The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Path to Profits: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Having It All … and Still Having a life! by Michelle Jacobik

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

The Path to Profits: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Having It All … and Still Having a life! by Michelle Jacobik Michellejacobik.com Amazon.com Looking for a strategic edge in your business finances? "THE PATH TO PROFITS" offers a groundbreaking approach, cutting through the complexity to highlight what truly matters in your financial data. Where "Profit First" revolutionized entrepreneurial mindset, "THE PATH TO PROFITS" takes it a step further by uniquely demystifying the financial signals that drive sustainable growth. Join a legion of savvy entrepreneurs who have uncovered the secrets to long-term profitability and success beyond the usual strategies. This book isn't just about profit; it's about understanding the heart of your business’s financials with unparalleled clarity for creating the freedom you truly desire! . Most entrepreneurs need to stop long enough to answer this question: Are you profitable in support of your life ... or at the expense of it? As a visionary, creative, or purpose-driven entrepreneur, you know how easy it can be to let your business rule your life. You'll do whatever it takes to succeed in the moment, and everything else—family, relationships, health, self-care, even sleep—takes a back burner. Meanwhile, you may not even be making enough money to cover your bills, let alone build the dream life you envisioned. But what if every bold move and drop of sweat could produce real, tangible profit from day one? What if the entrepreneurial game wasn't just about making money, but about keeping it, nurturing it, and putting it to work for you? True success and financial freedom aren’t just about the freedom to spend, but the freedom to create, build, and thrive. Getting there means marrying financial wisdom with your biggest, boldest desires. You’ll also need to follow a well-lit path toward financial empowerment with clear guideposts that support you, your business, and your bottom line—your personal Path to Profits. Business Profitability Strategist Michelle Jacobik is a 30-year veteran entrepreneur, coach, and finance professional. In this groundbreaking book, she reveals her signature Vision + Flow + Grow method for creating a profitable business—the same method that has helped thousands of entrepreneurs achieve their big visions in record time and change their lives and legacies forever. Profit is a habit, not a one-and-done. Hustle, burnout, and exhaustion don't have to be your norm. There's a better way to build your empire—and it will make your business more profitable, not less. Your Path to Profits awaits. Are you ready to step up? About the author As seen on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and PARENTS, PEOPLE'S & ENTREPRENEUR MAGAZINE With over three decades of experience, Michelle Jacobik helps highly motivated Entrepreneurs understand their unique potential so they can achieve their big goals in less time and with more ease. She is an expert at helping them master their Vision, Mindset, Money and Business Growth. In addition to her education in insurance and finance, she transformed her own life as a 23 year old young woman, drowning in a sea of debt, to a Businesswoman who with her partner, bought the company they worked for, (at the age of 29) growing that client base from $600k to over $12million in sales a year... Today she’s transfers her experience and insights as a seasoned Entrepreneur and Mentor, sharing her powerful strategies and has built a successful coaching practice while traveling the country doing what she loves. Clients refer to Michelle as “an inspiring fierce leader”, “a compassionate professional with passion, drive, and seemingly infinite positivity”, and “an incredibly powerful coach with the skill to deliver what is most needed with precision...all fueled by a desire to see others WIN at this game of Entrepreneurship and in creating lives and businesses that fully serve them and their Vision ”.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, folks. Hey, folks. Hey, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings. That makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys for over 16 years and 22 and a half episodes. I don't know are you alive go to goodreads.com for it says chris voss linkedin.com for it says chris voss chris voss

one the tiktokity and chris voss one out there as always we have the most amazing people on the show we have a wonderful young lady on the show with us today. Michelle Jacobic joins us on the show. Her latest book came out September 26, 2022 called The Path to Profits, An Entrepreneur's Guide to Having It All and Still Having a Life. Sounds like a book that I need because I've been self-employed since 18. I'm trying to still figure out what is this having a life about? So we'll get that from her as well.

She is a leading voice in financial empowerment and best-selling author of the aforementioned book and The Path to Profits and Prosperity After Divorce. Michelle is passionate about helping people take control of their finances and achieve profitability in life and business. I hear profitability is good in business. Unless you're in Silicon Valley, then it doesn't matter, I guess. Her inspiring personal story of overcoming debt and growing a multimillion-dollar company is proof that transformation is possible.

