Episode 150: Leveraging Talent and Transparency to Build Unstoppable Teams [featuring Michael Michalowicz]

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Transcript

PATRICK CASALE: Hey, everyone. You are listening to another episode of the All Things Private Practice podcast. I'm really excited today to be joined by Mike Michalowicz, who has written nine books, a lot of which you've known, including Profit First, Get Different, the Fix This Next series, The Pumpkin Plan. But most importantly, we are talking about his new book, All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams.

Mike, you're a busy guy. You are kind of on tour right now for speaking and your book sales. Thank you for being here and making the time.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: It's a joy to be with you. My next little trip is to Boston. So, we're both, you know, from the Northeast, originally. And so, I'm looking forward to heading up there and having some wicked good food, maybe some lobster.

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, yep. You know, I like Boston, but Portland, Maine has my heart in the Northeast. I love that area so much.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Love it. Our youngest son was off to college. This was about four or five years ago. My wife and I said, "We can choose to live anywhere in the world. Why don't we start going city by city?" The first city we visited was Portland. And it was remarkable.

We didn't tour any more cities. Our grand tour of all the major cities and where we should live started and ended in Portland because my wife said, "What are we doing? We both had aging parents. We need to be home and be present for them. This is where our roots are, our friends are. And I've been here my whole life." So, we're like, "Okay, let's go back home." But Portland was amazing.

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, it reminds me of, like, I live in Asheville, and it's, you know, I don't know if you've been here, but [CROSSTALK 00:02:38]-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: I have.

PATRICK CASALE: …good food, good people-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: The vibe, too, man.

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, cool vibe. And Portland reminds me of this on the ocean, in the Atlantic in the Northeast. So, yeah.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: I was down in Asheville. I used to do the makeover segments on MSNBC. They had like a business show called It's Your Business. And I would go out and there was a playground manufacturer in Asheville. They were as a husband and wife team. They built these wooden play sets, but pretty big ones, like community-sized ones, not necessarily for your backyard, albeit, some wealthy people did buy that.

And I can't remember what the name was, but one of the insights from a marketing specialist it was like, you know, Fun Time Play Sets. They said, "Change it to Asheville Play Sets, and look what happens." And that simple change was it had the keywords that people look for. I want a play set and I'm in Asheville. Their business traffic exploded as a result of [CROSSTALK 00:03:35]-

PATRICK CASALE: Sometimes it's that simple thing that you're too close to the thing or you partly see it, you know? And that outside perspective is like, "Oh, of course, I should have done that."

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: I think we get too cutesy thinking, "Oh, that's fun." But cutesy gets confusing.

PATRICK CASALE: It gets confusing. Cutesy is not really typically sound marketing strategy, either in terms of creation. So, I like your tagline on your website. I was looking at it before you came on and eradicating entrepreneurial poverty. And I know that a lot of your stuff is geared towards focusing on entrepreneurs, mental health entrepreneurs.

And so, tell us about this new book because I'm in a lot of different leadership roles in my life. And yeah, it certainly sounds like something that is very valuable.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: So, and it ties into that tagline, eradicating entrepreneurial poverty, I'll define it real quickly. Entrepreneurs, when they hear it, generally, say, "I know exactly what that is." But the outsider who's not an entrepreneur doesn't really see it.

So, entrepreneurial poverty is this vision we have for ourselves. It's inevitably three things when I interview entrepreneurs. I started my business because I want financial freedom, that's one. Second, is I want personal freedom to do what I want when I want. Third, impact of, you know, to serve my community, to be of service, to give back in some capacity. So, those are three things.

So, then the reality, though, is most entrepreneurs who start a business for financial freedom are in more debt than they ever been in their lives or under financial stress. That personal freedom of doing what you want when you want is out the window. You are enslaved to your business and to your clients, it's constant work. And the impact, no time to even think about, it's survival mode because you just have to keep this monster fed. So, it's that gap of our vision and the realities we call entrepreneurial poverty.

One of the components, and why I wrote All In, is many business owners envision one day the business operating itself, running without them. But what happens? They actually kind of lynchpin themselves in the business. They become this, I call it the superhero syndrome. They constantly have to swoop in and fix the problem of the day. It's constantly putting out fires. That is typically defined by poor leadership.

Now, I want to qualify that also. I'm not saying that entrepreneurs generally are poor leaders. We do things that are necessary in the beginning. When we start a business, we may be doing this solo, we may be scant on cash, so we have to put in the sweat. So, what gets the business going today is just raw effort input, doing what it takes. Getting the business to the next level requires the extraction of yourself and empowering other people.

