Profit First
by Mike Michalowicz
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Jul 2025 on My First Million.
The general take
Shaan Puri credits Profit First with being a wake-up call about his own business—he'd been running it for years without actually extracting profits or understanding where the money was going. He describes the book as a meaningful gift that delivered an important message about the gap between having a business and actually profiting from it.
About
Author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability. Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.
Who said what
Shaan Puri👍 Recommends
…discussing profit first methodology for business accounting and cash management
“And Andrew Wilkins, I came on this podcast and had this book. He was talking about profit first. I really like the philosophy of it, which is basically with normal business, you have your revenue. Then you have all your expenses. And then it's like, surprise, here's how much profits left over after all that.”
My First Million — How I Bought a $3.4M Business For $200Kat 48:00
Listener reviews
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