Meet Mike Michalowicz

 [00:00:00] Mike: The job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job, it’s to create the job. That’s our job. So if you’re a therapist and you love doing therapy, by all means sustain that. If you want to build something of perhaps even greater impact, meaning you can serve even more people, then we have to employ people, but then your job has transitioned to building jobs for them, and the reward when you build jobs for people, AKA grow our economy, is profit.

[00:00:35] Linzy: Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapist podcast, where we answer this question: how can therapists and health practitioners go from money, shame and confusion to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach, and creator of the course, Money Skills for Therapists.

 [00:00:51] Linzy: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today’s guest is the one and only Mike Michalowicz, creator of Profit First. I try to keep my geeking out, to a minimum, and my fangirling to a minimum.I feel like I succeeded. You can let me know. Today Mike and I talk about some of the biggest conceptions around Profit First that he still sees, coming up, 11 years after he wrote the book. We talk about what profit actually means, like what is profit? and we talk about some of the black and white dichotomous thinking that can come up around profit and people, and moving out of that simplistic thinking around profit and what it is. We talk about the importance of profit specifically for folks who are doing therapy work, healing work, helping work, why we especially need profit, and the cost that happens when our businesses are not profitable. When we’re under financial stress. and we talk about some of the changes that he’s seen in the small business landscape since he wrote the book, and what we need to be more thoughtful about now when it comes to Profit First. Here is my conversation with Mike Michalowicz.. 

So Mike, welcome to the podcast.

 [00:02:10] Mike: It’s a joy to be with you, Linzy. Thanks for having me.

 [00:02:12] Linzy: It is a straight up honor to have you here. I’m going to try not to geek out too, too hard but it is wonderful to have you here to be able to talk to you about Profit First. ‘Cause as we are chatting about a little bit off mic, before we just started recording the work that you have done with creating Profit First and popularizing it has had a huge impact on the small business world. You have made waves.

 [00:02:36] Mike: Yeah. It’s such a blessing. I am so fortunate. It’s been a lifelong dream. I’ve wanted to serve entrepreneurs because of the struggles I’ve experienced. I think the journey can be simplified, maybe not easier, but at least simplified. And it was funny, there was a,a meme. My wife came to me, she’s like, oh, this video got like 5 million views, whatever. So yeah, look at this. I’m watching and it’s this video they’re talking about, American business and stuff. Right in the middle of the guy is reading Profit First. She’s like, look, you’re in pop culture Now, it was not a complimentary video. 

[00:03:10] Mike: It was all about kind of like the American Hustle mentality and how we sacrifice everything in life. So he uses this book, says, look, it’s all about profit, which is not what the book really means.

 [00:03:17] Linzy:  That’s inaccurate. Yeah.

 [00:03:19] Mike: It’s kind of cool to be in that pop culture scene.

 [00:03:21] Linzy: There you go.

 [00:03:22] Mike: It was on Sister Wives. I’m like, that’s kind of fun.

 [00:03:24] Linzy: you go. Yeah,,, yeah, Okay. So you’ve made it onto tv. you’ve got Yeah. Yeah, it has. It has and I’ve heard sometimes the phrase like, if you have haters, then you know, you’ve made it so people, it’s popular enough that people misunderstand it, right? Which says a lot. So I wanted to start with this actually: What do you find are the biggest misconceptions that folks have about Profit First? 

[00:03:47] Mike: I think that meme videos, it was kind of a good indicator. We think that profit first means profit over everything else in a business, that it’s Profit First and people last. That’s often the thing I hear. People are like, oh, I’m people first, not profit first.

[00:04:02] Linzy:  Yes.

[00:04:03] Mike: But what Profit First means is that you need to care for your profitability. It must be the priority otherwise, you can’t care for your people; you can’t care for your organization. It’s not viable. The example I used with therapists is imagine,I’m a patient or you’re the patient and I’m the therapist, and you walk in, in scenario one. I’m like, I’m not profitable. In fact, I’m barely making it. and I’m really desperate to cover my mortgage this month. Let’s do this session or you come in to a therapist who is like, I’m very profitable. The business is extraordinarily healthy. I’ve paid for my mortgage and I have a reserve for the next three months. Are you ready for your session? Who do you want? We all know that the lack of money and the panic to bring it about brings about this ongoing stress and the lack of attention, but when you are profitable and sustainable, you can be all in on your patients. So this is the greatest irony when people don’t know about Profit First is your clients are starving for you to be profitable. They want it for you in the worst way. They may not say those words, but their behavior is totally in alignment with that.

