spending money. After month one, you're like, oh, this is not going to come back. I need to start controlling costs. So you start reducing your costs, but you still have that runway. So three months can last six or eight months. Six months

• 24:45Speaker 01

  can last a year to a year and a half. So we set up a separate account. Now, what we did here at our office is we use an online bank in this case, but Kelsey, who's the president of our company, she has the username for the account. I have the password, but we don't know, the other doesn't know the party, the other's code. So it's kind of like the nuclear keys, like you know, to unlock a nuclear system. She has to enter the username and she blocks it. I enter the password and we're in the system. Then we can get access to this vault. But no one can make a rash decision. I can't go in there and say, I need the money real quickly for the business and take it, nor can she. So separate account, out of sight, out of mind, reserve that money for at least three months.

• 25:22Hala Taha?

  I really, really love that advice. I didn't know that. So I'm going to start implementing that at Yap. How about debt? What do we do if we have some debt that we need to pay off? How do you suggest that we handle that?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  The only way to handle debt is by being profitable is the first thing to understand. Because when I present on this, people come up and say, I have debt. I can't be profitable yet. I'm like, oh, you have to be. So just real simple definition. Debt is an expense you incurred in the past that you couldn't afford or chose not to afford. You used other people's money. Only way to pay this is that you make more money than you're spending right now, profit, that you can pay this back. It's the residual leftover that you can use to pay it back. So you have to be profitable. So step one is if you have debt, you have to implement profit first. You still allocate money to profit. But the tweak is until this debt's away, when the profit distributions come out, we use a large portion of it, sometimes upwards of 95% of that distribution to eradicate debt. I'm not a fan of having debt. I'm a fan of self-funding. That's the position I put my companies

• 26:17Speaker 01

  in, is that we, we have debt, we first get rid of it, and then we allow cash to accumulate in a vault account, so that we have runway and we can be a bank to ourselves if we have to be. One last tip about debt, and this is not my strategy, this was at least documented by Dave Ramsey, I don't know if he's the creator of it, but he calls it the debt snowball, and it's illogical, but it's very behavioral. The logic is pay your debts with the highest interest rates, because that's the most expensive. The behavior, though, is if we can get early wins, we're more likely to stick with something. In his concept, sort debt by smallest amount due first to your larger debts, and get rid of the small debts first, because it'll trigger that momentum, because you can tear up those bills and get the next one taken care of. So we found deploying that debt snowball effect, sorting by amount

• 27:01Speaker 01

  due as opposed to interest rate, actually gets better momentum and debt eradication.

• 27:04Hala Taha?

  That's super helpful. So, let's talk about the profit account again. So I'm a business owner, and I have to say, I am pretty guilty of never taking money out of my profit. I never do. I always reinvest it back in the business. I pay myself an owner's salary, and I sort of just like let this pile of cash sit there. Actually, all my three months reserves is like in my profit account, right? So I need to pull that out and all of that. So what's your best practices in terms of taking out profits and sort of the mentality? You touched on it a bit in terms of the fact that you need to reward yourself. You're the one who's taking on the risk and everything like that. But I guess, like, what would you say to me? I'm guilty of it. I'm not taking my profits out. So what would you say to me?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  It's usually a scarcity mindset that triggers that, meaning, I'm afraid the business can't do this on its own yet, so I'm gonna put the money back in. It's like, like starting riding a bike with training wheels, and every time you start getting momentum, you're like, no, no, put the training wheels back on, and you never allow yourself to get the training wheels off. Well, by reinvesting or plowing back, and those are words I can't stand, because what they are, they're soft terms for extra money for expenses. It's basically saying, here's an expense, you're not strong enough or healthy enough yet, company, not to get by without more expense cash. When you, you as the owner, say, take, start taking profit distributions out of the business, the business now can't have the training wheels anymore. It has to sustain Own, it has to work within its true budget and doesn't get a little extra feed from the owner,

• 28:27Speaker 01

  the parent. So first thing is it harms a company by replowing back money in over and over again. The second thing is we want to empower the entrepreneur. So when you take that reward mechanism, when you get into the habit, you're like, wow, maybe you reward yourself by expanding your lifestyle in certain ways, or maybe you like to donate to charities or have an impact in some other capacity. But what it does, it starts empowering you to have a greater impact as an individual. So I really encourage you, that profit has to go to you. It's your choice how do you use it, but don't put it back in the company.

