Mike’s Book Series Project
Mike is in the midst of a three-book series. The first two books — GRIND & GROW — are complete. He will start writing book three in 2024.
Author
GRIND, his first book, is written to bring someone into the spirit, ethos and mentality of a successful entrepreneur. It is not a how-to manual, with boxes to check and templates to follow. It is more of a spiritual wondering where Mike shares what he has learned in relation to the attitude and mentality it takes to be successful as an entrepreneur. Most people get in their own way. Because you are the most important ingredient in the success of your new enterprise, your own self-awareness is key. How do you need to ‘be’ to give your new business the best chance of success?
GRIND forces you to examine your own strengths and weaknesses and makes you analyze how they are going to impact your start-up. Nobody has a full tool belt when it comes to being an entrepreneur. Some tools need to be sharpened, others are in great shape and a few need to be replaced entirely. You will assess your weaknesses and areas you need support but also your strengths and how they should be leveraged.
GROW picks up where GRIND leaves off. GRIND starts the moment you commit to your new business and leaves off when you have your first day of positive cash flow. GROW picks up amid the bootstrapping entrepreneurial phase when life is uncertain and you are still hand to mouth, scratching and clawing for survival. You are out of the gate, and it appears you have a viable business. Now what?
You must transition from entrepreneur to leader. You must take the business from a fledgling start up to a stable enterprise. It is your job to create an environment for people to thrive. You must create a team who can run the business better than you can. This means you need to chuck everything that made you successful as an entrepreneur out the window and recreate yourself as a leader to take your business from Chaos to Calm. GROW will plant seeds within you for you to nurture and care for so you can sprout and grow into the leader your organization needs you to be.
Ideally at the end of the GROW phase you have built a powerful leadership team allowing you to get trucked by a bus, buried six feet under sucking on tulip roots and the business will continue to thrive. This is my definition of a stable and sustainable enterprise.
The obsession in entrepreneurship today with start, grow, scale and liquidate is limited in scope. Let’s give you as the entrepreneur every available outcome. You can build it, grow it, scale it and hold it. You can build it, grow it, scale it and bring in a strategic partner. You can build it, grow it, scale it and pass it on to your kids. You can build it, grow it, bring in private equity and do an IPO. Once you have built the company into a sustainable, stable enterprise the options are limitless. The current obsession with start it, grow it, scale it and liquify is just one of many options. The goal is for your stable, sustainable business to be around in 100 years still having a positive impact on the world.
Books
New!
Grow
Become the leader that your people need you to be
The transition from bootstrapping entrepreneur to effective leader is arduous, and very few make the transition. Essentially the entrepreneur needs to throw everything out the window that made them successful and learn the qualities it takes to be a strong leader. GROW was written to assist in that transformation and shows readers how to build their organization into one with an environment that expects people to thrive, with a leader who meets the organization where it needs to be met and where trust is a baseline for all relationships. The GROW phase ends with the leader being so effective at leading and creating a powerful team to run the organization that they have become irrelevant to the business thriving into the future.
Grind
Take Your Business from Concept to Cash Flow
Mike doesn’t have an MBA and you won’t hear him talking about being disruptive, leveraging assets or changing paradigms. He is, however, the co-founder of co-CEO of BIGGBY® COFFEE, a fast-growing $300 million-dollar coffee franchise with 350+ locations.
At a time when there’s a lot of confident-sounding start-up advice from academics or ultra-wealthy tycoons, Mike’s remarkable life journey from minimum-wage barista to business leader has given him a very different outlook.
Moonshot Guidebook
A Launch Pad to Higher Purpose
What has been the most powerful tool in Mike’s toolbox for creating the amazing life he has today? Visioning!! From a young boy Mike’s parents would challenge him to do small visioning exercises. Visioning is about creating your perfect future reality and then allowing yourself to live into that space. In essence you must know who you want for it to become reality. Knowing who you want to be is a foundational component to building a life you love. The Moonshot Guidebook – initially a visioning tool for BIGGBY® COFFEE Home Office employees – is a workbook that will help put visioning to work for you. Think of it as a how to manual on visioning.