 [00:05:00] Linzy: Absolutely, yeah, sometimes I say that we should be living the lives that our clients think that we’re living or want us to live, right? Because we do, and we see this all the time, especially in the therapy health practitioner, helper, healer space where we’re putting so much, we’re trying to pour so much into making other people well, but you know, we’re pouring from an empty cup, right? And we’re doing all sorts of things that we would not encourage them to do. We wouldn’t be like, you know, what you should do is like work until you’re exhausted for so little money. Go home, cry into a bag of Cheetos, go to bed, start over, right? Like we would never want that life for them and yet sometimes when we are so afraid of being taken care of and being, well that is the life we end up building for ourselves. Right. The financial stretch. and it’s, it’s classic wounded, healer kind of behavior. Like it’s right on target for us, in a lot of ways for the types of folks who, you know, tend to be drawn to these kinds of fields, but yeah, our clients want us to be happy. They want us to be stable. They want us to be able to go on vacation, right? Nobody wants you to be struggling, and as you say, there’s such a cost to that stress, right?

 [00:06:00] Mike: So, and it’s not just with the therapy space. I was reading a study that average retail store owners earn less than if they worked a job at McDonald’s, and the work hours are ridiculous. You know, I have got to stock inventory, I have got to be there all the time. I have got to sacrifice weekends, et cetera, et cetera. And we’re not getting by. Yet the consumer does think, wow, you have got a store that’s been around for five years, you must be wildly successful.We’re the cause of that because we’re the ones that we have to look successful. This gap of perception and reality is what I call the gap of entrepreneurial poverty. We’ve become entrepreneurs ,and we have this impoverished life. It’s not just financial by the way. It’s in so many ways, soulfully, timefully, all these things, but we put this air out there, success, and we believe everyone else has it, but not us. So if there’s one thing I can convey: if you’re a living check by check, you ain’t alone. It’s okay for this moment, but it’s not okay going forward. We have got to fix it because if we fix it, we serve your clients better, you’re fully attentive to them, your life becomes better so you can do more of your craft. Everyone wins if you’re profitable, and admittedly, everyone loses, or at least is compromised if you’re not.

 [00:07:08] Linzy: Yes, yeah, and you know, when you were mentioning that piece of people saying, you know, it’s not Profit First, it’s people first. Something that I think of there is, I think that there’s an old labor slogan, right? Which is like people over profits and so I almost wonder if like, somehow that phrase has gotten plugged in, right? Like people are like, well, if I have to choose, people are profits. I’m choosing people, but you’re like, well, that wasn’t the conversation we were having. People can be very, black and white in their thinking around these things.

 [00:07:31] Mike: Yeah, and it’s not this dichotomy. It’s not either or; they’re complimentary. It should be people and profits, or profits, helps me support my people. I’m very proud that my business has been profitable for 15 consecutive years, every single quarter, and a profit distribution comes out every single quarter, and I’m privileged, I can even share with my team members here.

 [00:07:51] Linzy: Yes.

 [00:07:52] Mike: And I’m proud that it supports an environment we want. There’s not this panic. You see when you’re not profitable. There’s this desperation to get through just tomorrow because we have bills and responsibilities, and that desperation comes into the office. We’re a small shop here in this office, in particular there’s about eight of us. And if I come in stressed, my colleagues will feel it. If they come in stressed, I feel it. So, profit alleviates that, brings about a runway, it brings around, a lack of stress, whatever the alternative is to that and it brings about happier clients, you know?

 [00:08:24] Linzy: Yeah, sustainability has been one of the words I found myself starting to use more like I’ve been working with therapists around finances for six years now, and more and more I find the term sustainable just hits a chord for me. That’s what I want; that’s what most of my clients want. Like most of my clients, they aren’t looking for grandiose lifestyles. They’re not looking for yachts. They’re not even looking for necessarily, you know, impressing the neighbors, but they do know that they need to be okay, right? Like, we all need to be okay, and we all need to be actually enjoying life and so that’s a phrase that really sticks out for me. But profit itself, like, can we dig into your definition of profit or how you talk about profit? ‘Cause I think, too, profit can be this very loaded word, right? Again, this very like, ugh, it’s like an evil word. How do you define profit?