• 28:56Hala Taha?

  Really great advice. So let's talk about the two buckets or accounts that we should never touch, which is profits and tax, and then also this vault that you just mentioned. I believe that's something we should never really touch.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, never really touch except for quarterly. So it's an account that sits aside. So what happens is as we allocate money to a profit, if we leave it at your active business account, it can come, become very tempting. Day bills come in, you're like, I can't pay these bills. Oh, I have some profit money. I'll take from there. The day you do this, this becomes a shell game and now you don't have profit. It's an expense and you just pretended you had profit. So what we're going to do is when profit gets allocated, we're actually going to hide that away too. Taxes, the same symptom can happen. Only just take from the tax money. No, no, that's for the government. Let's hide that away. So we set that up as a separate bank. Now we do touch it once a quarter and there's a reason behind this. Everything I'm teaching in Profit First is a behavioral based, behavioral based justification behind it. And the 90 day thing, where there's

• 29:51Speaker 01

  an interesting phenomena around 90 days. 90 days is far enough out that you have to make effort to get there, but it's close enough that you can anticipate it. It is pretty imminent. So it's a good rhythm. If you took profit once a year, it's so long out, people don't even think about it. But since every 90 days is just around the corner, we keep on pushing toward it. Oh my gosh, can we be more profitable? So it builds our energy around it. This isn't just, just a behavioral principle that I'm suggesting. All major public corporations do 90 day profit distributions, or the majority do. Ford, every quarter sends out their profit distribution and you'll see that with most public companies. They know the number one fiscal discipline is engagement with shareholders. Get shareholders excited. If you reward them every 90 days, that's the highest Level of engagement. Conversely, you'd think, well, I just take out profit every week.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I'll get really excited. No, then it becomes precedent and expectation. Oh, this is my new life standard. So 90 days is far enough out that we're anticipating it. We can't get our hands on it right away. So hide that money away. The tax, same thing every 90 days is when tax quarterlies are due. That's when the money comes out. You can make your quarterly payments. These are your personal taxes. Your business can pay your personal taxes. Again, walk with an accounting professional. Sometimes they can't pay it directly. It may have to reimburse you, but there's ways to do it. But that tax account is the same thing. We want it outside, out of mind. And when distribution day comes every 90 days, we do on the calendar. That's when it comes out and we reward ourselves with profit and we pay our tax bill through the business.

• 31:13Hala Taha?

  I remember at Yap Media, before we implemented Profit First, our first year in business, we were hit with like such a big tax bill that we weren't expecting. And it really hurt us, you know, like just cash flow wise.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Gut punch, yeah.

• 31:26Hala Taha?

  Now, you know, taxes are around the corner. I'm like, God, we're handled that, you know?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Oh, this is the craziest thing. I'm really blessed. I get an email every 15, 20 minutes now from readers of Profit First and my other books, but Profit First predominantly. The number one busiest day of emails, and I'll get one every minute or so, is on tax day. So in the US, April 15th, it's unbelievable how many people say, I just paid my taxes. My business has paid my taxes for me. I'm so excited. I thought people would be so excited about profitability and they are, but never having to worry about taxes again and that bill that can just shock you, having your business already accounted for, seems to be like the biggest relief for people.

• 32:05Hala Taha?