So, All In is, how do you get your team and legal also qualify this. Team doesn't mean full-time employees necessarily. It could be part-time, it could be a contractor, it's your vendors. So, you could be in a company of one person with a vendor network of technology and different things. That is part of your team. It's this accumulation of all these assets that move the business forward.

How do we organize that team to the highest level to, I call it to be unstoppable? Ultimately, with the vision of extracting ourselves.

My final thing just to put a nice bow tie on this, I was doing a lecture just a couple days ago. And it was all entrepreneurs in a room. I said, "I believe this emphatically, the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job is to be a creator of jobs." Very small portion of the global community will ever start a business and sustain a business. It's about 3% start a company and then actually make it work for the long haul. If we are doing the work, we are stealing jobs from the other 97% of the population looking to get or have a good job for a good company doing good things. So, our job is to create jobs. It's to get the hell out of the way. And it's one of the hardest things to do.

PATRICK CASALE: That is such an important, powerful piece right there, what you said. Like, our job is to create the job, not to be in it all the time. And I see so many people, like you said, superhero syndrome or whatever you want to call it, who feel like they have to do every single role, who have to be overly involved, they are kind of micromanaging their teams because they don't maybe trust their teams. Maybe they don't trust themselves to make the right decisions at times. I see this so often. You know, a big portion of my audience is mental health entrepreneurs, and because so many of us, I would almost guesstimate, 95% in totality have zero business training because graduate school doesn't talk about-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: No.

PATRICK CASALE: …running a business. It's almost taboo. So, you get to this place where, you're right, I want autonomy, I want freedom, I want flexibility, I want to be able to give back to my community in a way that I couldn't before. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself in this situation where you're like, I've created this mechanism that really feels like it's controlling me and my day-to-day, and I have no ability to step away from it and, like, let it run seamlessly and smoothly.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: They say, as a business owner, it's a parent/child relationship. You know, you're the parent of this business, it's the child. You have to serve it, and care for it, and protect it, and cuddle it until one day it becomes an adult on its own and it comes back and serves you.

I call BS on that. Like, that's not how it works. It's not parent/child, it's Siamese twins. Actually, that's no longer politically correct. It's conjoined twins. We share critical organs. We become so morphed in with the business that if the business is ill, not physically functioning, we will feel the consequences. Our personal finances will collapse, we'll become ill. So, we have to surgically extract ourselves.

The number one way to do this is by giving your employees ownership and *I'm not saying equity because I'm not giving equity away no, no. I'm not saying legal ownership. There's a famous concept called psychological ownership.

So, in the book, I talked about this guy in the 1980s, a guy named John Pierce. He ran this fascinating study with businesses around this concept called psychological ownership. And what the question was, was how do you get individuals to be so committed to something, to be all in on something? And he said, when have we the feeling that we own something, we become most engaged with it.

So, a classic example I share is, I know you've rented cars before. You know, I rent from Hertz, you know, recently. And by the way, I think that title Hertz is perfect because it does hurt [INDISCERNIBLE 00:09:59] buy. I rent from them. What's interesting, though, is, after you get out of that DMZ checkout by showing your license for the umpteenth time, I drive out, and I will admittedly drive the car more aggressively, abuse it, practically, doing donuts in the parking lot. And I will skid into red lights, and I'll floor it when it turns green. And this it's like a Prius, you know? What can this baby do? Why do I do that?

Well, a rental car agency, I don't have any ownership in the business legally or psychologically, but they also force compliance. They say you got to return with a full tank of gas or we're going to penalize the crap out of you. You know, we're going to charge you $10 a gallon. You know, you could [INDISCERNIBLE 00:10:39] scratches or dents, we're going to go around the car 15 times and take pictures. And if we see a single ding, you're going down. It better be clean.

I had a saying, when we force people to comply, they will seek to defy. It's human nature. When I put constraints around you, it's human nature to elbow out. And most leaders in their business say, "Here's what you need to do, colleagues, here's what I expect from you. If you fail to do it, you may lose a job, or there's going to be consequence." So, what do people do? They start to elbow their way out. It diminishes their desire. They can even abuse the role.

Now, compare that to a car I own. That car, I just recently did a long drive from New Jersey down to Chattanooga, Tennessee to visit with my daughter and carry some furniture down. By the end of this monstrous 12-hour trip, I literally and embarrassingly patted the dashboard of my car and said, "Good girl." Which it's embarrassing, but I did say that. And I don't do donuts, I don't skid, you know? I want to take care of this vehicle.

