Clockwork ― Design Your Business to Run Itself

The author of Profit First and The Pumpkin Plan shows you how to streamline your business to run more efficiently, productively, and without constant micro-management.

Mike Michalowicz is back with another game changing book. In Profit First he challenged the established axiom that profit comes last, and shared a simple, powerful method to drive permanent profitability. Now, he challenges popular productivity and time management methods to outline a simple strategy that can help an entire organization align around a single goal and run like clockwork.

Chances are you started a business so you could be your own boss, set your own hours, and bring your unique style to leading a team to solve business problems. In reality, you probably find yourself too bogged down in the daily details of running an organization to limit your work to regular hours or provide any real leadership to your team. In Clockwork, you'll discover a simple, counterintuitive approach to creating efficiency that frees you up to pay attention to the things that matter, in life and at work. Among other things, you'll see how to:

* Capture Systems: Most entrepreneurs try to streamline by creating new systems, without realizing all the systems already exist... in their head. Clockwork shows entrepreneurs how to capture the processes they already use.

* Protect the Queen: Identify the one core function that is your organization's most crucial, valued resource, and orient the business around making sure that function is never distracted, overloaded, or compromised.

* Empower Decision-Making: Free yourself from the minutiae of daily decision-making by empowering others in your organization to act independently and with confidence.

Drawing on dozens of true small business success stories, Michalowicz shows you how to enable yourself to take a 4-week vacation, disconnect from your business, and return to find that it's thrived in your absence.

Mike Michalowicz (mi-CAL-low-wits) launched and sold two mulitmillion-dollar companies and is co-founder of Profit First Professionals, a membership organization of accountants, bookkeepers and business coaches who teach the Profit First method. He is the host of the American Express Turning Points podcast, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, is a popular speaker and has shared his insights on business and entrepreneurship at TEDx, creativeLIVE, INCmty and others. He is the author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. His columns have appeared in The Entrepreneur Magazine, Open Forum, and Harvard Business Review.