MI Rewind: Business Crash Course w/ Mike Michalowicz

23:28In fact, you use a zigzag pattern because you go as best you can toward the island, but you need to capture the wind. You need to avoid obstacles like other boats, sandbars, catch the momentum, the current of the tide is shifting, and you use all this to move that direction. But after a certain period of time, maybe a few hundred yards, then you pull down a sail, you redirect it, you lift it again to go in another direction. And now you're zagging and you zig and zag. And sure enough, you get to that island by zigging and zagging to get there. That's what we need to implement in our business. We do 90-day planning.

24:01As of this recording, we're eight days away from quarter end. our team is meeting to do our zag. We had a very clear vision of what we wanted to do this year, and we zigged this quarter, and it moved us in that direction, but things have come up, some opportunities, some struggles. And so we're sitting down and we're going to plan the next 90 days out. We can do short-term planning. I think that's smart. What to do in the moment in the near future. We just can't plan out the entire future. So set a vision and then zigzag your way their attack. Whenever I think of a business plan or something along these lines of planning, I always think of that quote from Mike Tyson that says, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

24:41You can have a business plan and then something goes wrong or off plan and now what? It is such a great quote. Can you imagine taking a punch from Mike Tyson? My face would explode. When I see some of these YouTubers that are starting to box some of these guys, Yeah, I know. I can't imagine. It's insane. But it is such a good visual because it's so visceral. That's what it's like in your business. It is like taking a Tyson punch. Your face explodes. Hopefully, you're conscious at some point after taking that hit. And that's how we have to respond to our business. I think the greatest day for most entrepreneurs, honestly, is the day before they start their business.

25:17We have these grand hopes. We're about to get into the ring with Tyson. We got this. And then you take that first punch and it's like, what the hell just happened? The greatest day for many entrepreneurs is the first day. And that's a shame because then they start losing faith in themselves. It becomes a grind. They become entrapped in their own business. We need to go back to that first day and just simply know that was a vision. Reset that vision. This is what our desire is. And then start doing the short-term planning and reactions to get there. Start zigging and zagging. Your newest book is called Get different.

25:48And I want to talk about some of the important concepts from the book that I think people listening will get value from if they're trying to start their own side hustle, small business, even a startup. And the first concept is really the overarching idea for the whole book. But you say that being better than your competitors isn't enough because customers rarely care about better. Different is actually better. Why isn't being better enough to win customers. Yeah, because customers can't even see better. Imagine you and I had directly competing businesses. Maybe we both own a dry cleaner, for example.

26:24And I say, you know what, we're going to be the best dry cleaner in the neighborhood. I'm going to answer the phone in two rings. Any customer calls, we answer the phone within two rings so that they can get whatever information they need. And you say, we're going to be the best dry cleaner. We're going to answer the phone in one ring. Unequivocally, you are better. Measurably, you are better. But the question is, does the customer even notice? The answer is no. Of course they don't notice. We can look at our businesses right now, any of us, our own businesses, and say, we've got better credentials, we have better experience.

26:54You can go through the list of all these ways that you're better. But the customer only notices a few things. And the most common thing they'll notice is the exception. How are you different? Here's an example. My first company was in computer system setups. I was the computer guy. And I was better than my competition in so many ways, the credentials we've achieved, the type of deployments, network setups we did, and all this great stuff. And there were dozens in my immediate area that were doing computer services and regionally hundreds, if not thousands. And we would compete. It was a slog every day when you do a proposal, you're competing against five or six other companies and so forth.

27:32And then one day, one computer company came into town and they kicked my ass to Sunday. They did with all of our competition too. The company is called Geek Squad. And what Geek Squad did is they threw on these uniforms, these flood pants, tape around the glasses, and these little narrow ties. They pulled up in their Volkswagen Keystone Cops vehicles, and customers went crazy over it. The reason they did is because it was different. Who doesn't want a geek superhero fixing their computers? It was something that was different. Myself and all my contemporaries, We put on our suits, admittedly a little bit too large, shoulder pads sticking out.