So, the question is, you know, why do I care for one car and not the other? Well, I have ownership in my car. But here's the interesting thing, I don't legally own it. The bank does. I'm making installments. I have psychological ownership.

So, here's the grand lesson, there's three things that John Pierce, that researcher, identified that gives people ownership. And we can do it through all of our colleagues, our vendors, any of them. First is control, meaning the ability to use the vehicle when I want, to have authority over it. So, instead of being forced to comply, I can park a car where I want to park it. I can use it when I want to use it. It's my car.

The second thing is personalization. You'll notice when you get a rental car, chances are you aren't programming all the radio stations. You're probably not slapping a bumper sticker on but my car, it's got the window sticker, all the stations are programmed the way I want. The more I can insert myself into my self-identity, personalization, the more I feel ownership.

And the last thing is intimate knowledge. The more I know about something, the more I'm actually associated with it. So, when I get a rental car, I don't go through the car manual and flip through each page and say, "What does this button do?"

When I got my truck, my guy, I spent two hours in my driveway in the middle of winter going through each page in the manual. "Oh, my God, this little button makes the sides of the mirrors open and close." It triggers psychological ownership.

So, with our colleagues, give them control and authority. And it's the scariest and risky thing for us to do, but when they do, they won't feel like they need to defy, they'll feel ownership. Allow them to personalize things.

We have a web accounting system on the web here, which is QuickBooks, but Kelsey oversees it. We call it Kelsey's accounting. And just by associating a little personalization name to it, it's more authority for her.

PATRICK CASALE: Exactly.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: I do want to give just one little caveat. You got to be very careful of fiefdoms or fiefdoms. A fiefdom is where someone has such control and authority they start blocking out others now you're at risk. If they leave or they get upset, you're going to pay dearly.

So, you want to do what's called collective ownership, which is where you have multiple people owning something, Like, if you have a family pet, and there's many people in your family, it's our dog or cat, it's our pet. And that's the last thing I want to share. When you start hearing your colleagues, your vendor, saying, this is our company, as opposed to your company. They're indicating through words collective ownership.

PATRICK CASALE: And they're indicating investment, right? Like-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: And investment.

PATRICK CASALE: …[CROSSTALK 00:14:09] investment.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Yeah.

PATRICK CASALE: And that's so big. So, I own a group practice here in Western North Carolina. We have, I don't know, 24 employees as we have three more coming on in the next week.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Amazing.

PATRICK CASALE: And we have 100 applications a month. And our turnover rate is almost non-existent. Like, most of them have been there since day one, January of 2021. So, everyone's going on three and a half years. There's so many ways to create collective ownership without, like you said, giving equity of the company, but in turn, saying what's the schedule that works best for your system? Let's not create this traditional, like, you have to be here at this time until this time.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Oh, totally.

PATRICK CASALE: Let's figure out all these ancillary benefits that people want. Like, I just did a grocery run before I got on the call with you for like, snacks, [INDISCERNIBLE 00:14:54] and things that people really want in the office spaces. These little things go a long way, including people in decision-making processes. Not everything, like not everything is completely democratic. But the ability for people to have their opinions heard, validated, seen, and acknowledged, and then transparency as a leader, being more of a mentor, holding people accountable, guiding, coaching, mentoring.

And it, like, can feel unorthodox for people because they're like, "No, this is my business. This is my reputation."

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Right, right, right.

PATRICK CASALE: But that stuff doesn't work. And counterintuitively, like, you know, I acknowledge the longer I retain staff, the less onboarding and training costs we have, the less expensive staff become. The more we treat them like humans and give them a voice, and give them some say and control, the more likely it is that they're going to stay pretty damn loyal to the business.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: For sure. And wanting to deliver their best. It's human nature. It's the essence of reciprocity. You know, the New York, New Jersey area? This happened recently, I was driving, and I was late to get to the airport, so I'm in a rush, a little bit panicked, and it was bumper-to-bumper traffic.

First guy, the guy sees me trying to get in, he actually waves me over. So, what do I do? I wave back. I'm like, "Thank you." He's like, "No problem." It's reciprocity. The guy behind him, I kind of cut off, embarrassingly, he flipped me the bird. So, what do I do? You know, I gave him the bird. I'm like, "[INDISCERNIBLE 00:17:17], man." It's reciprocity.