  It really is. That's one of the biggest things that I noticed with that. Okay. So we talked about how to change into this management system, taking baby steps. Why should we run our business based on what we can afford today rather than what we could potentially afford someday?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, the biggest benefit of constrained spending, working within your means, is it brings about natural innovation. We talked about Parkinson's Law. There's this hidden, well, he revealed it, but this hidden secret of Parkinson's Law. As a resource increases, he says, the more supply of something, the more we consume. So if you put more food in front of me, more cookies, I eat more cookies. But what's interesting, he says, as you constrain the supply, we start changing our behavior around it. So if you only put one cookie in front of me, I'll break off a corner. I'll stretch it out a little bit. When we have less of something, we become very innovative. We think of new ways of utilizing it. So by constraining the spend in our business, we become more innovative. One of my favorite stories, and we have lots of them, but this was my favorite. There's a baseball team called the Savannah Bananas of Savannah, Georgia.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  And they are explosively successful. They are a all-star college team. In other words, they're in an industry that makes no money, except for this one. They've become the Harlem Globetrotters and they are selling out their stadium of 5,000 people every day. They're more profitable on a percentage basis than any team, including major league teams in the world. But what they've done was they implemented Profit First from the get-go. And the founder, Jesse Cole, and his wife Emily, reached out and said, when we ran Profit First, we didn't have enough money in our expenses to maintain the scoreboard, which is an electronic scoreboard. So instead of saying, we need to borrow money, or we gotta spend more than we have. They said, the system tells us we can't afford it. No scoreboard. And what they did is they brought people from the stands, like a boxing ring match. They walked by with the score between before each inning. And people loved it.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  They even gave the audience in participating in the game. And that's one of their secrets for how successful they become. The moral of the story is constraint of cash brings around an explosion of innovation, new thoughts, and you'll break the industry rules. You are much more likely to define the industry or redefine the industry.

• 34:11Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap fam? If you're building a personal brand, you already know how hard it is to stay consistent with content when you're also trying to actually run your business. I love creating content, but realistically, I'm not trying to sit in front of the camera every single day. I need time to work on my business. But the problem is consistency matters. The more people see your face and hear your voice, The more familiar you become. That's why HeyGen has been such a great tool for me. You can record just 15 seconds of footage, create an AI avatar of yourself, and use it to make videos on demand. So instead of constantly filming from scratch, you can create more content, stay visible, and keep showing up without making your entire life be about generating content. And you guys know I'm always looking for tools

• 34:56Hala Taha?

  that give entrepreneurs more leverage. HeyGen is definitely one of those tools. Thirty million people already use it, from solo founders to 85% of the Fortune 100. Your first three videos are free at heygen.com/profitting. That's H E Y G E N dot com slash P R O F I T I N G. Heygen.com/profitting.

• 35:23Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast, and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling, because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show, and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over $1 million a year on the platform has doubled.

• 36:07Hala Taha?

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W H A T N O T, in the App Store. Download it, and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store.

• 36:22Hala Taha?

  Hey, young and profiteers. As an entrepreneur, my days are absolutely jam-packed. And I usually start my day off with a coffee or an energy drink. And then by 3:00 PM, I'm crashing. And that's why I wanted to tell you about Mod. Mod connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers who could prescribe a once-or-twice-daily motive-final drink designed to help keep You energized, focused and alert throughout the day. Here's the thing, yeah, bam. Energy drinks with caffeine temporarily block adenosine, which is a chemical that makes you feel tired. Once the caffeine wears off, it all comes crashing down at you at once. Modafinil works differently. It engages multiple pathways in your brain and it helps you achieve a steady energy and alertness for 10 to 12 hours. Modafinil was invented in the 1970s and has been used in high-stakes situations

• 37:07Hala Taha?

  where concentration and alertness are critical, including by soldiers, pilots and astronauts. Visit mod.com, that's M-O-D dot com, for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code PROFITING. That's promo code PROFITING at mod.com. See their website for important safety information and we thank MOD for sponsoring the pod. I love that. Another way to make sure that you're not depleting resources is to make sure that your product offerings are really focused and that you're not all over the map in terms of how you're servicing your clients. So can you talk to us about that?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, hashtag truth. I mean, it does a truth bomb and a half. That's fact, Hala, is that the more variability, the more we dilute our ability to be good at any one thing. So when we constrain cash again, when we reduce our operating expenses, we've become super efficient. The analogy I use here is a doctor. Imagine you had a heart scare and you get rushed to the hospital and the doctor comes to you and says, I'm a heart surgeon, I'm also a neurologist. I started studying geriatric care. I'm thinking about doing pediatrics. You know, like different things. It's really enjoy it. I'm thinking about becoming a chiropractor next. What is your confidence in him? Versus say you go into the hospital, the doctor approaches you and she says, I only do heart surgery. In fact, that's the only thing I practice. The exact case you have, I've done 600 operations in the last two years.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I have a 99.99% success rate. Who do you choose? The one who's doing everything? Or the one person that can save your life? Of course, the one person that's proven they can save your life. Now, this analogy translates to business. No, we're not necessarily saving lives, but you're transforming lives. You're having a major impact on business. Consumers want, most consumers, want the person who is most effective at curing their biggest need. And the only way to do that is to do the same thing over and over again. That doctor, that heart surgeon, has done the 600 heart surgeries, learned 600 times over how to do it even better. The one heart surgeon, neurosurgeon, geriatric surgeon has done about three heart surgeries and hasn't mastered it yet. The best customers want the best masters.