28:08It looked like a scarecrow, to be honest. Me and my contemporaries were scarecrows, and all of a sudden, in comes a geek, and they dominated. Today, Geek Squad, which sold to Best Buy, is at a$1 billion valuation with Best Buy. Massive. My company didn't do that. And even though I could argue I was better, and I still could argue we were better, technically, superior to Geek Squad. They were superior in being different and different wins because customers know it's I love that story. I think there's also this piece of everybody has a different opinion on what's better. I mean, you have measurable things, right?

28:43The phone calls, if you pick up on one or two rings, obviously one is better, but there's a lot of things like some people might think a product is better just because it has a lower price, or they might think it's better because it has a higher price. I mean, there's a million different things that could define what is actually better for a product or service, and everybody is different. Robert Leonard, Ph.D.: Correct. The challenge is we see the trees. We're in the forest. It's our own business. The customers are outside that. They see the forest. We have two radically different perspectives.

29:11It is so obvious to us why we're better. The customer only knows about 0.01 % about our business. It's that 0.01 % that matters. When I say be different, I'm not saying be different in everything. I'm actually saying be the same in everything. Just pick that one thing that's undeniably noticeable. And often, actually almost always, it's in the marketing because no one has experience with your business until they experience your business. So therefore, the only experience they'll have with your business prior to experiencing your business is the experience they have with marketing. Marketing is your front door for your business.

29:47If everyone's front door is black, paint yours red because that's the door that'll appeal to you. In fact, in the book, I talk about that phenomena. I say, imagine you walk into a room and there's 500 people in there and everyone's wearing a gray suit. And one of those people is actually your soulmate. It is your ultimate connection. How do you find them? Well, you'd have to just go through people for hours and hours interviewing to find your soulmate. And honestly, we'd probably even give up 20 hours into it. Like, this is not worth it. This is your soulmate we're talking about. It's not worth it.

30:16Now imagine one person in that whole group is wearing red. And I'm thinking, okay, your soulmate's somewhere in here. Start the interview process. Well, there's 499 gray suits, there's one red suit. Chances are you're going to go to that red suit first. You're not going to go randomly through it. They may not be your soulmate, but the fact that they distinguish themselves, draw you in to identify and start there. That's the power of differentiating ourselves. It makes it very easily, sequentially in a person's mind, where to get started. Start with the thing that stands out. It's most likely what you want.

30:48Even if it's not your soulmate, that's where we're going to get started. Robert Leonard Why do most businesses' marketing plans fail? Is it because they're wearing that gray suit or they're just painting their door black too? Robert Leonard Yes. And planning implies commitment. That Colin Powell statement where he said, anyone can plan for a battle, but the second that first bullet flies is outside the window. A marketing plan is a commitment. And when it fails, most people say, I guess it didn't work for me. Plan's like, I'm going to do Facebook ads. Everyone else is doing Facebook ads for 10 grand.

31:22I'm going to do 10 grand. I can barely scratch that dough together, but I'm all in on this. And you do it and it fails. It's like, well, Facebook's not for me. And this was so costly. I'm never going to market again. And we give up. The word plan implies commitment. And I think that's a grand mistake. I think we need marketing experiments. Experiments implies testing. There's actually an expectation for failure. There's an expectation and experience to learn from failure. So marketing experience is what we should do. These are very low cost, low dollar, low time investment efforts we make to see how our community responds.

31:55Something out here, if we get a little traction and amplify and improve that, if it doesn't work, great. Now we know that little thing that didn't work, let's try a new variant or a whole new thing altogether. So plans are risky because we think it's an all in or all out. Experiments is a learning process. Trey Lockerbie One thing that I actually tend to talk about quite a bit is copying someone else who is doing what you want to do and is having success with it. I even hear some marketing influencers or gurus say that they go into the Facebook ad archives to look at what their competitors are running for ads.

32:31But I think you feel a little bit different about this strategy. So why does copying best practices from your competition almost guarantee your marketing will go unnoticed? Yeah. So here's the big risk is there is a process in every brain of humanity called habituation. It's a process where our mind is wired to ignore stimuli that we already have quantified as irrelevant. So it's white noise. Here's a classic example with email marketing, for example, maybe five, six years ago, I remember getting my first email that started off with the words, Hey friend, Hey friend. And when that happens, I never experienced that before.