So, when we F you our colleagues, and say, "You know, screw your family. You're missing the kid's soccer game, we got to get this job done, and it's your job." There's a little bit of an F you there.

PATRICK CASALE: Absolutely.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: When we give that consideration to them, the consideration comes back. There are abusers. Like, I'm not saying every human being is perfect. There's people that will take advantage of that.

PATRICK CASALE: For sure.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: But interestingly, with organizations, particularly, your size, when you have 10 or 20 employees, the corporation, the business will inevitably go where the strongest emotion is. So, if most of those team are driven like we're getting the job done, that's where people go. And the people that are kind of on the fence like, "I don't know." They're going to go more in because everyone else is. And the people who are not that type of person, they're leveraging the company to their advantage will feel rejected, and they'll start isolating. And the rest of team will say, "This person's not working out, not a bad person, a bad fit."

Conversely, if you allow, the word cancer is probably not the appropriate term, but that kind of that dead wood, dead mentality, that becomes the prominent one. Your best people will start to degradate very quickly. So, we have to be conscious of that.

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, it's super contagious. And I think the energy that you sustain is something that you need to exemplify as a leader, too, of how you want to align your business values with how you want your co-workers, your colleagues, your employees to show up. And it's a fascinating dynamic. I hear so often from people like, "I can't get people to apply. People don't stay. We are trying everything in our power."

And I'm like, "I think you got to look at your culture. Like, I think you have to re-examine your job offerings. I think you have to re-examine your expectations and how your employees get to show up."

Because I, for one, I'm not someone that can be confined and can be told this is what you have to do for the rest of your life, or the rest of your week, or the rest of your month. And you're right, when you keep making this motion, that is exactly how I would react to a lot of that. So, I think it's just about trying to lead in a way that really makes sense for your organization and for the people that you're working with.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: As I was writing the book, I was studying what invokes levels of commitment in this psychological ownership is, one, there was another one around safety. So, just a quick story, OSHA, which is around physical safety, you know, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Association, I'm probably bastardizing that, came about in the 1910s, 1920s. It was when World War II was happening. And the males of the United States were out fighting. The females of age were hitting the manufacturing plants with a company called The Radium Dial Company. They make watches. And you've probably seen these, Patrick, watches with the little fluorescent dots on them that glow in the dark.

PATRICK CASALE: Yep.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: So, they were making for their soldiers so when they were in the middle of the night, they could see what time it was. They used a material called radium. Radium is radioactive. What they told these line workers to do was to take a pointed paintbrush, dip it in radioactive material, radium, put a droplet on the watch at the 12 o'clock point, for example, then lick the paintbrush to give it a point again, and repeat the process at three, and do it over and over and over again.

They were consuming radioactive material. The workforce within months of doing this started to glow. And that's not like hyperbole. They were glowing. They became known as the ghost girls. So, if you've ever Googled ghost girls, you'll see this.

And they're going to doctor's appointments and saying, "Your skin glows, your teeth were glowing." Then the tumor started to come, deadly tumors. It was horrific. You'll see the deformities that came about and how it killed these people.

It was painful and excruciating. The company denied the whole way. They knew they had something that was dangerous, but said, "Just keep doing it. Not going to affect you."

Well, OSHA came around that. I'm happy to say, societally, at least in the US, we're mostly past that. But there's other forms of safety. And there was one that was really interesting that we started deploying unknowingly about 10 years ago. But it's transformative. And it's financial security. This is based on Maslow's hierarchy of need. We need to be physically safe, but we also need to feel secure fiscally. If not, I've been there, there's constant panic of how you can get past the day.

PATRICK CASALE: Yep.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: So, I said, okay, does that mean I have to pay my employees an extraordinary salary? And the answer was, "No." What I had to do was go to open books. And this is what was shocking to me. Open books is where I started sharing the company's details. Here's our revenue, here's our collective expenses. I don't share individual salaries. It's all embedded [INDISCERNIBLE 00:22:03]. And here's our health.

What was interesting about this is it gave clarity to my colleagues to understand how the business is doing. So, they didn't have, you know, if you do your first million dollars in revenue some employees may think, "We're doing a million dollars. The owner's taking home a million dollars."

No, the owner's going broke, you know? But they don't see it. But now that they have clarity and on the good years they see how we're storing up cash to protect us for the future. And ironically or coincidentally, last year, we had a real punch that got unexpectedly, and it caused a big drop in our revenue. And so, our team saw how we're navigating on a cash basis. It brought confidence to people.