Welcome to the show. Michelle, how are you? I am fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us a.com.

Where do you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs? Yeah, so michellejacobic.com. You can follow me on Instagram, TikTok, all the places. michellejacobic.com. Kept it super simple for everybody. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your newest book? Yeah, so in my newest book, The Path to Profits and Entrepreneur's Guide to Having It All and Still Having a life, it is broken into three different sections, right? The first one is, if we aren't clear about what it is we want to create, we show up in business and in life, wondering 20 years later, 10 years later, three years later, how the hell did I get here? A lot of stress, a lot of disconnect from the thing that we thought we were going into business to do. And we find ourselves not necessarily on the bright road that we were setting out for, but in a darker place. And that's just the gist of the road of entrepreneurship, because it isn't just all roses, as you said in the beginning, right?

There's a lot of challenges. And so the book is broken down into vision, which is getting super, super clear about your core values, your personal core values. Why are you doing what you're doing? What is the method of impact that you're wanting to make in the world? And really having that be a measurement tool, like why are you doing it? What do you want to have happen? What's the freedom that you're after? Because most entrepreneurs are after some form of freedom, whether that's financial freedom, time freedom, travel freedom, whatever that may look like, freedom from the job, right, working for somebody else. But if we're not clear about the vision piece, and why we're doing what we're doing, there's not even a measuring stick to see

whether we're off chart. The middle of the book is there to help people call it the flow chapter, cash flow, make no mistake, as you said, we need to make money in business, If you don't have a profit, you're going to be on that failed business statistic, the 66% that don't make it the five years. And then the final pillar of the book is about grow. And for me, grow is how do you get more visibility, more people to understand what you're doing, that you're doing it because again, if people don't know about you, they're going to be doing business with somebody that maybe is out there talking in a different visibility light. And then bringing those three pillars together to maximize your profitability in business. Definitely. So I love that. I love that. The why of things. A lot of people,

you know, they just get caught up in the business. They're like, hey, I want to start a company and maybe be my own entrepreneur. But i don't think about why that's important to them and you know there's i mean a lot of people when i got into being an entrepreneur i didn't know i didn't know really what i didn't sit down and go i'm going to be an entrepreneur i was just like i need some bucks my own ass is i gotta i gotta leave the house at 18 or i gotta go start a business and so that's what i did I started a business after getting fired from McDonald's. And, but, you know, there really wasn't like a why beyond that. Like after a while you started asking yourself, like, why do I do this?

This is, this is a real pain in the ass. Yeah. You know, I'm right with you, Chris, because here's what happened for me. The same exact scenario, right? We talk about dating ourselves. Like today kids can stay on health insurance until they're 26 years old. For me, it was 18 too. So I hear you.

And that was the thing. You've got to get a job. You need to get health insurance because you got to get the hell off ours. And I just remember thinking, okay, I'm not going to be stressed the way that I saw my parents stressing. I felt, you know, my mom and grandmother, I watched them, you know, my own story was that they were stressed, right? My story was my mom had a vacation club and put $5 a weekend.

My mom had a Christmas club and put so many dollars a weekend. My interpretation of her methodology around how she broke up money was very different. Mine was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to make six figures. I'm going to answer the ads for sales and all the things. And it's funny because again, I think from an early age, the path to entrepreneurship many times is lit very lightly when we're younger, but I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family. My parents both, we came from humble upbringings. They both worked for a municipality. My dad was a blue collar guy, worked for the parks and recs department.

My mom worked in the finance department for a municipality. And I just remember thinking, that seems too hard. That path to a pension and lifetime medical at the time seemed too hard for me. And when you have that spirit of being able to create money at a young age, my parents didn't know how to speak into that. So today as an entrepreneur, one of my favorite things is speaking into that and letting my children who are now grown adults and also entrepreneurs know that there's this spark that you may have and other

people might be blowing out that candle and blowing out the light. But it comes, I think the first thing is, what is that inspiration coming from? And in today's world, there are so many ways that you can create money. For me at 19, I left out of the house. And I thought I had a whole sense of adult confidence right along with a vision board that had all of the things that I wanted on it. And to your point, I wasn't thinking about my why he was I was thinking about what am I going to get? What what vacation am I going to take? What car am I going to drive? All the things, right? I was Tony Robbins on speed dial.