33:11Oh, I have a friend calling me a friend. This is a very friendly thing for them to say. They're not even calling me by my first name. That's how friendly they are. I started to read this. I'm like, Oh, this is irrelevant smarmy marketing. This is not for me. In that one moment, habituation kicked in. My mind started to program. When the next email came in and it started off with, hey, friend. I was like, last time, not relevant. I skimmed it real quick. I was like, no, not relevant. Spammy marketing. The third, hey, friend, and ever since, I've never looked at them. It's the automatic delete button because I know it's not relevant.

33:48That first person that did the, hey, friend, was a genius because they broke a mold, something that I didn't expect. When something unexpected presents itself, how our mind is wired, we actually have to evaluate it. There's a whole reason. there's a biological reason why we have to. The second person though, the copycatter is now starting to make this white noise. And by the third or fourth, it becomes ignorable when we see it's not relevant. And you don't see this in marketing. You see in all aspects of life. I live outside New York City here and fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, they've changed their sirens.

34:2220 years ago, it was a high, low whale. People were dying because of this. Literally not the people who are trying to rescue. People are walking across the street and not hearing a screeching ambulance coming humming down the block and was running people over. The reason was habituation. Our minds got used to this in New York. You hear the high, low, high, low over and over again. It's not relevant. We actually totally tune it out, even though it's super loud. So what they did is they changed the sirens to squeaks, honks. They had to interrupt that pattern so it jogs us into paying attention again.

34:54It's a great lesson for marketing. If you are doing the same high-low as everybody else, you are just being ignored. If you are the first one to introduce something new, a new flavor to your community, something they haven't experienced before, they have to pay attention and you'll capture them. So I think the great lesson in what the competition is doing is when you see a pattern that other people are replicating, that's the one pattern you should break. Other than just that tagline to not copy of, hey friend, And what else made those emails spammy? And how do we make sure that our marketing isn't spammy like that?

35:29So there's actually three stages of effective marketing that I found in my research and I put into Get Different. I call it the DAD framework. It's an acronym, DAD. And these three elements need to be checked off to be successful. First of all is be different. I'll lay out the three elements and I'll give you an example of how I did it. So first, be different, meaning break through the white noise. The second element, the A stands for attract, needs to speak to the customer. I outlined there's 15 different elements that speak to a customer, and you can blend these together. A couple are, does it serve a need?

36:02Or does it invoke a curiosity? Or does it simply entertain? Is there a reason to stay engaged with this? Does it speak my language? That's a big one. Does it have my lingo? Do you get who I am? We need to communicate that. A lot of spammy ones say, I want my private jet. You can have a private jet too. I'm like, first of all, I give a shit about private jet. I don't want a private jet. And you're bullshitting me. You don't have a private jet. So don't lie to me. You snuck onto a tarmac and took a picture there, pal. There was an instantly disconnect. These marketers often put themselves in such a superior position and put the recipient in such an inferior position.

36:36Now, if anything, it'll maybe invoke jealousy or envy, but it's not going to evoke connection. So that was one of the elements. They fail to do what's called the attractor factors. And then a lot of marketing don't have the last D, which is direct. Direct is a specific call to action, and this is the key, that is reasonable and safe. A lot of them are too big of an ask or they're too ambiguous. They're not clear. So tell the person what to do and be very clear, but it's got to be safe. If you were looking to buy a car, you come into my car lot and I'm like, hey, give me $100 ,000 and find you your dream car, Robert.

37:11Who are you? Forget it. But if I say, give me your cell number so I can send you pictures of our inventory and we can find your dream car that way, then you're more likely to comply because it's a reasonable ask. Now I'm moving you toward the final transaction where you'll get your dream car and I'll get my commission. I'll give you an example on email just of how I did it. I noticed my contemporaries, other authors, when they do their email blasts, they're sending them out and it has black and white text, which of course, it's a black finding, it's a white background, some pictures maybe or something.