 [00:09:07] Mike: It’s a reward for societal contribution. So I’ll give some context and some stats ’cause they’re pretty shocking. If you look back to kindergarten, when you went, Linzy and I went… Not that we went to the same class necessarily, maybe we did, but there was what, 25 kids or something in our classes, and this data shows that about 17% of those kids, of 17% of the population, will ever start a business. Now you multiply, say 25 by 17 quick math, where three, maybe four kids, very few will ever start a business. So let’s say it’s four. Of that 17%, only 20% do it sustainably, meaning that they’re beyond, you know, your exact word, beyond check to check survival,for five years or longer. And that they’re contributing by offering employment, part-time contractors, hiring vendors. That’s all employment. Well, 20% times 17% is 3%. So if you look at kindergarten, out of 25 kids, 3%. That’s one. One kid pulled it off. Which Linzy, in your case, it’s you. In my class, it’s me. It’s very few. Our job is to be a provider of jobs for the other 24 kids in the class because my friends, your friends, they’re looking for good jobs with good companies to do good things, have a good impact in life, and have a good life themselves, so I have a little kind of quippy saying that. The job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job, it’s to create the job. That’s our job. So if you’re a therapist and you love doing therapy, by all means sustain that, but we do have to make a choice. Are we building a business or building a vocation, or a job? If you’re building a job for yourself, continue the path. If you want to build something of perhaps even greater impact, meaning you can serve even more people, then we have to employ people but then your job has transitioned to building jobs for them. And the reward when you build jobs for people, AKA grow, our economy, is profit. It’s the thank you pass for what you’re doing for our society. So yeah, some of these CEOs make way too much money or these business owners. I understand. I get it. But also look at all the jobs I’ve cascaded out of the work she or he has done. It’s pretty extraordinary. So maybe some people have deference to how much they make, but I would argue they, and you, and we, deserve something for contribution, and that’s what profit is.

 [00:11:24] Linzy: Yeah, and that’s a great definition and that’s a great point about the rarity of entrepreneurship and the rarity of successful entrepreneurship, too. I think, too, for some folks who are achievers, they’re used to getting stuff done. Like, I think about my group practice owners that I work with. They sometimes might take for granted the fact that they’ve been able to build this… Like anybody could build this! Of course, anybody could just hire 20 other therapists, and fill them up, and create a great reputation and have a really strong, you know, quality of clinical care that’s being given to everybody…, like of course anybody can do that. Like they don’t really recognize the rarity and the specialness of what they’ve built, and the person next to them wouldn’t actually be able to build that, but I do think with therapists, especially we do tend to underplay our gifts or our accomplishments and forget that like, no, actually your neighbor down the street couldn’t have started this private practice. The neighbor across the way would not be able to actually help people cure their complex trauma. What you’re doing is special, and you should be rewarded for that.

 [00:12:19] Mike: Totally. I do a little mind game when I walk down the street and I observe other people, I ask myself what’s likely their vocation? And just the way that people carry themselves or dress or something, it’s like, oh, they’re probably doing this and that. It’s rare that I say, oh, that they’re clearly an entrepreneur. And then when I do a more formal survey and ask people, oh, what do you do? Just at a cocktail party that I’ve never been to before meeting new people? It’s the rarity. Someone’s like, I own a business. It’s typically a vocation of some sort and so it really is rare what we do. I think we also undermine our talents. So the fact that you can help someone navigate such a difficult, perhaps, experience and help ’em see to the other side, which is extraordinary. That’s a gift. But because we can do it, it’s like, well, everyone can do it because I can do it, and if I can do it, the world can do it. And that’s not true. That is your God-given talent. That’s extraordinary.