And I just thought, I'm going to hit it all. And I think that many times that's what happens, right? We come in and we start going after. We're in the chase of the things that we believe entrepreneurship will bring us. And what we really find when we start to peel back the layers when we get to the success and you're not happy or you're not feeling fulfilled that happens for so many people right they get there and where is there you get there and it could be you're financially strong but it's like why am i not feeling happy and that's exactly what happened to me like first i fell on my face and ended up with mounds of credit card debt because I had no financial maturity. And then I cleaned it up and figured out those pieces, got out of the chains

of guilt and shame and the things that I walked through, all great lessons, and then showed up and built this great business that was literally sucking the life out of me. Loved what I did, but I literally gave it all and everything else in my life got crumbs. And so the book was birthed from a place of how can we have the business and the dreams and the things that we inspire to do, the impact that we want to make, but be intentional about what we're building. And I truly believe that getting clear about the life you want to create and then aligning the business to that is exactly how you get there. And creating a balance. I think that's what you're saying is making it so that

you don't feel like you're just burning one end of the stick and you're just, or both ends, I guess, and you're not balancing your life out. A lot of entrepreneurs, we tend to do that at the start. We're just like, we'll just burn hard at the first little while, build a business, and then we'll balance it out later. Hustle, hustle, hustle. That's right. And I think that, you know, it's, it's one of those things that when we're talking about my parents and I'm thinking about my dad and he would get in, you know, he'd throw us all in the car on a Sunday to take that Sunday drive, right? No map, no GPS, no nothing. And he would just navigate, where are we going today? Don't worry about it.

Get in the backseat. Sunday drive, get in the backseat. Yeah. And I think to myself today, how many entrepreneurs, if we go on vacation, are we going to show up in a new area, rent the car and not have our GPS? Hell no. We're not going to navigate that way. We're going to say what it is we want. And we're going to actually use the tools to get us there and i think what happens with many entrepreneurs is they think that the dream and their passion is enough that and that that sets the gps and it starts but the truth is we need both a financial roadmap and a runway right we need time to get there and we can't expect that you know what potentially would be three to five years is going to happen in on a three week road trip. And I think that that's really what happens.

A lot of people are just they're just driving and they're not stopping long enough to actually look at. Are they on the right road? Are they on the right road? I had an interesting entrepreneur journey when we really started hitting our our successful companies. You know, I had a few initial ones, and then the ones that really hit with my business partner. And I was getting into businesses because they were investment expedient.

We had a model, and we're like, hey, let's go do this. We have an opportunity. We're going to play that opportunity. A lot of entrepreneurs, I don't know them a lot. I don't know if there's data on this, but many entrepreneurs, they find something they love, they find something they want to improve, they find a widget and they go, hey, we want to make this widget better. And they do all that.

But the challenge is, for me, was I never got into anything I really loved. I loved being the CEO, I loved innovating. I loved being in business, but I didn't really love, you know, being, being in the business that I was in. And I started, you know, I grew up poor and I got successful and I was one of those people that I, I got successful and I'm like, I'm miserable as hell. Yes. I'm just, I hate this. I hate all of this. And, and, and then I was left with what, what is up with this? And so then I had to go on a journey and, you know, people would come into me and they'd just be like, oh, it's so amazing. You get to do what you love. And I'm like, I hate all of this. I hate it. I don't know what you're talking about. And just trying to come to work every day to do stuff I didn't really wasn't passionate

about was hard after a while, especially when I wasn't happy. So I went through that journey. I know what that feels like. Yeah. And it feels like a dark road of despair, yet you're supposed to be completely aligned with all of the abundance and blessings that are coming your way. But honestly, I truly believe that entrepreneurship is the spiritual journey. I think that some of us are taken on one path to find our growth. And sometimes that's,

you know, drugs and addiction, and people find their path through that. And then there's entrepreneurship, there's divorce, there's all kinds of places where you can be stretched to grow. And I think that, you know, mindset is as big in entrepreneurship as strategy. Like we always have to be growing, we always have to be doing the internal work. And I think that's where I love this piece of the first onset of the book is about really looking at what is important to you, right? So like, when I actually did that work, when I showed up like you, I actually had I hired a life coach after like 20 years of like, always having consultants always hitting all the metrics, being super successful. And I'm like, a life coach, why would I hire a life coach? But like you, I found myself not happy, not fulfilled.

