Who is Mike Michalowicz and what you can learn from him: Mike Michalowicz launched his first company when he was 24 years old. After selling it in 2002, he foundedRead More
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]]>Mike Michalowicz launched his first company when he was 24 years old. After selling it in 2002, he founded PG Lewis & Associates, which he sold in 2006. He now works as a writer, speaker, and consultant through Provendous Group. He helped found the company, which is a profit sharing venture group, and currently serves as the CEO.
Mike is more than happy to share his success with other aspiring entrepreneurs. His books are full of advice, and his blog is loaded with helpful articles. Here are his top 5 pieces of advice for new business owners.
Get rich quick schemes are a fool’s dream. You can build a large and successful business. But it will probably take 10 to 15 years. If you go into a new project expecting instant wealth, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. When you don’t reach your goals, you’ll likely become discouraged and may give up on your dreams too soon. Setting realistic goals is the most important thing you can do for your new company.
If it was common place to become a billionaire by opening your own business, everybody would be doing it. It isn’t uncommon for people to open a new business planning on astronomically large financial returns. Realistically, just managing a business that keeps its doors open is a huge success. Don’t expect to make millions by doing it.
You also need to step back and watch for long term results. Any new venture is going to have setbacks. Keep reminding yourself that big success takes time and perseverance. It also takes a little luck much of the time. As long as you see forward progress towards your goals, be content with the pace at which things are moving. The only really bad sign is if your company remains stagnant for a long period of time.
Just because nobody else has the exact same idea as you doesn’t mean that you won’t face competition. Any available alternative to using your product or service is competition for your business. This includes the possibility that people choose to do nothing.
It isn’t enough to convince people that there isn’t anything like your product on the market. A truly superior product almost always costs more- you need to convince your customer base that the extra features of your product are worth the extra money it costs. People might recognize that you have the best product on the market, but they don’t need anything that does what your product does. You need to convince them that they do.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of putting their entire lives on hold as they focus on getting their business off the ground. If you don’t take care of yourself, however, your business will suffer. Everybody needs time off to relax, de-stress, and remember why they do what they do. A little time away from your company can serve to remind you how much you love it and send you back to work with a renewed enthusiasm.
Nobody can fire on all cylinders 100% of the time. As you get more stressed, you will become harder to work with and for, affecting your employees. As you get more tired, you will start to miss little details that just slip right past you in the rush. If you run yourself too hard, your health will start to suffer. In order to take care of your business, you need to take care of yourself.
Startup companies succeed in attracting employees away from established corporations by having a worthy goal for people to rally around. A dedicated team of people focused on the same outcome is a very powerful force. But if you attract different people with different messages, you aren’t going to have a unified objective. It’s okay to tailor your pitch to each party a little, but the core message has to remain the same.
This is also true in marketing. There are countless outlets for you to use to raise brand awareness. Different outlets lend themselves to different messages and you’re going to want to refine your message to reach your target audience with each marketing campaign. Newspaper ads, for instance, as far more likely to be seen by an older audience, so you’ll want to present yourself slightly differently than you would on a social media site with a young following. But you company image has to be consistent across all these platforms. If people don’t know who you actually are and what you do, they aren’t going to become customers.
The Internet is not known as the Information Highway for nothing. One tiny leak can spread across the globe in seconds. For this reason, it is very important that you are always upfront about everything. It is almost certain that anything you try to cover up will become public knowledge. People will forgive and forget a mistake that you own up to relatively quickly. But a cover up that gets exposed in a juicy scandal will hang over your company for years. Your reputation may never recover from such a blow.
Preview The Pumpkin Plan with Mike Michalowicz himself
Buy The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz on Amazon today
Preview The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur with Mike Michalowicz himself
Buy The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz on Amazon today
Preview Profit First with Mike Michalowicz himself
Buy Profit First by Mike Michalowicz on Amazon today
Visit MikeMichalowicz.com to learn more about Mike and his books
Follow Mike Michalowicz on Facebook and Twitter
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]]>Introduction In this episode Mark Hatch shares his book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, where he describes remarkable technologies accessible today and shares stories of how ordinary people have created extraordinaryRead More
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]]>In this episode Mark Hatch shares his book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, where he describes remarkable technologies accessible today and shares stories of how ordinary people have created extraordinary products from those tools.