 [00:13:10] Linzy: Yeah. And what I try to remind our students of as well, and everybody listening is that, first of all, you had a natural tendency towards this kind of gift ’cause generally like folks who are really empathetic and able to do that was like a natural gift you got. Then you got a bunch of education, right? And depending on what that education was, you might be a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt for that education. Then often, in the United States… I’m in Canada, so our process here is a little different, but in the United States, often folks end up working for very little money or for free. To get their licensure, and then you start practicing and then at that point you think that you should be giving things away for free and there shouldn’t be any more money. You know, like, and then we move into a self-sacrificing place. It’s like, no, you have just invested so much into yourself. You have so much to offer.  You know, there’s

 [00:13:50] Mike: a saying,when you have a family, you always want to have a doctor, a lawyer in your family, and a therapist. One of my colleagues here is studying to be a therapist. Her name is Jenna. She’s been working on it for about two years now and she goes, as I’m pursuing this, she goes, you wouldn’t believe how many people in my family, like, oh, I have got to tell you something, talk, you know? Right, and she gets this. So as a therapist, you are really in a privileged position, like you’re something that every family wants and if it’s not my family, I’m going to seek it out. So I also understand the cost of that. Because that means even though it’s a business, it is a 24 hour job. You never know when that call is coming from a patient or not.

 [00:14:28] Linzy: Yes, And I think too, something that I’ve reflected on over the years is also because often people were being therapists before they were a therapist, then it’s weird to think that you should get paid well for being a therapist, and maybe even have profit ’cause you’re like, but I’ve been doing this since I was eight. Now, like, I’m supposed to want you to pay me $200 an hour for it. Like I’ve always given this away for free. So there’s a lot of specific barriers, I think, that in the helping professions, you know, that we have to overcome to get to that point of realizing I need profit in my business.

 [00:14:55] Mike:Yes, and I’ll give you a little tip. You know, when it comes to paying people are only as vested in the outcome as they are invested in the service. So if you provide services for free, I’ll see it as valueless. Maybe I appreciate what we’re doing, but if I don’t show up or I miss an appointment, ah, what do I care? It doesn’t cost anything anyway, but if I put $200 into a session. That’s real money. Now I’m acutely listening to what feedback you give me. The conversation matters deeply to me, and the output matters. It’s ironic. The more your customer, client, or patient pays, the more they’ll participate. So we actually have a duty, a responsibility to charge a premium. Fair. I’m not saying gouge by any stretch, but charge a premium to ensure the engagement of the patient in the first place.

 [00:15:43] Linzy: Right, they have to buy in, literally.

 [00:15:44] Mike: Literally.

[00:15:45] Linzy: You need skin in the game. And for folks listening, you know who I know their minds might be going to like, but what about people who don’t have a lot of money? It can be proportional, right, to what somebody’s earning. Like somebody doesn’t need to pay you $500 an hour to be invested in therapy, but there is a literal investment that happens when folks pay you a meaningful amount of money for your services. It’s not trivial at that point.

 [00:16:06] Mike: No, yeah, it can’t be trivial. It cannot be trivial. My mother-in-law is a therapist in Hawaii and she works with some individuals that are in a, we’ll say, impoverished position, and what she does is say, listen, I’m not going to charge you a fee, but you must contribute back societally. So they volunteer time at a local food shelter. That’s the contribution and it’s measured and tracked, and it says, okay, you’ve made that effort. It’s helping society, secondly, they still made an investment, and they link it to her because they have to do that work in order to get the therapy, and it’s been a huge win-win.

 [00:16:37] Linzy: I have never heard of that.

 [00:16:39] Mike: Oh, really?

 [00:16:40] Linzy: For such a creative way of compensation. Yeah, I mean I’ve heard all sorts of creative ways ’cause therapists are endlessly creative. I’ve heard of all sorts of ways that folks come up with different sliding scale points and like you…

 [00:16:50] Mike: You can do that, too. All that.

 [00:16:51] Linzy: You pay me per hour, what you get paid per hour, whatever you make in thousands a year, that’s your hourly fee. I’ve heard all sorts of things. 

 [00:16:56] Mike: Oh yeah. Interesting.

 [00:16:57] Linzy: But yeah, that’s interesting to actually ask somebody to exchange their time and like, contribute to the community. It’s like you are investing and contributing to them, and then they’re turning around and contributing to the community. That’s an interesting model. So I am curious, you know, having done this work now… You first published Profit First in 2014, so it’s been a minute at this point, 11 years. What have you noticed has changed in the small business landscape over the time that you’ve been doing this work? 

