In this Mike Michalowicz starts with asking you to imagine that you are in the market for a pumpkin. Once your eyes caught a sight of an enormous pumpkin at the pumpkin patch. Not the “for sale” kind, but the one surrounded by velvet ropes and photographers. Now imagine that pumpkin is your business; so large that the media takes notice, so successful that people travel miles to do business with you, and so inspiring that books are written about you. Mike takes the strategy of growing world-record pumpkins and applies the same to principles of business in a commanding style.
The book talks about being different. Being unique is itself implies being appealing and magnetic. You don’t need to do more to be the best. You need to do the things differently.
The Pumpkin Plan is propelled vividly by Mike Michalowicz in seven steps. STEP ONE: Identify your biggest natural strengths. STEP TWO: Sell, sell, and sell. STEP THREE: As your business grows, fire your small-time, rotten clients. STEP FOUR: Never, ever let distractions take hold. Weed them out fast. STEP FIVE: Remove the less promising clients and recognize your top clients. STEP SIX: Focus your entire attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them and find out what they want and provide the same if it aligns with your company’s goals. If possible, then replicate the same service or product for the rest of the top clients. STEP SEVEN: Watch the humongous growth of your company.
Find the right seed
Don’t waste your time planting seeds that may or may not work.Then focus your attention, money, time and other resources on that niche until all of your entrepreneurial dreams come true.
Michalowicz correctly identifies, one of the biggest problems in small businesses is that– owners trying to please everyone. Small business owners sometimes take on projects that are outside their area of expertise. Michalowicz explains that you need to really define your area of expertise and don’t diverge from it ever. He describes this right seed as the sweet spot – the place where your best clients and the best part of your business meet. When you figure out the one thing that you do really well, it’s like the right pumpkin seed.
The author explicitly explains the essence of “Sweet spot”. It is the intersection of your top clients, your unique offering, and your ability to systematize it.
Entrepreneurs are one who identify the problems, discover the opportunities and then build processes to allow other people to get things done. They don’t do the work. If you want to grow a prize-winning pumpkin, you have to plant a prize-winning pumpkin seed. Therefore, focus on thinking prize winning business seeds.
Approach your customer
The Pumpkin Plan is not an “if you build it, they will come” kind of plan. This is a “build it, then build a paved road to your client’s door, then give them a luxury bus ride (while serving them breakfast using only the finest china) to your door” kind of plan.
A Pumpkin Planner’s success is not in having better answers but in asking better questions and defining the problem.
The key to humongous growth is to indulge in competition reasonably well. Ask yourself what is the one area of your business that you can dominate? Your brain goes to work as soon as a it receives a question in the form of stimuli. Good, bad or indifferent. Be effective regarding your questions because it will determine the quality of your answer. You cannot scale your business if you do most of the work. In fact, a Pumpkin Planned business require that you refrain from doing unnecessary tasks and focus on bull’s eye. Take a minute to ponder at the possibility of this question in your business? Systems do not simplify the results rather systems simplify the process of getting there.
Cutting Clients
More is not better, people. Better is better. You need to shift your mindset away from the quantity game. You need to stop killing yourself for scraps.
You need to stop wasting so much time on the clients who are high maintenance, who never pay on time, the clients who always change the scope of the project, and the clients whose calls you dread. Every small business has clients who drain energy and use valuable resources with little or no return.
There are three types of clients mentioned below based upon their importance: 1. Good clients 2. Non-existent clients 3. Bad clients.
As George Carlin once said, “Anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster is a maniac.”
So just focus on forging relationships with the people who are going just your speed. Therefore the goal is to focus on your best clients.
Michalowicz also mentions some techniques to fire clients: • Eliminate services • Prioritize service calls (when good clients call they should get serviced first) • Raise prices • Refuse to two-time – explain that you have an agreement with a major client that prohibits you from servicing them. These may sound harsh, but can be extremely beneficial.
The Tourniquet Technique
The beauty of the Pumpkin Plan is that once you kill off the diseased and unfit clients and shift your attention to your most promising clients, you have the opportunity to cut all expenses that don’t serve your top clients – everything from phone lines to parking spaces. It makes cutting expenses so much easier. You can see what has to go and because you’re trying to grow a massive, prize-winning pumpkin, you have the emotional leverage to get real with your P&L and stop the bleeding.
According to the author this is called the Tourniquet Technique.
Cash is the lifeblood of any business. Michalowicz talks a lot about how we are always waiting to land the next client. “This next one will change things.” But the problem is that if we land them, we run out and hire new staff, get a bigger office, a new show room, a new car. We spend what we earn be it plain and simple. But when we run out of cash, the trouble begins.