• 39:10Hala Taha?

  Totally. That way you'll be able to charge top of market. Your team's gonna be like highly trained because you're gonna have SOPs for everything because you guys are doing the same thing over and over again. There's no different variables that everybody has to keep track of in terms of every account is different or every way that you do it is different. That's how you really get efficiencies.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it's totally streamlined and customers will circumnavigate the world to find you. Like they'll go out of their way to find you. If you're the world's best heart surgeon, I don't care if you're halfway around the globe. I'll find a way to get there and I'll find a way to pay it. I won't say, hey, is anyone know a heart surgeon in my town? I'm just looking for someone. Listen, there's some customers like that and there's some customers say, I just need someone to design a crappy website for me. I'll find someone local, but the elite customers, that 20% of the best customers say, I need the best website, in my case, for an author. Who does author websites and knows how to do it better than anyone else? I don't care where in the plant they are. I don't care so much how much you charge. If I can't afford it, there's a certain point I have tolerance, but I will pay an absolute premium because they get me. So you can dictate more, people will seek you out, streamline and efficiency comes about all by being narrow in what you deliver.

• 40:16Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and by the way, this means turning people away sometimes and telling people, no, I can't help you. I have so many people, I have a agency, I have a podcast network. I have a lot of people who come to me and they're like, you know what? Your social media service is really expensive. Can I just do three days, not five days? Can you just do this for me and not that? And I just say, no, I can't. This is my product offering. This is how I've established, you know, what profits I make. This is how much I charge for it. And there's no other offer, like this is the offer. Because if I just, I made the mistake early as an entrepreneur, just trying to be a people pleaser, yeah, I could do that, sure, I could do that. And then it's, everything's just messy because you're trying to keep track of things and it's just not all the same, like you were saying. So you have a great quote in your book, all revenue is not the same. Talk to us about that.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  All revenues are the same. Congratulations on that discipline. It's one of the hardest disciplines for entrepreneurs is to decline what we see as an opportunity when it's actually a, an albatross around our neck. Those small customers usually are the most needy customers. So when someone wants you to charge them less, they see you as valueless. So you have to be very careful about that. What we need to do is differentiate between good customers and bad customers. And the nice thing is you can look at your existing customer suite right now, and you can identify who truly are the best customers. Not just on the financial basis alone, but also have a good rapport with us and so forth. There's a saying, birds of a feather flock together. And they say that because it, there's a truth to it. Those customers want to learn more about them. Where do they congregate? Where do they hang out? You're much more likely

• 41:43Speaker 01

  to find more customers like them. But if you're willing to take on any customer because everything's an opportunity, you're going to start diluting yourself. You're going to have a, a very, very type of customer need. You're going to have some people who are very needy at the bottom, and it's going to continually anchor your business down. So you have to have that discipline. I encourage people that haven't done this before, start off with one customer, start off with one decline. Go to, of all your customers you have to say, I'm sorry, we have to discontinue services for you, or find a way to politely do it. But get rid of one. Notice, the drop in revenue will be unnoticed, but the improvement in your emotional state will be radical. You'll go to sleep without thinking or worrying about this person. Transformation internally is radical, and that starts bringing the strength to do more of this. And as you free up from worry, as you get rid of the low hanging

• 42:28Speaker 01

  customers, now you concentrate more on your better customers, and they often start to flourish. You're more available for them. They may even demand more. So in most cases, by eradicating the unfit customers, I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm just saying they're not a fit, get rid of those unfit customers. Often, I see a revenue boost within a few months of that, just because the emotional state for the owner and the team has changed. Now they're focusing forward with their best customers.