In his book, Hatch explains and shows you how to create, innovate, and make a profit with nothing more than your own creativity, hard work, and a desire to make some change. The goal of this book is to help entrepreneurs take part in a new age of manufacturing tools which were once impossible to afford.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are very creative and innovative, but need an all-in-one resource for manufacturing new product ideas on a minimal budget.
Everything I thought I knew about innovation in launching a hardware company has fundamentally changed in the last decade. I had not seen anybody writing about the impact that it was going to have on the startup world. There is this confluence of trends that have come together in the last decade that nobody had really wrapped together in a single volume. So I felt that somebody needed to write it and given my position in the industry it made sense for me to do it.
Each of the chapter pretty much stands on its own. It is a fairly easy read in that I do a lot of stories to back up the reality that is occurring. There is nothing like giving examples that have already happened to convince the reader.
You no longer have to be a professional to change the world.
I start with my first day at a TechShop. It was very early on, we had only been open for a year when I ran into Jim Newton the founder of TechShop. Jim convinced me to come by and take a look at the place and given my background I was intrigued with this new retail platform that he had developed. I had talked to three entrepreneurs back to back and each of them had said they had saved 98% of their development cost and each are now worth millions. At the end of that day I realized I was standing in the future and because of the potential economic impact this would have in unleashing the creativity of the creative class there needed to be one of these in every single city on the planet. As I moved through my experience over the first three years I realized that this was having an impact everywhere. Then I also realized there was a gap on the current availability of books and discussion about the movement itself. I set about to capture the gestalt of the movement itself. So I came up with nine principals that basically makeup the manifesto itself.
The first principle is to make. Humans were designed to make, we have that opposable thumb and it’s ingrained in who we are. Just making things is a fundamental activity that humans get enjoyment out of. One of the things that makes making whole is the ability to share it and that’s the second principle. Often there is a giving component which gives meaning to these projects that are completely different than what you get when you buy something off the shelf. There is a play principle as well. A lot of the best projects turn in to the best projects because somebody comes at the project from a different angle. And then there are some really important things around participation that I am seeing emerge in a collaborative community. It is a lot more fun and affective to work in a space that has a lot of other people working away on their projects rather than doing it in your garage. The last two principles are support and change. Support is the call to action and why I call it a manifesto is that this platform is creating an environment where we can do innovation and change the world at price points that we’ve never seen before. And the last principle is to change. When you embrace this activity making it will change you in positive ways and its import to embrace that and encourage other people to change as well.
The reason we call this a manifesto and movement is because we are anticipating and expecting a significant portion of the population to change their consumer behavior, behavior around gift giving and attitudes around trade skills.
I am a former Green Beret, quite a while ago, but it feeds a little bit into the book. I was trained on how to participate and/or run a revolution. From there I did a startup and went back to school. I worked for about eight years at Avery Dennison manufacturing company and a year at Kinkos. All of this was before I began at TechShop as the CEO and Co-Founder.
I saw early on after I joined that there were small companies that were launching hardware startups for the lowest cost I had seen in my career. The average member there saved 98% of their developmental cost which fundamentally changes the access to be able to create hardware startups. A friend of mine, Chris Anderson, wrote an article called The New Industrial Revolution which inspired me. Chris took one angle at it and I wanted to write a book that would be open more to makers as well as a fairly easy read for policy analyst and startup junkies.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker
Buy The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch on Amazon today
Visit MarkRHatch.com to learn more about Mark and his book.
Follow Mark Hatch on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: One Simple Idea by Stephen Key | The Business Idea Factory by Serguei Netessine | The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur according to Mike Michalowicz: Introduction In this episode Mike Michalowicz shares his book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Mike Michalowicz shares his book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur where he gives you the business tools to get ready for building a business and the kick in the behind to get started.
In his book, Michalowicz provides his perception on what entrepreneurship is and how you can navigate starting and building a business when you have no resources. The difference between this book and others like it is Michalowicz connects entrepreneurship to the bathroom experience when we find a way to survive on a very small amount of toilet paper.