The Pumpkin Plan requires you to cut the expenses that are associated with the clients that you fired. Michalowicz gives few ideas to stop the bleeding. For instance, going through your profit and loss statement line by line is the most relevant. Taking a good hard look at every expense is the key. In addition, cutting staff, giving up the office, missing that national conference etc. Furthermore creating an org chart for each position is also valuable. This helps eliminate any confusion and helps establish roles and responsibilities
Once you’ve passed the early stages of entrepreneurship, success isn’t a quantity game anymore. It’s the quality of service/ product to your best clients.
Would you be willing to fire a majority of your clients?
Felix Dennis in his book “How to Get Rich” discusses various aspects one needs to be aware of when looking to become rich. These aspects include: • Ideas • Luck • Ownership • Negotiation • Delegation • Focus • Self-Belief
1.The significance of executing your Ideas
Dennis discusses the importance of executing your ideas umpteen times in this book.
Ideas don’t make you rich. Correct execution of ideas does.
Essentially, one needs an action oriented mindset to be able to become rich. If brainstorming and coming up with ideas is all you do, then you will not be successful with your business. Therefore to be successful one should materialize his/her ideas into actions.
2. The importance of Luck in Becoming Rich
Dennis discusses his successes and his failures in this book. In this aspect Dennis discusses how he ended up in the hospital due to his drug use. What was lucky about the situation is that he insisted on going to his cottage and since he was not in New York City, he was able to be diagnosed quickly and accurately in a smaller hospital. This allowed him to turn his life around and continue to make more money. This event was certainly lucky as Dennis could have died from this event. When building, growing, and owning a business, there are many events and outcomes which can be influenced by luck. If you want to become rich, you will have to have luck on your side.
3. Ownership and Richness
If your goal is to become rich, Dennis argues that ownership of a business is critical.
Dennis said “To become rich, you must be an owner, and you must try to own it all.”
This is unlikely that working as an analyst or as a manager for other people, will lead you to extreme wealth. When you own a business, you tap into a different wealth building equation. With a business, you are increasing your wealth by both receiving the cash flows from the business, but also own a valuable asset. If you are working for someone else, all you get is your salary or hourly wage.
4. Negotiation Skills to enhance Your Wealth
Talent is the key to sustained growth, and growth is the key to early wealth
If you want to scale your business and wealth, hiring others to help you will be critical. Since working with other talented individuals can help you grow your business, and allow you to accomplish your tasks over time.
5. Delegation of tasks
Delegation of tasks will free you up to think more strategically because it helps you to focus on what really matters for your business. Dennis advises businesses to delegate tasks to subordinates. Thus the businessman can devote more time towards strategic decisions.
Identify it, hire it, nurture it, reward it, protect it, and when the time comes, fire it.
6. The Importance of Focus in Building Business
Focus is one of the most important skills to cultivate if you want to experience growth in your life. While it seems like multitasking is a great way to get ahead, being able to focus and be consistent with your actions over time will be much more beneficial. Focusing on one thing that is necessary for success today will allow you to move forward over time and grow your business.
7. Believe yourself to achieve Success
How’s your mindset? Do you believe you can do whatever you put your mind to? Believing yourself means trying to get out of your comfort zone, building a business, and growing as a person. When looking to become rich and wealthy over time, self-belief is incredibly important. But there is a lot of risk in starting your own business. However, done right, you can grow your riches through both the cash flow of the business, and the asset value of the business.
Belief in yourself and faith in yourself can move mountains. But not if you insist on trying to scale the mountain by an impossible route which has already failed.
So through affirmations and mindset you can trick your brain into believing whatever you want.
Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.
Good to Great – By Jim Collins Jim Collins and his team studied 28 companies over 5 years and identified the key determinants of success and failure. The book intends to solve queries on-“Why some companies fail while others prosper over time?” “What are things needed to be infused in the company to fuel business prospects?”
7 Habits of Highly Effective People – By Stephen R. Covey The book outlines a habit-based approach to be followed to attain your goals.
Think and Grow Rich – By Napoleon Hill Napoleon Hill interviewed “more than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known” to discover the universal building blocks required to amass a fortune. He lays out a six-step guide to apply those principles to your own life.
The 4- Hour Workweek – By Timothy Ferriss The author narrates some “lifestyle design” hacks, make more money, and live the life you want.
The Essays of Warren Buffet- By Warren Buffett The book provides some basic business principles to align your interests with the investors.
Tribes- By Seth Godin This book describes how to find opportunities to cultivate the sense of community around your business which is considered as one of the secrets of success.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany – By Steve Blank This book describes the framework to help entrepreneurs achieve product fit and market fit with concrete examples to organize sales and marketing strategies. Moreover, the book contains practical exercises.
The Innovator’s Dilemma- By Clayton M. Christensen The book describes how successful businessmen and entrepreneurs think about innovation and managing their companies.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World- By Cal Newport The book describes four “rules” for cultivating a deep work ethic.
How to Win Friends and Influence People – By Dale Carnegie The book states how to make people like you and then win them over to your way of thinking without causing resentment.