And I loved my work. I actually had a different experience, but I didn't love what it was taking from me. And quite honestly, I owned an insurance agency, right, an independent insurance agency, and spent 26 years in insurance. And no one wakes up and says, I think I want to be an insurance agent. No one does that. Okay. I went into it because with my humble upbringings, the guy that I worked for in financial services, when he won a trip, he got free vacations, and he took me and another person. And so when I went into the field, it was because, oh, I can take free vacations. I'm good at sales. And I connect with people and I get out there and hustle. All the things that I have on my vision board, probably I had 10 vacations on there. I'm just

going to crush those goals. And I think that, you know, there's this element of understanding that entrepreneurship, it is mindset, right? We need a warrior mindset. We need to make sure that we're in it for the long haul and that we do the things to take care of not just our business, but our minds and our bodies and our health. The number one statistic, okay, the number one cause of death for agency principals by the age of 50 is massive heart attack. And I was an agency principal and at 45, that is not going to be my demise. And the day that I made the decision to tell my business partner that I wanted to take an exit plan, literally another competitor, my top competitor in town, literally my top competitor dropped out of a heart attack, 49 years old in his office at 10 in the morning. And yeah, I think

that, you know, too many people find themselves in that place. And I think that the first thing is sometimes you find yourself in a place, you are profitable, you have built something amazing, right? But we forget that sometimes we get to build it to sell, right? Too many people go into business and they build it for cash flow for to create a job for themselves a paycheck. And I love to challenge people and say, wait a minute, build it so that if it does get to the point where your core values change, or it doesn't feel aligned, or you built something that you just have no passion around, did you build it to sell? Because there's probably somebody out there that if you do it right, and you aren't the whole book podcast and talking about how much opportunity is out there even for entrepreneurs to go and buy an existing business. So we have to show up in our businesses and get rid of the financial avoidance.

Financial avoidance, when we're in that place, head in the sand, we're not looking at the money. We miss opportunities. There's misaligned spending. There's a lack of financial stability. And we just keep grinding. And we're not even looking at the thing that we would really love to be doing. Maybe it's just one piece of the business. So I love that you're bringing this up because I think that, you know, for me, the core values,

one of my core values is fun and adventure. If Michelle's not having fun, I know it. When I'm working, and it doesn't mean that I believe in complete balance, right? I think we do compromise, right? There's times and seasons in your business where you're going to work harder than other times. But if you can look at your core values and say, okay, my top 12 are this, when's the last freaking time I had any fun, right? And so, if you haven't, then you've got to realign. And I think that I had any fun, right? And so if you haven't, then you got to realign. And I think that those are the things, right?

So you define your vision first, you set your goals, and then you go where aligned opportunities will take you. But everything is based on that GPS being like, okay, I know where I'm going, but I'm going to make sure that I'm passionate about what I'm doing. And it is possible. That's the whole premise of the book. But you can't get there if you're just getting up every day and hustling and trying to figure out how to hit the metrics, even when you're hitting the metrics. Yeah, there's kind of that hustle culture where you're like, I sell my soul and burn my health and everything else to get where I want.

And then you're just always on that hamster wheel. And balance is everything. You spoke to designing your businesses for an exit. That was something I never thought of. I always thought of building empire building and building companies that will last me forever. And then I found out that, you know, sometimes cyclical nature of business and markets, 2008 recession, things, things come at you that you don't see. And so many times, you may want to sell those businesses. There were businesses that, like I said, when I started getting tired of everything, I was like, you know, I really wish I could sell this to somebody or get rid of it.

I made a huge investment in it of time and money, but we didn't build our stuff to sell. And we've had a number of authors like yourself on the show that have come on that talk about using that sort of focus, building your stuff to sell so that you can do all that. And that's really important. It's good to get balance and have a life. I found that I was burning out so many different ways. I never took vacations. I learned that I needed to take weekend jaunts, just get away, go someplace peaceful.