[00:17:22] Mike: Well, you know, inflation is one, so the numbers always go up, but it seems to all go up unevenly. It kind of evens out the next plateau, and it’ll be there for a period of time. So Profit First seems to be even more imperative to get done right because all the costs of doing it wrong are just bigger. So that’s one. The second thing is with automation, you know, the rise of AI and so forth, there’s a lot of tools to help see you along. But what’s interesting, we have about 1 million, maybe a little bit over, it’s like 1.1 million businesses globally have deployed Profit First. The ones who deviate from the core system struggle the most. So even though there’s these AI tools, these amazing spreadsheets you can create or download, they’re not intercepting your natural behavior. So this is not a therapy term. I made it up. I call it behavioral intercept, so I don’t even know if that’s a clinical term, I don’t think so.

 [00:18:13] Linzy: It’s good.

 [00:18:13] Mike: Alright, so here’s what a behavioral intercept is. I look at a pattern I have and I insert something in that pattern to either disrupt it or channel to an outcome I want. So the example is for exercise. I want to exercise regularly. This is about. 10, 15 years ago now, I said, I have got to commit to this. I tried to use willpower. No shocker, it didn’t work. I started putting my gym shoes on top of the toilet seat. So when I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t use the bathroom without grabbing my sneakers. That’s what I call behavioral intercept. Well, for our finances, the vast majority of therapists I’ve met managed their numbers at their bank, and the accountant or bookkeeper is saying, don’t do that. You know, you’re not. You have got to balance your books. Your bank is not the place to go. And I’m telling you, if that’s you are walking to the bathroom in the morning, that’s what you have to do, but we have to intercept it there. So we set up the accounts at the bank. So it’s ironic. As things have changed and there’s more of this technology, people are abandoning the sneakers on the toilet seat and saying, I’ll leave ’em in the closet ’cause that’s where I should store them. But if you don’t go in the closet naturally and deliberately, you’re not going to have access to that tool. So, that’s the iron. The basics still work. Set this up at your bank. Have multiple accounts as money flows in, carve it up. Pre-allocate to as intended use before you spend it, and you’ll have clarity. Don’t rely on something that you don’t likely use. It may be more sophisticated and interesting and really razzle dazzle, but if you’re not seeing it every day, by default, you’re just not going to see it.

 [00:19:36] Linzy: Yeah, yeah, and something that I always describe to students when they’re contemplating, should I play with Profit First? Do I do another budgeting method? Profit First is so tangible. You know, the system that you have developed is so tangible. There’s a physicality to it. Like often when I’m talking about managing money in general, but also about Profit First, I do this by moving your body motion, like you have to do it. ‘Cause sometimes like therapists too, because of it not necessarily being what we love, most therapists don’t also love math. The Venn diagram overlap is small. It exists. I’m in there. I’ve met other people who are in there, but mostly this is not where our happy place is. So that physicality of it. Sometimes I find that therapists have a hard time understanding Profit First like they’re like, but I don’t really get it and I’m like, just do it. Like you have to do it. You have to set up your numbers, figure out what makes sense for you, do your distribution, actually feel the money moving. See like, okay, my income account now has zero. My OPEX has 500. That’s a real number. That’s real, right? Like you’re setting up actual boundaries. That’s one of the clinical terms that comes to mind for me is boundaries, like good boundaries, and you can steal from yourself. Like you could just move the sneakers off the toilet and be like, meh, get out of my way, and ignore them, but you’re making a choice to do that at that point.

 [00:20:45] Mike: Correct, there’s consequences.

 [00:20:45] Linzy: Yeah. Yeah. You’re actually having to physically override it, and it’s the same. If I want to steal from my staff account to pay for something in opex, I can do that. Nobody’s stopping me. It’s mine, but I have to clock the fact that I’m doing that, right? I have to be honest with myself that I am out of my plan right now, and maybe I’m out of integrity, or maybe I’m doing it on purpose, but there’s no deluding myself.