The Lean Startup – By Eric Ries The book states a “just do it” approach and shakes up traditional approaches so as to prevent any traps.
The Non- Technical Founder – By Josh MacDonald In this book the author interviews over 20 founders of multi-million-dollar software companies who give advice to non-techies on building a product so as to create customer base through social media.
Rise of the Millennial Entrepreneur – By Joey Wilkes The author shares strategies on creating your own bootstrapped business. In addition he teaches how to survive the ups and downs that come along your way with growing a business.
Zero to One – By Peter Thiel In this book, the author shows how to ask the right questions to create products and services that are truly new.
The $100 Startup – By Chris Gillebeau This is a very motivating book for those who feel low due to a lack of funds. The author talks about 50 of the most amazing success stories of entrepreneurs who are making more than $50,000 and who started with only a few bucks in their bank accounts.
The 4-Hour Workweek describes the specific actions Ferriss took about “lifestyle design”, about creating a life that balances work and plays. Thus maximizing the positives of both.
This book “4-Hour Workweek” is the complete embodiment of the 80/20 principle into an individual’s personal and professional life. The 80/20 principle is the idea that says 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your time, and the other 20% of your productivity eats up 80% of your time.
Timothy Ferriss argues that by eliminating 20% of productivity (Unproductive work Hours), you can live in a much more efficient way.
D is for Definition Most of this section is devoted to divorcing yourself from the idea of working to death for a gold watch and a pat on the back. Instead, you should abandon a few concepts behind such as retirement as a holy grail and that absolute income is the most important thing in your life. Relative income – i.e., the amount you earn per hour of work – is the most important thing according to this book).
Here’s one key exercise from this section that really shows what he’s talking about. Spend about five to ten minutes and define your dream. If it wasn’t for the things you had to do, what would you be doing with your life right now? Now, spend another five to ten minutes and define your nightmare in as much detail as possible for you. What is the absolute worst thing that could happen if you followed that dream? If you take the dream and compare it to your nightmare, is that nightmare really bad enough to abandon your dream?
From there, the book goes into a very detailed process of breaking down that dream into tangibles and seeing how close you really are to that dream. Set up the remainder of the book, which identifies things you can do to reach that dream.
E is for Elimination It focuses on some very straightforward techniques for eliminating most of the regular mundane activities that fill our professional lives. Here are seven examples:⦁ Make your to-do list for tomorrow before you finish today. When you add an item to this list, ask yourself if you would view a day as productive if that’s the only thing on the list that you got done. Then, when you start in the morning, just attack that list with full force and focus knowing that all of the stuff is worthwhile.
⦁ Stop all multitasking immediately. This means when you’re trying to write, close your email program, instant messenger and your web browser. Just focus on writing, nothing else. This will allow you to churn out the task a lot faster.
⦁ Force yourself to end your day at 4 PM or end your week on Thursday. Even if you have to come in on Friday, do nothing (or, even better, focus on something for your self-development). The goal here is to learn to compress your productive time.
⦁ Go on a one week media fast. Basically, avoid television and nonfiction reading of any kind. By the end of it, you’ll discover that the media and information overload was giving you a mild attention deficit.
⦁ Check email only twice a day. Combining this with the “no multitasking” principle enables email to only eat up a sliver of my time when it used to seemingly bog down everything.
⦁ Never, ever have a meeting without a clear agenda. If someone suggests a meeting, request the specific agenda of the meeting. If there isn’t one, ask why you’re meeting at all. Often, meetings will become more productive or, if they were really time-wasters, to begin with, they’ll vanish into thin air.
⦁ Don’t be afraid to hang up a “do not disturb” sign. This was something that seemed very natural to me, but for many people, it’s not. If you’re being interrupted regularly by people popping in, you’re effectively multitasking which is a time-waster. So if you have a task that requires your focus, literally hang up a “do not disturb” sign. People will get the message
. A is for Automation This section describes how to become a little or no-value-added entrepreneur – in other words, a middleman. The idea is that if you set up being a middleman appropriately, you can create a stream of passive income that permits you to make money with very little effort.
It relies heavily on salesmanship (the ability to convince people you have a product that they want) and luck (stumbling into a market). If you have both, you can do quite well, but such things are never a guarantee.
L is for Liberation In essence, it takes into account the dreams, the enhanced productivity, and the passive income and creates that titular four-hour workweek.
The first step is to change your job so that you can work remotely. You can do this by getting efficient (as described in the second step), then demonstrating your efficiency during sick or vacation leave, then requesting some time away from the office as part of your routine, then slowly and gradually shifting to an all-remote life. This way, you can tackle the work from anywhere on your own terms. Of course, this may also lead you to quit your job if you are able to build up new opportunities.
What do you do in your free time? The the entire point of this book that time is the valuable asset we have in our lives, not money. Time allows you to follow your dreams. The prime purpose of the book was about devoting more time to your personal life.