Searching for peace was a big deal for me. Yes. And trying to get that balance. What do you find with people that are trying to find a place to refill your bucket, you know, some sort of way that to do that. Yeah, I think you're 100% right. And it's different for everybody, right? For some people, I think the number one thing is turning off technology, right? We walk around with our phones, our emails on their social media, everything's there. And it's making a commitment to say, you know what, like, in order for me to actually fill my cup, it can be a multitude of different things. It could be walking in nature, it can be listening, you know, to just

a meditation, but not having the phone right near you. How many people are like trying to listen to a guided meditation and then all of a sudden they're scrolling their social media? So, how counterintuitive is that? But I think that, you know, it's finding what actually brings you back to center, right? Sometimes it's making time for friends. I think in the path of profits, one of the things that I do is I have people go into these eight pillars, right? So it's not just about the business

and it's not just about money. Same thing with prosperity after divorce. It's about going into these eight pillars of where are you now with your health, right? In that health journey, where are you now? Where do you want to be you know what's getting in the way most importantly or what are the triggers right because if you don't look at the triggers yet you know the triggers are just as important what are you

going to do to remove the triggers when you're figuring out how you're going to prioritize yourself right a lot of times we're the ones that don't put we put borders around ourselves and then we move the borders right so i think that going in and looking at what is the quality of my personal relationships around me, my circle, am I giving crumbs to my kids and my partner? Am I giving crumbs to myself? And then figuring out, like making a list of the things that you stopped doing, right? Because a lot of times we just have to come back to the things that actually did bring us joy, the adventure things, the fun us joy the adventure things the fun things the quiet things you know and i think that the measurement

is if you don't have time in your schedule for you for you to actually fill your cup there's something wrong with the business model it's not a sustainable model you eventually you will hit burnout for me it was always as soon as i got off a vacation i wasn't even off the plane i already had the next one planned and i just was like that's my reward that's my reward right every every so many weeks i'm taking and i did i took great vacations but at the cost of i could have done something every day or a couple of times a week to actually fill my cup and prevented that you know even today before you know hopped on this call, I went and took an hour walk. And I could have talked, in the past, me would have talked myself out of that. Well, it's a great way to refresh yourself and, of course, get all the blood moving and you feel good.

Like, I feel more alert and succinct by going to the gym. And, you know, it's just one of those things. But, yeah, it's important that people learn this in life. And I think sometimes what burns us out is we don't delegate enough. Do you want to speak on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's super important. You know, I'm somebody that will sit down on Sunday evening rather than Monday morning,

take, you know, an hour on Sunday evening, kind of prep for my week, right? And I'm a huge proponent of just brain dumping. I set a timer for 10 minutes and I just, if I, brain dumping, ADHD, right? If I just get it out, then I can take a look at the list. And I think it's important to take a look at that list. The way I break it down is what do I need to do? What do I need to delegate? And what do I need to dump? What's on this list that I have no business even having? Where did this thought even come from? Right? So it's do, dump, delegate. And I think that too many times the day goes and we have this laundry list of things that we need to do. And we forget that we actually have somebody else that can do it. This morning, right? I said to my son on his way out the door to work, I'm like, hey, you want to cook dinner tonight? And he said, sure, we have to ask. Instead of me having a thing. And he went in

the freezer, took out some food, and I have no idea what we're having, but I know I'm not doing it. Right. And I just finished my brain dump and I'm like, oh, this is so good. It's, you know, beginning of the year and I'm already asking. And I think that the thing is you have to have a process for getting the things out of here onto paper so that you can actually look at that to-do list and then navigate how do you delegate

and who's it going to yeah i like how you did it too where you you got him to buy in instead of you know thrown as a command yes absolutely you do it or else if you want to live here yeah yeah no one wants that right nobody wants that i don't know i like yelling at people in that way but that's just me yeah now the next step the next step of delegation is not having it come back to your list day after day after day. So the next step, and I realized this when he walked out the door was like, you know, I need to get more committal. We were empty nesters and, you know, he just moved back here with us. We brought everybody home when COVID happened and then they all dispersed back out again. And he's our youngest, he's only 20 and he just finished auto mechanic school, right? So he's getting a start and figuring out his path to get out