• 42:50Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I definitely want to talk about an example that I did at my company with this, because we had an initiative in 2022. We called it Nice Clients 2022. And that's because we had an influx. When I first started Yap Media, the agency, we had lots of interest and lots of celebrities and big CEOs, billionaires, and these were very egotistical clients. And we ended up with some really big accounts. The profit was great, 20, 30 K monthly retainers. It was really hard to just walk away from that money. But I noticed that we were losing employees. The morale was down compared to when we first started. It was getting inefficient. These clients wanted more and more and more.

• 43:32Hala Taha?

  And although they were paying us so much, they wanted us to do everything. And we kind of just felt like we had to answer to every beck and call. And they were calling me on my cell phone and it just was crazy. And so we're like, all right, we're gonna have to say goodbye to these big monthly, you know, retainers and do what's best for our company and company culture. And so we actually let go of like two huge accounts. And it hurt in the short term, but long term I was freed up to come up with new innovative, scalable ideas. I started my podcast network. I started my masterclass. These are all things that have already made up for that revenue plus some, and are more scalable than a talent heavy agency. So it just goes to show that sometimes you got to eat it in the short term, but it's, it's good in the long term.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  I have a very vivid memory of myself of getting rid of a customer when my business was at the point where we needed money and it was a substantial revenue opportunity. But this person was so rude to their own employee. We were doing a conference call, so rude, I was shocked. In that moment, I said, I'm not doing business with this person. By the end of the call, I said, I'm sorry, we just can't serve you. I hung up the phone and I felt this relief. I felt panicked still, like I need this money. I was like, I finally stood up for not allowing that kind of behavior. And I would never allow it again. And it became such an empowering feeling. I think when you have that empowering feeling, you also become more confident, which makes you a more effective salesperson. So it starts that upward spiral for sure.

• 44:52Hala Taha?

  I love it. This is such an impactful method. I recommend that everybody go get profit first. Like I said, it's like a Bible at Yap Media. A couple more questions before we close. I know that you mentioned that, or we mentioned that this is the path for financial freedom for owners and entrepreneurs. So how can we take this system? And then once we get our profits, how do you suggest that we manage those finances? And break those apart? I knew that you mentioned that there's like personal accounts that we should have as business owners as well.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's personal accounts. Yes, I have a chapter in Profit First called Profit First Life. And there is a parallel between our finances at home and finances at work. Or I shouldn't say link as opposed to parallel. Meaning if I am doing poorly at home, but the business is doing well, I will leech off my business and cripple it. Or if I'm doing well financially at home, my business is struggling, I'll start funding it. So both will go down. So we need to have this financial acuity and comfort, not just a business, but also at home. We do the same thing. My wife and I implement this when we implemented Profit First for our business. We implemented our house right away and it brought such clarity in our communication. We used to be saying, hey, can we go on this vacation? And I think, I don't know. And there'd be disagreements and stuff. Well, now we have an account that says vacation. And so my wife will say, hey, I want to go on vacation.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  She actually just called a week ago and said, I want to go to Cabo. I'm like, okay. Like I said, can we go? She's like, the account has the funds. I'm like, we're on. So we set multiple accounts for multiple purposes. It could be education for yourself or for your children or grandchildren. It could be vacation or it could be emergency circumstances. Could be repairs or maintenance of your property or homes. So we have, and I went a little bit in excess, 17 accounts now. What happens is money flows in my income and then gets pre-allocated based upon percentage at home to all these different accounts. And it's brought with me and my partner, my wife, absolute financial understanding and acuity. We both understand where our financials are at home without having to have discussions or sometimes arguments over it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  No more. We know exactly where we stand. So it's the same deployment in our personal finances.

• 46:54Hala Taha?

