Review: Profit First: A Simple System To Transform Any Business From A Cash-Eating Monster To A Money-Making Machine

Profit First: A Simple System To Transform Any Business From A Cash-Eating Monster To A Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am going to guess that fewer than 10% of the readers of this book actually followed through with all of his advice.

This book was rare. Many business books, if they have any faults, will tend to restate the obvious, be full of fluff, or just have one simple idea that gets repeated throughout. This book does the opposite. It not only offers an idea, which, as far as I can tell, is a very good one. It offers the entire framework for applying it to your business, step by step.

The issue is that it goes too far in the other direction, which is why I doubt many readers actually followed through, despite the author practically begging us to "Stop now!" and get his points done before proceeding (he repeats this multiple times, and does so for each point). The problem is that his points literally involve opening multiple bank accounts, restructuring your company's entire cash flow and bookkeeping system, and going through other exercises like finding all your expenses from the last year and reducing them by 10%.

These are all great points for a consulting service, rather than a book. For example, I couldn't pause everything to open multiple checking accounts (I was reading this over a weekend, while finishing up a job for a client due on Monday, and helping out my sick wife with our child). I did pause, but only for a day or two, before deciding to just write up his process on excel (which he says is a cop-out and advises against). I'm going to go ahead and guess that most busy entrepreneurs are like me.

Like I mentioned, as far as I can tell the information is great (although he seems to meander a bit later on in the book and also repeats a couple of his examples), but I suspect he knows most businesses won't apply all his changes while reading the book, and uses it as a way for promoting his consulting services. Still, it is interesting he offers all of the information to do it on our own in the book, no matter how complicated.

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