37:39I was like, okay, black and white is the common noise. What if I send out an invisible email? So I took a white font, put it against a white background. I sent out an email blast in the very beginning in black text that said, this is the first ever invisible ink email. Click and drag below to highlight the message and reveal the message. And people went wild over this. It was different. I don't know if you've ever received an invisible ink email, probably not. So that has to invoke curiosity and interest. So we looked at it. Now it was attractive because it harkens back to the past. As a kid, you maybe played past codes and stuff with friends, used some kind of decoder ring, some kind of invisible ink thing.

38:18So it harkens back to the past. It also invokes curiosity. What I was doing was trying to build my list for the Get Different. I said, hey, you just experienced invisible ink email. That's different marketing. I have 99 more ways that you can do unique marketing like this for free. Please sign up for my list if you want it. So as a reasonable ask and exchange, I was giving them something of a value where they can replicate this and other strategies that they just experienced. And that was, of all my emails, actually historically, that has been my most effective ever. So that's an example of something that you can do that would change up what we regularly experience.

38:54Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

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42:12That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. Have you found people start to use the Invisible Inc emails? Here's what's shocking. No. And it's a gimme. If your community hasn't experienced it, send it out. But I know why they're not doing it because there's a fear trigger. So this is very interesting. In my research around marketing, I looked at just how our brain operates. And if we look back in the early days of humanity, I'm talking about the hunter-gatherer days, when we were in tribes, our survival depended upon compliance with the tribe. So if you're like, hey, to the tribe, let's go hunt a woolly mammoth.

42:54And everyone's like, well, I'm in. And I'm like, no, let's go for the saber-tooth tiger, man. Now I'm out. The tribe is committed to something. And there you are getting that. I am kicked out of the tribe because I'm not trustworthy. I'm going against the tribe. I'm out in the tundra by myself now, and I'm not going to be accepted back in. I'm more of a risk. And if I'm out by myself back in those days, that's a certain death. I am done. So back then, being different, challenging the status quo meant certain death, and that is still wired into our reptilian brain. Society has moved very quickly, but our brain's kind of chugging along at a very slow pace.

43:30So our brain is wired to not do different because that means we'll be excluded and that means death. The other part though, which is weird is when we do different, we also know that's the only way to distinguish ourselves and stand out. So there's this kind of battling effect going on in our mind that we want to be noticed without being noticeable. When people discover this invisible ink, most people are like, oh, that's cool, but I can't do it in my community. That's the battle going on that if I do something and I get rejected by my community, I'm dead. The truth is, if you did replicate it, the worst outcome that could happen is that experiment fails and no one engages.

44:05The best case is people are like, wow, I've never seen this before. When you do different, when you're the first to do it, rarely do people replicate right away. That first, hey, friend that went out, I bet you that person was doing that for a little bit, a little while. And then all of a sudden it catches on like wildfire because other people now see it as safe and they start cloning the community. So do something first. And I'm consistently shocked how long it takes for people to catch on. The Invisible Inc. email will catch on home day, but I'm going to milk it for all it's worth until it does catch on.

44:33Robert Leonard In the same vein of this TV show of Undercover Billionaire, or there's another show where they basically just take somebody who's been successful in business, drop them in a random city with no money, and tell them to figure it out. If you were in a situation like that, or you're going to launch a brand new business today, you can't use your brand, people know who you are, any of your books, anything like that. What would you use though from your knowledge that you know today that you didn't know maybe when you first started your first businesses that you could use to increase the speed and the probability of the business you're starting success?

45:08I absolutely would get my first client by offering whatever I'm doing for free because the first client is the hardest client to get, but the second client wants to know who else are you working with. In fact, everyone wants to know who else are you working with? That is the assurance they want in the quality of product or service you offer. The first client is a marketing source. I think the mistake I see and I'd made with my first business was, got to charge, got to charge, and now I'm reducing my price and I'm trying to get that first client and negotiating. If I simply went to a marquee client, the big name in the industry, and said, hey, I will provide my service to you at no cost in exchange for you for being a referral source for me.

