5 Lessons I Learned From NYT Bestselling Author Mike Michalowicz

I had the honor of having Mike Michalowicz as a guest for a Google+ Hangout. Mike and I talked about The Pumpkin Plan and his upcoming book, Profit First. I read The Pumpkin Plan a few months before the Google+ Hangout. Even if you have read The Pumpkin Plan like I did, you will learn a lot from the Hangout. Here are the 5 things that I learned from Mike Michalowicz:

1. Fear leads to action. On his 24th birthday, Mike lived in a retirement home where the people there were “either 80 or dead.” Mike said that it was fear that drove him to start his multimillion dollar businesses. That was a way of looking at fear that I never thought of.
2. Just start. Mike said that people keep on thinking and thinking. However, it is more important to just start. When starting, it is also important to start by spending as little money as possible just to see what works.
3. You need to be clever. Pizza stores are very competitive, and many of them end up being out of business. However, the pizza stores that go out of business still have their telephone numbers. When Mike teamed up with a pizza store, he looked for telephone numbers of other pizza stores that went out of business. Mike was able to find 3 telephone numbers of 3 pizza stores that went out of business. Then, Mike and the people at the pizza store went to work creating automated messages that directed those people to their own pizza store. That pizza store Mike was working with got three times as many customers.
4. Write a book about something you like. Mike knows a lot about growing pumpkins. He gave a summary about his knowledge during the Hangout, but in The Pumpkin Plan, he goes further in detail about how planting the colossal pumpkin (the orange fruit). He does relate growing the colossal pumpkin to growing a colossal business just as well, but Mike knows a lot about pumpkins. Since he knows a lot about pumpkins, writing The Pumpkin Plan was the perfect choice.
5. Give people teasers. Mike’s new book, Profit First comes out in July, but we won’t have to wait until July to see some of his book. In the Hangout, Mike said he would have a link to the first chapter of the book in one of his upcoming blog posts. Mike also gave a lot of teasers for The Pumpkin Plan which can be found all over his YouTube channel.

It was an honor to have Mike as a guest for the Google+ Hangout. Here’s the link to the hangout, and we will be doing another Hangout when his new book comes out.