Author
Mike Michalowicz
The founder who sold two companies, lost much of the money, and built an account system that takes profit from every deposit.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two companies, then lost most of the proceeds through bad investments and had to start again. The experience convinced him that the standard accounting formula, which makes profit the leftover, was the reason small businesses so rarely saw any.
Profit First, published in 2014 and revised in 2017, reverses the formula and prescribes the four-account split that has since been adopted by accountants and bookkeepers as a service. He has written a series of small-business books around it, including Clockwork, on designing a business that runs without its owner, and Fix This Next, on deciding what to fix first.
The signature
Michalowicz writes as a founder who made the mistakes, with jokes, confessions and bank balances, and builds every method on the assumption that owners will not change their habits and so the structure has to do the work.