back to his independence and freedom. And for me, it's like, I don't want to keep having this on my to do list. So I'm going to actually ask for a commitment, like, hey, what nights of the week do you want to cook dinner? Because a lot of times what happens is we don't actually take the next step, which is how can we give somebody else ownership of the task, and actually not have it be put on our list every single day that then we have to figure out who to delegate it to. And I think that that's a big part of delegation is finally removing it from our list and giving it to somebody else and not keeping it there. And I think that's one of the biggest problems that most entrepreneurs have is they ask once and then they continue to keep it on their list and they don't give full, full authority to the person that they know that they can do it. And then you let that person come back

to you and let you know, hey, I can't do this today. And then it's back on your list, but it doesn't need to be there. Yeah. That's the way a lot of entrepreneurs burn out. They just try and do everything. They don't delegate it. They have this mindset they can do it better. I've been guilty of that in my history of owning businesses. And then they just fry. And so there's no balance there. Let's talk about some of the offers you have on your website. You've got several different things up there that you do and you help people with.

Talk to us about some of the things you do there. You know, my favorite way to align with people is a lot of people read the book, right? They read The Path of Prophets, and it's great. It's got great knowledge in there. At the end of every chapter, there's exercises. And most people, like me, they'll listen to an audio book, right, first. And then they'll be like, hey, you know, this resonates with me. I'm going to go back and do the work. And the opportunity to DIY it is right there for you. But there's so

many people out there that just need that added support. They need accountability. They want to shorten the timeline. They want to get started now. They're finally ready to make that decision to have a different path, right? And so there's this emphasis around the money in the book and budgeting and the marriage between your personal finances and your business overhead, and how you structure five revenue goals for the year, but the path to processing out, you know, your cash flow projection, but mirroring and blending your personal finances in your business. So it goes under the hood to both of those areas and gives people the roadmap to do it. But my favorite offer is the fact that you don't have to do it alone, right? It's called the Savvy Entrepreneurs Financial Foundations Program. We walk with people one-on-one. This is not group work because everybody has different things that they need to work on. Some people need a debt

repayment strategy. Some people don't. And I love doing it one-on-one. So that is my favorite offer because it allows me to first leap with a vision and goal session. If there's a couple, even if you're the business owner, but you have a spouse and you want to kind of come together and talk about what are your core values and vision, we start with that. And then I mean into the going under the hood of the personal finances and the business finances and doing the analysis, then coming back into supporting the entrepreneur with what I see and getting their buy-in and feedback and conversation going around the things that they're probably avoiding and then build out the tools for them. So they don't have to go figure out, you know, dropping something in ChatGPT to

create a spreadsheet for themselves or whatever. We actually build it for them and then walk with them for about four months. It's an eight session program they i give them virtual envelope system i give them the tools i walk with them they've got training wheels on until they have the confidence to walk on their own it is life-changing right like the things that the feedback that i get is oh you're the you're the marie condor to my finances right or the closet organizer to my finances it saved my marriage is the first one I love. Entrepreneurs come to me all the time and say, what's happening? I'm not sharing. My spouse knows the stress, but I don't share what's really going on. We owe the IRS $60,000 and my spouse doesn't know.

We have $80,000 of credit card debt on the business side and my spouse thinks we have four on the personal side. I can't keep doing this thing. And so sometimes I'm just working on with the entrepreneur and getting unstuck in that avenue. But that's my favorite offer is the invitation to do the work. It's I don't believe you have to make this decision in January. I think that you can make that decision any day, any week, any quarter, any month, to just make a decision that you want something different. And that is one of the offers that will change the most, it'll have the most impact in the decision to make a change around the financial avoidance. So that's one of my favorite things. A couple of the other offers, I host two-day drop-in masterminds where I love to incorporate travel in my business today, right?

So how do I launch this business? I'm like, I'll do events a couple times a year. I do drop-ins. Our next one is in March in Savannah. People show up on a Sunday night. I keep them real small and intimate. People are ready to do live events again. I love the small and intimate connections that I create in a room. So we keep it to 25 people. And we mastermind. We literally, you bring your problem and we work on unclogging the kink in your business, or maybe it's your mindset even. And you make great connections because we're there together. We have lunch together, dinner together for two full days.