Clarity and openness gives an understanding. It's just like if you're ever diagnosed with a disease, it's the time waiting to see, "do I have a diagnosis or not?" where the most worry is. When you know you have a disease, at least you know what you have. And now there's a pathway forward or action that maybe you can take. It's this purgatory stage that's actually the most terrifying.

And many business men, leaders, are keeping their employees in Purgatory. "Yeah, everything's fine. We're good." And then, all of a sudden there's layoffs and people are, "What the hell is going on?" So, open books gives people a sense of safety, which was very interesting.

PATRICK CASALE: I could not agree more. I think fiscal financial transparency, aside from, like you said, people's salaries and individual stuff that's happening behind the scenes, like, is really important.

And we go over that too because I want our staff to know where the money's going, where the money's coming from. Are we in a position to, you know, increase salaries? Are we in the position to increase benefits? Are we in the position where we may need to increase caseload sizes based on the ever-evolving landscape financially? And it gives people insight into, like, the employer/employee relationship, which can have a massive power dynamic and differential, then becomes a little bit more fair, equitable playing ground, because it's like, "Oh, I see that we're all on the same page, moving towards the same collective mission." It allows for more buy-in.

And that also means, like, ancillary benefits, health insurance, 401K is preparing for the future, you mentioned security, can go a very, very long way, opposed to like, "Oh, I have to increase this salary tenfold." When that may not be realistic. But in reality, offering health benefits, 401Ks, other benefits can create that sense of safety because your needs are being met both in the present day and in the future tense.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Yeah, we did something interesting, so you're spot on. It's not always increasing salaries. Sometimes you can do much smaller monetary investments that have that long-term benefit.

So, we called a financial advisor, and he's like, "Oh, you can set up a VUL or a whole life insurance policy for your colleagues. And this is how it works. The company would pay for it in installments. If the person happens to pass away, their family is protected to whatever the policy limit is, hundreds of thousands or millions. But it also becomes a retirement account."

So, we're putting away for, it was one particular colleague of mine. I think it's to cost the company $300 a month. So, listen, that's almost 4000 a year. It's real money, but we didn't give them a raise of 10,000 or 15,000 whatever. And over the last five years of doing this, they have, it's a small nest egg. They have a nest egg, I think, about of 30 or $40,000 queued up for them, so that it expires after 25 years. So, they got 20 more years to go. But then, they're going to have, we think, a nest egg of about 150 to $200,000 just that the company contributed to.

So, what's so interesting is, this is for Kelsey. And Kelsey is like, "Gosh, my family's protected and served. And you're building a little bit of a retirement for me in a form that I wasn't already addressing."

And yes, we have a 401K and other vehicles available. It was a very cost-effective way of caring for an employee in the immediate concerns, what if I'm not a money maker for my family and in the long term? So, there's many ways to do it.

PATRICK CASALE: Yeah. And I think if you get creative and take that approach, it just allows for an organizational culture that feels significantly more sustainable, and collectively productive in multiple areas. So, I really love the way you're thinking about this, and what you're sharing with everyone because it's definitely the same exact way that I think about leadership and organization. And it's nice to see people are shifting into that model. So, I definitely think changes are coming in that regard.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: But yeah, and I want to share one last thing about change because I think it's the biggest one is in my research, in All In I talk about this, and I see it coming is the traditional model is the pyramid structure you have, you know, leader, president, and you kind of go down. And what's interesting is, I think, the, I know the pyramid is crumbling because it is a command control environment. Directions come down, feedback comes back. But there's a telephone game in between and it's always bastardized.

Also, a pyramid structure mandates that we match people's talents to the title. I need to hire a salesperson. Salesperson has to do these 15 different things. And I need this talent, this person, to be able to do all 15 things.

The new model we see coming about is more like a web-like structure. Instead of matching talent to titles, we're matching talent to tasks. So, take those 15 tasks within sales and say, "What person do I have or what resource I have available that's good at one of these tasks?" And does that person get another task?

So, as an example in a company, I ultimately sold it, but I looked at my receptionist, and her name was Petra, and she was excellent at a few things. Customer relationships was her thing, answering the phones, meeting people face to face. We were brick-and-mortar back in the day, and she was fantastic. She was no good at the light data entry, invoicing, that was 50% of the receptionist's role. So, I said, "I hate to say this, but we got to let Petra go."