 [00:21:07] Mike: The most addictive drug in the world is playing out here, too. It’s called dopamine, serotonin. And so it’s a little squirt that comes from our brain when we do these motions. So dopamine’s the anticipatory drug every time you log into your bank account. Once you do this transfer to profit. Perhaps for the first time you see a cash profit accumulating, next time you log in your bank account, dopamine, it’s like you’re about to do the transfer. It’s like, yes! And so it starts building that muscle. So Profit First is by design, I made it to be a repeated process, most businesses do it once a week. You can do it semi-monthly too, but once a week does actually seem to be the optimal rhythm and admittedly, most people ogle every day. So we log in and say, how does that profit account look? And then maybe once a week we do the transfers. All of that’s amazing because it’s all dopamine, serotonin, all the neural pathways start building, and so repeat this process. The other thing that’s beautiful is it doesn’t matter if you’re doing with dollars or tens of dollars or hundreds or thousands as long as you get started. So when you do that first transfer, and you see perhaps it’s a small amount, a dollar in your profit account, it’s like, oh, I never had profit allocated before. That’s pretty cool. The next day it’s three or $4, and it goes to 15, and that building momentum is amazing. I also designed the system that when you withdraw the profit to reward yourself, that never, ever will deplete the entirety of the account. There’s always something there. So the day you have your first dollar profit, there’ll always be a portion left because you’re always halving what’s remaining in that account, and you’re always contributing to it, too. But you’re always halving it, which means you’ll always have a profit distribution every quarter, hopefully always going up, sometimes going down, but never depleted.

 [00:22:41] Linzy: Yeah, It’s a brilliant design. And I do remember in the book you talking about your mom having those cash envelopes, you know, as being the basis for it. I am curious, how did you actually come up with this system? Like was it something organically that you started to build in your own business? How did you develop this? Because this is something that you actually like built and lived.

 [00:23:00] Mike: I’m ground zero for Profit First. I started it 16, 17 years ago, and part of it was that my mom used the envelope system. Part of it was, I remember, we used to go to our church locally and this concept of tithing and contributing, you know, pay first, I remember,the hiding money away, the old cookies in the jar syndrome, if you keep ’em on the counter, it gets consumed. If you hide it, you don’t and so what happened is, at my own desperation, honestly, I was trying to run it the way you’re supposed to run it through an accounting system and all these different things and it wasn’t working. And I said, I’m just going to go back to what I know. And my gosh, all of a sudden, profit was accumulating. My business didn’t change. It almost felt magical, like how could I make more profit? Well, I was just running the business more appropriately. I started understanding where the money was flowing and not spending money superfluously, And that’s how I developed a system. It was through trials and tribulations for about three years before I started documenting the story for the Wall Street Journal. I wrote the article. It took off. And I said, I have got to write a book about this and that’s how the book came about.

 [00:23:58] Linzy: Clarity is immensely powerful. You know, like just seeing it and I think that in so many ways too, it can feel like magic ’cause you’re making better decisions without having to use all of the cognitive willpower that it would’ve taken before to look at a bank account full of money and be like, okay, there’s 20,000 there. But I think 12 is for taxes, and I think like rent is coming out next week, so I need to think about that. Like there’s so much fuzziness. And I find too, especially for the types of folks who listen to this podcast and like the therapists and health practitioners that I work with who are so used to being so competent, that having fuzziness around money can really undermine your confidence. And, you know, you just end up feeling totally clueless and overwhelmed. And so you could still have $20,000 but feel like you have nothing ’cause you don’t know if it’s yours.

 [00:24:41] Mike: That’s right.

 [00:24:42] Linzy: Whereas just allocating it so you’re like, this much is taxes, this much is operating expenses. I’m covered for all of next month. I don’t have to worry about that. This much is my paycheck. It is so powerful, even though it’s the exact same amount of money.

 [00:24:54] Mike: Totally there, there’s a thing called the primacy effect, where we put great significance in the first thought and lessen the subsequent thoughts. I’m just finishing up a personal finance book, and so here I talk about an experiment. A thousand dollars is deposited into your account. You need to buy a new television. It’s $500. Can you afford it? Well, the answer is. I got a thousand dollars, it’s 500 and I say, the next thing is rent is due at seven 50. Can you afford it? And they’re like, I can’t but I say, scenario two, a thousand dollars comes in. Seven 50 is allocated toward your rent automatically. Two 50 is available for spending on whatever you want. A TV for 500 is what you need. Can you buy it? And it’s like, obviously no. So to your point, it removes that cognitive load. But without that, whatever our next urgent feeling is, we think all the money’s available for that purpose and blow it, and then rent comes due, and we’re in real trouble.