45:51Meaning I'm going to refer all my future opportunities to you as a referral source. And I simply ask for your honest truth, speak to them and tell them this is what your experience is like. That exchange is significant because now I have a marquee name, the big name in the industry, and I can say, that is my client. And they're going to back me because that's the agreement. Now every other client is so much easier to get. And I can come out hitting premiums. I don't have to fight my way up, start at a low price point, there is no negotiation. I got the number one client, you can be the number two.

46:20And I'd start using that to foster a lot of opportunity. You've written six, seven, eight books, something along those lines. Seven books. One coming out this Christmas. Wow. Quick turnaround. Yeah. It's a children's book. Actually, if you can see it right above my shoulder, there it is. I can see that. I'll have to pick up a copy for my son. Preston Pysh Oh, there you go. It's called My Money Bunnies. How it came about was so many people into Profit First are like, I wish I could teach this system to my children. And I'm like, I got to write children's books. So this is my first experience writing a children's book.

46:53It's been a blast. It took me about a year to get it done, but it's My Money Bunnies. And it's a very simple and hopefully extremely fun way of implementing a Profit First-like system in your personal life as a kid. Preston Pysh I've loved all your books. I'm sure that I love that one. And And obviously being into money and investing, I'm looking forward to when my son is old enough to be able to have those conversations. So - Oh, it's going to be so much fun. Yeah. It's going to be exciting. So I actually just signed my first book deal to write my first book. And so I'm excited. And I've actually talked to people from the audience.

47:26I know there's actually quite a few people in the audience who are writing their own books too, whether it be traditional published or self-published. What tips do you have for somebody who's looking to write a book? Do it. I think the world is starving for great books. Let me put a little asterisk next to that. I don't think the world's starting for more books. I think the world is starting for great books. There's a huge churn in books. So go for it, but put everything into it. Put your soul into this book. And my other tip is give it all away. I think one of the fear people have is when they write a book, if you give everything away, every ounce of your knowledge, you'll never get an opportunity beyond the book itself.

48:05But here's what I've experienced. I put every ounce of my knowledge, hopefully presented as concisely and effectively as possible in my books and as entertainingly as possible in all my books. And I found there's two types of readers. There is a community of do-it-yourselfers, and that's the 99 % community. Most people are reading books simply because they are seeking answers. They are your best marketing force. If you put everything you know in your book, that community will tell other people saying, this book has all the answers. and they will perpetuate the marketing. 1 % of the readership reads a book and says, now I found my source.

48:41I don't want to do this, but I know this guy knows how to do it. And they come to you for more. Because I put everything I know in Profit First, everything I know in Get Different, we have an unbelievable amount of people calling and saying, I just want to do this book, but I want to do it right, so I want you to do it for me. So it's built businesses behind it because everything's in it. And the vast majority that's already shared are people just perpetuating the concepts because they're doing on their own successfully because everything's in there. So put everything you know into it. And the likelihood of success, I think, is a multiple over cutting a book short.

49:12At the end of every episode, we have a segment called the action plan. And in this segment, I like to give people who listen to the podcast three different things to go do when they're done listening to the podcast. I think too many people read books or listen to podcasts or just consume educational content and then not actually take action on it. So my plan with this action plan is to get people to actually take action. And so the three things are a principle or habit to implement in their life, a book they should read, and then the very first step or action they should take when they're done with this episode.

49:45So first one, Mike, which habit or principle do you follow in your life that has had a big impact on your success that not enough people do, but should? random acts of kindness, hands down. Actually, just yesterday, I just went around our community and was just picking up garbage for an hour. And here's what's the power of a random act of kindness. It feels good doing it. And I think what you'll realize is when you put things out through your business and so forth, when you feel that reward of just doing feels good, amazing things come back to you. I believe actually marketing is the ultimate act of kindness.