And then, the epiphany hit like, "No, no, where else do we have a need for customer relationships?" Well, our sales person, Rob, was a great closer, a horrible farmer, maintaining relationships. We put Petra in there because that matched her talent. And sure enough, we had these established relationships. And Petra just lit people up. They loved and trusted her. And we started to get more and more business from these farmed relationships.

Interestingly, Rob was very good at the number crunching. That's why he was such a good closer. He knew exactly when to go for the strike, if you will. So, he's like, "I would love to know more about our invoicing, so if I understand the billing practices and stuff that's going on intimately, I bet I can close even more deals." So, he started doing our light invoicing and data entry. We started matching people's talents to tasks. Both of them elevated up.

The risk, the challenges is stripping titles. It's almost impossible do that to say, "Rob, you're no longer the sales guy. You're simply like number cruncher guy." That can be defeating and undermine someone because they have associated themselves with a title.

So, what we do with new hires in our organization here, everyone, except for one person is titleless, including myself. I'm author, speaker guy thingy, is kind of the closest thing I have a total title. Kelsey is our president. You need to have a president, but everyone else here has roles they serve. So, you know, when you ask someone, "What do you do here?" They won't say, "Well, I am the marketing director." We don't have that.

Andrew, who serves in that capacity will say, "Oh, I direct our marketing, and manage our email communications, and put out fires when there's a problem with someone navigating through our website."

We stripped away titles. What's also interesting about this is when someone is assigned a title, I used to have a CFO. I had a small business. I had a CFO because I wanted to look big. That guy, within a few months, he was a great bookkeeper. He did some accounting too, but he was great at that came back to me said, "Mike, I was looking at the ads and the paper and, you know, a CFO gets paid 1.5 million on average."

I'm like, "Yeah, at Coca-Cola." I said, "But for us, you know, 50,000 is a good salary." He's like, "No, I'm a $1.5 million guy." So, there's also this risk of titles is people will use that. It's natural, I do too, to compare myself to everyone else in that category and it can undermine you, too. So, if you can, don't go with titles. It's hard to strip them away. But don't add titles in as you add people. Match talent to task, not talent to title.

PATRICK CASALE: I love that, yeah. Because it takes away from that, like, black and white perspective of-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: That's right.

PATRICK CASALE: …I'm hiring for this role, and you better meet all of these requirements. And naturally, most people are not going to be able to successfully or confidently do every single thing in a job description really, really well. But if they do a couple things really well, and you're able to match their talents, you can really create a lot of growth internally. And also, support them in their journey, professionally, as well.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Yeah, that's absolutely true for me. I want to think I'm good at everything, I'm not. I'm good at a few things. I'm good at a few things. And I think that's true for almost all of humanity.

And the funny thing is it brings about the most joy when we can do what we are good at is usually we're good at it because we like to do it, and therefore, it starts this positive, upward spiral.

PATRICK CASALE:100%. Mike this was a fun conversation, and it's really exciting for me to have you on because you're someone who I've read your books. I-

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: [CROSSTALK 00:31:38].

PATRICK CASALE: It's just really cool to be sitting here with you. So, thank you for your wisdom and what you're putting out into the world. And please share with the audience where they can find your new book and your eight other books that you do have.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Hey, and it's been cool being with you, Patrick, and meeting you. So, thank you for this.

The Mecca, the starting point is mikemotorbike.com. That brings you to mikemichalowicz.com. No one can spell Michalowicz, including myself, at times. So, Mike Motorbike. The irony is I've never driven a motorcycle in my life, but it rhymes, and the domain was available, has all my books, free chapter downloads, so you can start experiencing the book.

And it's not about, "Oh, read the introduction." It's like the actionable stuff. To me, I'm more concerned about people having impact than trying to hook people into buying a book. So, if you go to mikemotorbike.com you can get the free chapter downloads. I just write for the Wall Street Journal for years, so you can get those articles for free. And also, I have a podcast there about entrepreneurship.

PATRICK CASALE: Great. We will link that in the show notes for everyone, so that you have access to all of Mike's information. I know you're also a speaker, so I'm sure there's ways to look that information up on there, too.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Yep, on Mike Motorbike.

PATRICK CASALE: Perfect. Thank you so much, Mike. And thanks for making the time.

MICHAEL MICHALOWICZ: Patrick, thank you very much.

PATRICK CASALE: To everyone listening to the All Things Private Practice podcast, new episodes are out every single Saturday on all major platforms and YouTube. Like, download, subscribe, and share. Doubt yourself, do it anyway. We'll see you next week.