  And just a hot tip for everybody, I use Brex and it's free to create as many accounts as we want. Are there other bank accounts where it's free to just have as many accounts as you want?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, my favorite bank hands down is called Relay. And what's so interesting about Relay is they've become certified in Profit First. So you can go to Relay Bank or it's relayfi.com, I think financial institution. And you go in there and it'll say, do you want to set Profit First account? And you click yes and it rolls them out. It's a no charge, no fee bank and it'll even do now automatic allocations. So you can say 10% to profit, 15% here and you say boop and it starts doing the allocations for you. So they're a great bank.

• 47:32Hala Taha?

  Awesome. Well, they're not a sponsor of Yap, but maybe we'll reach out to them.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we're gonna have a little talk with them.

• 47:40Hala Taha?

  All right. So Mike, you have a new, newish book came out in 2021. It's called Get Different. It's a marketing book. What can we expect in that book? Because if it's anything like your past books, I'm sure it's brilliant.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I'm extremely proud of this book. And what I did is I deconstructed, what is the most effective marketing for small business? Businesses under $25 million in revenue, but my sweet spot is companies under a million dollars in revenue, really small enterprises. We don't have a budget for marketing. How do we do it? And I boil it down to three key elements. Makes an acronym, DAD, D A D. And subsequently, I heard every dad joke on the planet now. But the first D stands for differentiate. The only way to get noticed, and it's all again, behavioral mechanisms, is if something is unexpected. If you ever walk down the street and you do that double take, like, what was that? It's because your mind registers something unexpected. So do something unexpected. Now, I'm not saying outrageous. I'm not saying weird. It's something that's inconsistent with the common noise. The second thing is it also must be,

• 48:33Speaker 01

  A, attractive, meaning when someone takes a double look, you have them for about a millisecond. Now you have to win them over and saying, oh, that's for me. So what does your audience need to hear first? Usually it's that you acknowledge their pain. Are you feeling this? Or you talk about the benefits? Do you want that? You don't talk about features. Then the last part is direct. And direct is now they have this, what action they need to take. And the key is what micro action? What's the first small step that they will safely take? So if I draw into my car lot, because I got that flipping balloon thing, and you come in and say, I want a new car. And I say, well, give me $100,000. We'll find it. You're done. Like, are you kidding me? It's so outrageous. But if I say, hey, would you give me your cell number?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  I can send you pictures of our inventory. That's the small first ask that gets the momentum going. So Get Different talks about how to use the DAD model, differentiate, attract, direct, for small businesses to start winning over business opportunity after business opportunity.

• 49:29Hala Taha?

  I love that. And we have so many small business owners who listen to the show. So I'd love to have you come back on, give us your marketing advice. And then I can do some sort of like best of Michael McCallew. It's episode.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I would love to.

• 49:42Hala Taha?

  Definitely going to do that. All right. So the last two questions that we ask on the show is what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Real simple, only set one account. So we talked about the foundational five. You can do this in your personal finances or your business, you choose. But call your bank and set one additional account and call it profit. Then any money that comes into your personal account or any money comes into your business account, take 1% of it and move it into this profit account. The reason we do 1% is so small is it's not going to negatively impact your lifestyle or your business lifestyle. But it's going to have a very positive impact on your mindset because you'll start seeing cash accumulating. When you see that this can work at such a small level, it's just a matter of time before you get momentum and expand it out.

• 50:23Hala Taha?

  That's great. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this could be relationships, financial, however you want to think of profiting.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  It's funny, one of the secrets, I guess, is just something I discovered in the last year or so, and I've really been practicing this. I meditate every morning and I have a ritualized morning. And one thing I ask myself, and I have stopped asking, will I be successful in life? I've been asking, will I matter in this life? When I take my final breath on this planet, I don't know if people will say, oh, he was successful as much as Mike mattered. I think that's the more important thing, that that's what people remember. So I ask myself every morning, am I going to do something today that matters? And that has changed my trajectory and actually brought more energy to being of support to my fellow humankind.

• 51:08Hala Taha?

  I love that. That's so beautiful. Michael, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show. You are so smart and this was one of the most actionable, no fluff podcasts that I've had in a while. So I really enjoyed it. That's my goal at Young and Profiting, to be actionable. I think people are going to be taking a book worth of notes. So thank you so much for your time.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  This has been a joy, Hala, as always. Thank you.

• 51:30Hala Taha?

  Thank you.