Author
Mike Michalowicz
The serial founder who lost his money after two exits and built the account system that makes small businesses profitable from day one.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two companies before he was thirty-five, then lost most of the proceeds 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.