50:24Because when we have a great business or service and we put that out there, when you market and put it out there, you are being kind. But it's also scary. As we talked about earlier, it's scary to do different and get noticed because of that reptilian part of our brain. Random acts of kindness starts building that muscle. So start doing that immediately and never stop. And listen, it doesn't have to be big stuff. You could put a quarter in a parking meter. You can just say a friendly comment to someone when you're walking by, but just keep doing that and they'll build that muscle. Robert Leonard I've actually been doing that a bit myself lately.

50:55I was at a gas station the other day. I had to pick up a case of water and I'm waiting in line. And this woman walked in, she was very distraught and she had asked the cashier if anybody had found her money. Anyway, she ended up apparently lost like$500 of cash on the ground or something from the ATM. And she started crying and she's like, I don't have enough money to fill my car, my gas tank. I'm literally stuck in this gas station. I went over and I filled her tank for her and - Robert Leonard Love it. I don't want any pat on the back for that. But the point is, after I left and I did that, it was like 50 bucks, not the end of the world.

51:27But after I left that, I was just so motivated. And I did it for her, but I was so motivated that that was probably one of my most productive days that I've had in a long time because of that random act of kindness for somebody else. And how good you feel and how good she felt. It's funny. I was in a situation too. I was driving somewhere and stopped by a place to get a bite to eat. There was a line, and there was these two guys, young guys at the front of the line ordering food and they were trying to pay up and their credit card or debit card wasn't working. And the guy was trying to make a call and the cashier was kind of getting anxious and they were afraid.

52:01It was becoming a bad situation. And so what I don't know, the food was, it was like 20 bucks. I walked up and said, hey, I think you guys may have dropped this. I saw this on the ground and I grabbed 20 of my wallet and I picked it up and said, I think you guys dropped this. And it kind of gives me chills. So they paid for their food. And the one guy, they were walking away. One guy looks back and he's like, this is thank you. And I'm like, I said, brother, you have done the same for me. And he starts walking, turns around and again, he's like, thank you. It felt like there was a shift in what he's going to do for the next person.

52:35And that felt good. And this is a little ways back now. It's a month later. I still feel the energy of that. Like that's the funny thing is it doesn't need money. This, the examples you and I gave was a little bit of money. It's just doing something kind for someone else is just such a good experience for everybody. That gave me chills as you told that story, honestly. And I had a tiny, tiny one yesterday. I was leaving the gym and I was at a stoplight and there was a guy walking across the street and he looked like he probably wasn't in the best spot of his life. He looked just sad and angry on his face as he was crossing the street.

53:08And he looked at me quickly and I waved to him. I don't know why. I didn't tell myself I was going to wave to him. I just did. And he didn't do anything at first. And then he walked five or 10 feet more and he turned around and had the biggest smile on his face, waved at me, and then just kept going. And it was just the most random thing ever. And it had no money, nothing. I just - No, that is, oh, I'm getting teary now. That is the ultimate exchange. There's a movie called The Butterfly Effect, which I actually haven't seen. I got to see the movie, but there's this concept that a butterfly flaps his wings somewhere and it can trigger a monsoon somewhere else.

53:42Who knows? That guy may have been on this downward path and who knows what the thoughts were going on and maybe it's going to result in harm to himself or someone else. And now maybe it turned and he's like, I got potential. Maybe he delivered flowers to someone. It's like, you don't know the effect that can have, but I do know this, it's a good thing. And there's some, not to take it on a turn for worse, but there's some pretty crazy stories about the smallest little changes of people walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. There's some really crazy stories about that. If you had just said hi to somebody.

54:16Yeah, you can save a life. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Mike, what has been the most influential book in your life? The most influential book in my entire life was How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. I read that when I was 22. I was actually having heart palpitations at 22 because of self-induced stress. It is, I think, a pinnacle book on stress management. Listen, if you do therapy and stuff, I actually have done therapy. I do therapy. I think it's great. This book for the$15, I got a used copy for$2. It was the greatest investment ever. It gives such good tools that are perennial.