And those have been great. I call them the thrive hives. We don't sell anything. That's the best part. There's no pitch fest, but people come out and they have new collaboration partners. They have new customers. It's a natural thing when you create an incubator of no judgment and connection. So that's, again, one of my favorite offerings. And then I do VIP weekends for the entrepreneur that needs to get out of their business. I live in Naples, Florida,

I'm living my dream life. I love it here. It's 80 degrees today and sunny. And I love hosting once a month, I open up my calendar calendar and I invite an entrepreneur into my home. And they show up on a Thursday and they leave on a Sunday. Everything's covered. We do two half days of business strategy with a couple follow-ups. But it gives me the opportunity to get the whole entrepreneur in the room. We go into whatever place they need to in the business, whether it's the financial stuff or an idea. Last person that came, she was going to launch a new business, ran cashflow, all the things. And it was a no. It was a no. Because again, how many entrepreneurs have that great idea, but they've done no market research. And when she brought me the numbers and all the different things, we pathed it out over three or four hours. And then the next day we worked on what

is it if it isn't this, right? And today now she's out buying a business rather starting from an idea that was from scratch that it wouldn't have made her the money that she thought it would make. So I love doing the VIP offers as well. And then I do consultancy. And then how can people reach out to you? How can they onboard with you or find out? The easiest way is to, yeah, the easiest way is to actually visit my website, michelletrakovic.com and click on the link to book a call with me. And let me learn a little bit more about your business and what your goals are and where you are now and see if it's a right fit. You know, I love talking with people. I don't have anybody doing my sales calls for me because I want to know where I can support you. What do you really need? Peter Roscoe chimes in off of

linkedin so many entrepreneurs focus on the end goal but in reality hundreds of thousands of small steps and goals truly make it successful yeah absolutely peter you're 100 right yeah i mean you you kind of when you first get into being an entrepreneur you're kind of you know you're very big picture and you're like i'm gonna going to be an entrepreneur. And there's so much problem solving that you have to do every day. I have often said that they just rename entrepreneurism, just endless problem solving. Yeah, absolutely. Endless growth, endless growth. Yeah. And, you know, I think, I think too, you know, as we're talking about, you know, if you're not in the ideal place, you know, where do you begin? And we talked about like making a decision, right?

I'm a firm believer that you got to have a win. When you make that decision to do something different, it's like, how can you create one small win so that you get motivated, right? So if people right now are looking at the financial aspects of maybe they're feeling pressured, they're married with debt, whatever, they want something different. You know, my invitation is always make the decision to do something different and then carve out the time, right? A couple of hours to assess, right? This is a great time of year. All banks will give you your year-end summary, right? Credit card, you can pull your year-end summary and just sit down and look at what's the money in, what's the money out, you know, what are the debts, what's the income? And then have a small win, cut something, sell something,

right? Don't go into creation mode, go into first, how can I have a small win before I figure out what to create? Right? Because a lot of times we don't go under our own hood and figure out the things that we can cancel or change or, you know, making some phone calls. I do a money recapture challenge that can be done any time of the year. And people can get that on my website as well and request it. And it's just a simple series of phone calls you're going to make to save yourself some money, cut subscriptions, make those phone calls. And I think that when you have a couple of wins, you start to be empowered again around your money because a lot of people show up and they're just not empowered. Yeah. Being empowered about your money. I like the concept there. People need to do that.

Give us your final pitch out. Tell people where they can onboard one last time and we'll take it from there. Yeah. If you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for a true path to profits and want to get off the dark road of despair and into a better place, maybe you're just misaligned with your finances. Maybe you're misaligned with your vision, right? And you need to get clearer about what it is you really want to create. Reach out to me. I'd love to talk with you. It's michellejacobic.com. Thank you very much, Michelle. And read the book.

Read the book. Listen to the book. Turn it. Order up where fine books are sold. Dial it up. The Path to Profits, an entrepreneur's guide to having it all and still having a life. Thank you for coming on the show, Michelle. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss.com fortes chris fos chris fos won the tick tockety and all those crazy places on the internet be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time and that should have us out