This book is perfect for the aspiring entrepreneur who needs the tools to startup when they don’t have money and for the established entrepreneur in need of realigning their business.
I think it’s the analogy I use. I have to argue that the content that I talk about has been addressed by others in different ways so for a book to be fresh it just has to be a new spin. In Toilet Paper Entrepreneur I connected entrepreneurship to the bathroom experience. If you are every stuck in the bathroom with three sheets of toilet paper we find a way to survive it on just three sheets. It’s all about leveraging the fact that what you have is enough.
All the books I write build on the prior concept so this isn’t a jump in jump out, it’s a read through and at the end of every chapter I give specific actionable steps.
Resources are perhaps your biggest asset. When we have resources then the path we want to take becomes the doable path, conversely when you have no resources the obvious may not be doable and therefore it forces you to think of alternatives. And that’s where innovation comes from, when you can’t follow the obvious you have to break that rules.
I broke Toilet Paper Entrepreneur down into three different segments which are belief, focus and action.
The first part of the book is about the mental game of entrepreneurship, a big part that is not normally talked about. A lot of different resources talk about the strategies of entrepreneurship and they definitely apply but the big question first is to make sure your mind is behind it. The first chapter is titled Natures Calling and what I mean by this title is simply what you feel naturally compelled to do. A lot of people know there passion but I am taking one step further in this chapter and talking about what your purpose is. Passion is something you love to do and purpose is the reason behind why you are doing what you are doing.
The second chapter I call A Little Piece and Quiet in your mind and what I talk about in this chapter is the power of beliefs. Beliefs can either be a wall or channel. We are all wired in our minds to prove ourselves right. If you say you can’t get something done, it’s in your best mental interest to not get it done. And if you say to yourself that you will get it done, you will find a way to get it done. Our beliefs can be channeling where they can move us towards an accomplishment or they can be a wall. When it comes to entrepreneurship we have to investigate what the internal conversation is going on in our heads and then convert it into a channel. A channel will get us to our vision; a wall will prevent us from getting there.
The third chapter I talk about the fire in your belly which is the Why. When you know what your purpose is in your business and how it connects with you, you will know why you are doing it and that keeps driving you forward. I totally believe that the foundational component of entrepreneurship that so many people miss is the mental game.
In the next couple of chapters I talk about getting down to the actual execution of your ideas. One strategy that I talk about and strongly suggest is a strategy called tacking. Tacking comes from an analogy/strategy used by sailors. Tacking is where you identify the place you’re going but how you get there might not be straight on. It is about avoiding the obstacles’, leveraging yourself and redirecting your steps but ultimately you will get to your destination.
The final section of Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is the Action section. One of the biggest actions that entrepreneurs can take is to have the discipline of saying no. There are numerous stories and strategies that I share in this section pertaining to this issue. I talk about how to burn the boats in your business so that there is no plan B, it’s all about plan A, and you execute it until it works.
I wrap up with talking about money and equity which is an extremely important component. I talk about how to grow a business when you don’t have money and those resources. I show you how to extract some money when you don’t have traditional financing in place.
I believe The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur gives an aspiring entrepreneur all the tools to get ready and the big kick in the ass to get started. And I think for established entrepreneurs it realigns them with where they are and with their relationship of their business.
“Successful businesses don’t get richer quick, they get rich right.” – Mike Michalowcz
I am an author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan and Profit First. Prior to becoming an author I was a fulltime entrepreneur growing a couple companies and today the forefront of my activities is writing books and talking about them.
I wanted to challenge all the academic reads that were out there. I believe there are a lot of great content books but most of the books I was reading about business you have to bore your way through it. And so I decided to write my perception of what entrepreneurship is and how you can navigate starting and building a business when you have no resources.
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Buy The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz on Amazon today
Visit ToiletPaperEntrepreneur.com to learn about the book and download the first chapters
Visit MikeMichalowicz.com to learn more about Mike and all of his books
Follow Mike Michalowicz on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz | Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz | The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs by Kevin D. Johnson
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Unique Styles Of Entrepreneurs | 5 Personal Qualities That Make Up a Lifestyle Entrepreneur
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur with Mike Michalowicz appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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