Business Book Review: Fix This Next by Mike Michalowicz
For entrepreneurs who don’t know where to start, Fix This Next is your next must-read.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 272 pages
Publisher: Portfolio
Released: 2020
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
Mike Michalowicz proposes that:
“The biggest problem business owners have is that they don’t know what their biggest problem is.”
Michalowicz is on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. His best seller, Fix This Next, shows business leaders how.
Fix This Next Analysis
Michalowicz shares his diagnostic tool for addressing your business's most important priorities.
Taking a leaf out of Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, Michalowicz’s Fix This Next Analysis proposes his own needs pyramid.
Michalowicz’s ‘Business Priority Pyramid’, in ascending order, includes:
Sales
Profit
Order
Impact
Legacy
The book details five core vital needs that sit within each level.
Like Maslow, Michalowicz proposes you must first meet the needs of each level, before moving to the next. Thus, illuminating your order of priorities. The book challenges more idealistic thinking. The Profit First author proposes impact and legacy can only happen after meeting essential needs. Much like the foundations of Maslow’s original pyramid.
Lifestyle Congruence
In a discussion often neglected by other entrepreneurially-oriented authors, Michalowicz makes an important point about sales goals. Others often discuss meaningless goals and revenue forecasts. Michalowicz proposes making it personal.
Michalowicz suggests replacing arbitrary sales goals with goals of personal significance. As a starting point, determine what level of personal income supports your current levels of personal comfort. Your ‘comfort number’ replaces your ‘aspirational or dream income’. You then reverse engineer from there to find the level of revenue you need to consistently support that lifestyle.
Your Company’s Forever Legacy
Michalowicz makes an often overlooked point about the nuance of legacy. Legacy, as he proposes, isn’t about money, fame or power. He says:
“Legacy is not about you. It is about what you leave behind.”
Here’s a Michalowicz test: Who founded Coca-Cola? Health judgements aside for a minute, Asa Griggs Candler, in no way, failed to leave a legacy. As Michalowicz proposes, legacy is about the business continuing to have an impact beyond your active participation.
He reiterates:
“If you don’t define and prepare for your legacy, it will still happen. Just not the way you want it to.”
Favourite Quotes
“You arrive at your desk in the morning, put on your firefighter gear (your glasses, your email app, and a cup of coffee with a double shot of espresso), and get to work putting out fires.”
“I’m always amazed by how many of us business owners have a serious case of the “yeah, but’s”. We believe our companies are so unique that simple solutions and strategies could not possibly help us with whatever problem we think we have. “Yeah, but my business is different.”
“For the team to succeed, even if it is a team of one, we all must be moving toward a specific goal. And it all starts with your specific, personal goals. Not random sales targets, bragging rights, or trying to keep up with the Entrepre-Joneses.”
“When you sell the right thing the right way, you are speaking to the customers’ true needs. Customers don’t buy features; they buy benefits.”
“The vision for your company is usually strongest the day before you open the doors. That is the last day your dream is still a dream. The next day, it is all about execution.”
“To be clear, reinvesting profits into your business means it is not a profit and it never was. Say it with me: Ploughing back profit means it is not a profit. Never was and never will be. A reinvestment of “profit” is an expense.”
From profit to people and prospects and everything in between, Michalowicz delivers a comprehensive guide for your business stewardship. Michalowicz writes with wit and humour. He makes learning how to fix serious business problems a fun ride.
For entrepreneurs not sure where to start, Fix This Next is your next must-read.
Fix This Next by Mike Michalowicz: Available on Amazon.