 [00:25:43] Linzy: Yeah, I mean, behavioral economics is a big part of all of this, right? Like once you start to understand those kinds of behaviors, these things that can feel so personal, and also for so many of us can be kind of shameful. Like, oh my god, I’m so bad at money. I’m a mess. Once we start to understand those kinds of mechanisms, we can work with them, right? Like then we have somewhere to go. I’m very excited to hear you’re writing a personal finance book, by the way and Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. For folks who want to get further into Profit First want to learn more about you and the, basically, can I call it the Prophet First Universe? Is that fair at this point?

 [00:26:17] Mike: Yeah

 [00:26:18] Mike: Sure. I love that. They can go to my website. So my name’s Mike Michalowicz, mikemichalowicz.com, but the shortcut is Mike Motorbike. So anyone listening, you know, in their car or whatever right now, go to mike motorbike.com. It’s easy to remember and you’ll find all my resources there plus the books.

 [00:26:31] Linzy: That’s a good shortcut. Easier than Michalowicz.

 [00:26:33] Mike: Yeah, by far.

 [00:26:34] Linzy: Still alliterative, so we like Mike Motorbike.

 [00:26:38] Linzy: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Mike, for joining me today.

 [00:26:40] Mike: It is a pleasure.

 [00:26:53] Linzy: It was such a treat to get to chat with Mike today on the podcast, and something that stuck out to me that I don’t remember him talking about in the book, Profit First, is about that emotional load that comes when money’s not working for us in our small businesses. And in the therapy and health practitioner space how we’re going to end up inevitably bringing that into a relationship with our clients. You know, that stress, maybe a little bit of desperation, is going to be there in the relationship ’cause that’s what we’re carrying with us. and so the cost of not having money, not having a business that is working for you isn’t just a financial cost, right? And we know this, it’s an emotional cost. There’s so much that is painful about our businesses not working. So fun to talk with Mike today. So interesting to see my own language, and thinking about Profit First, which I’ve been having this conversation with students for the last six years to be able to have, conversation using some of that language with the person whose brain it actually came from. I feel like Mike also has a great illustration here of what can happen when you’ve just figured something out for yourself, and you turn around and teach it. I know therapists and health practitioners, as he said, we tend to undervalue what we know, but this is a system that he developed organically through his work. And in the work that we do, we’ve often solved certain problems for ourselves or we do have specific expertise on things, and we’re often scared to teach and speak up but when we do, like Mike Michalowicz, we can have a big impact, and change the way that people think about a certain thing. And Mike has certainly had a huge impact in how small business owners think about their business finances and I know it’s been a tremendous positive impact in my own business and in the businesses of so many folks that I teach. 

We do teach Profit First in Money Skills for Therapists, in my signature course. Not till later. We don’t start with budgeting. We get into budgeting later, but Profit First is something that I suggest most therapists at least try, just try Profit First. ‘Cause those pieces that Mike and I were talking about today about the tangibility and the clarity that you get, it’s really hard to get from any other budgeting method truly. And I find most people benefit for at least spending some time using Profit First and feeling what it feels like to physically move their money around and have that clarity.So I so appreciate Mike joining me today for this conversation. 

If you are enjoying the podcast, it’s so nice when you can leave a review for us. We have this beautiful magic link now in the show notes that will take you to a page that will direct you to wherever you can leave a review. So if you’re not an Apple Podcast listener, like I am not, it will direct you to other places that you can leave a review for us, like Spotify. If you have three minutes to do that, I really appreciate it. It’s a great way for other folks to hear about the podcast, and if you would be interested in getting my support in implementing Profit First and getting clarity in your business around your finances, as well as working on your overall relationship with money and understanding money, I do all of that with you in Money Skills for Therapist. So if you want to learn more about Money Skills for therapists, you can click on the link in the show notes. You just need to check out my masterclass, which is like my intake process. That’s where you’ll learn about the course, what I teach, my approach, see if it’s a fit for you, and that will get you an invite to Money Skills for Therapists. Thank you so much for joining me today.