54:55They live on forever to navigate stress. And I can't say I'm stress-free, but I'm so stress-reduced. It's like, oh my God, it's been amazing, that book. That's the second book now that I'm going to add to my list from just this - Oh, you haven't read that one? I haven't. I haven't even heard of it. So Dale Carnegie wrote two pinnacle books. One's called How to Win Friends and Influence People. It was one of the first books around modern influence techniques. It's still probably the best book in that category, in my opinion. And How to Stop Worrying and Stop Living. It gets a little old Englishy because this book is now almost 100 years old, but man, it just works.

55:32I think a lot of Anthony Robbins' work and more modern stuff was all based upon Dale Carnegie's work. Yeah. Warren Buffett actually says that Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the most important books in his entire life. Yeah. That's probably number top five for me. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is number one. When this episode's over, what is the first step or action that somebody should take to improve their life, career, or business? So you can do with one word, starting today, call yourself a shareholder. So let me give some context to this. We call ourselves entrepreneurs and business owners, and I love what that stood for.

56:12I love what that meant, but it's become bastardized. There's some pretty big names that say entrepreneurship is about hustle and grind. It's about workaholism. It's what's your grit and work your ass off mentality. Entrepreneurship was never meant to be the doer. It was the visionary. It was the person who choreographed resources around them. It was someone who says, I have an idea and I'm going to take a risk of organizing people and things to make it happen. It wasn't about doing the work. It was about affecting change and facilitating work. In fact, the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job.

56:44It's to provide jobs. So I think we can take on a new term and that's shareholder. I use that myself now. When some people say, what do you do? I say, oh, I'm an author and a shareholder in these small businesses. I'm a shareholder in, say, I am a shareholder of Ford stock. I own nothing, 100 shares. But as a shareholder, I have two responsibilities. One is I've taken risk by investing in the company. I share in the profit. Two, I give strategic direction, vote for the board of directors. When there's some other strategic decisions on how we're directing the company, we, the shareholders, vote for it.

57:17As a small business owner, you are a major shareholder, maybe 100%, or if you have a partner, you're probably 50 % or more. You own a lot. And we got to start behaving consistently with that. Give your business strategic direction. And thank you for contributing to our society and taking the risk of having this idea and putting it into action, sharing the profit. Call yourself a shareholder and you'll start acting like one. Before we give a handoff to where people can find you, I like to wrap up the show by turning the tables and letting the guest ask me a question. So Mike, what question do you have for me?

57:51Well, I'm really curious about being a single dad. When you became a single dad, how did that change you and how you behave? It had a huge impact on me. It happened young. So I was 22 when we found out, 23 or 24 when I actually became a single dad. And so it really impacted me mostly from a mindset and money perspective. And so growing up, all I cared about was money. I just wanted to be rich. I just wanted to be a billionaire, so much so to the point where... Have you heard of superlatives? In high school, you get best eyes, best smile. Yeah. The ESTs, yeah. Yeah. So I was voted most likely to be a billionaire in my high school class, which is cool because that's exactly what I wanted.

58:35And then I realized over time, And mostly when he was born and as he grew up a little bit, and he's still only three, but I realized that the people with the most money don't necessarily have the most time, and they don't necessarily have the most control over their schedule and get to do what they want. And I feel like oftentimes a diminishing return there of time and money. So it really shifted how much I care about becoming super wealthy versus having control over my time. And so it's been a big shift in terms of actually caring about the time more than the money. Oh, that's great. That's great.

59:06Thank you for sharing it. Where can the audience go to connect with you, pick up all your books, read anything you got going on? The place to go is gogetdifferent.com. So that's the brand new book, but I created this resource page for it. The book's titled Get Different, but the website's Go Get Different. And what I think is interesting about this is I do free resources there, including a hundred ways to market your business. So that Invisible Inc. one I shared, that's one, but there's 99 additional ways to market that are different. They cost nothing or very little, but they're great experiments to get started.

59:42And I think if you have a business that does good things, you have a responsibility to market accordingly. And I hope that script at gogetdifferent.com will help you do exactly that. I will put links to all Mike's different resources in the show notes below for anybody that's interested. I've gained a lot from the books and all the resources he's given away over the years. So I highly recommend you guys go check it out. Mike, thanks so much for joining me. Robert, thank you, brothers. It's been a joy. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week.

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