Mike Michalowicz is an American entrepreneur, speaker, and author. He is best known for his best-selling books on entrepreneurship and business finance, including The Pumpkin Plan, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, and Fix This Next. Michalowicz also hosts two podcasts: “Don’t Write That Book” and “Becoming Self-Made” and speaks at business events.

In Profit First, Michalowicz explains that his journey as an entrepreneur was a tumultuous one. After developing and selling two lucrative businesses, he felt confident in his entrepreneurial skillset and invested his funds into 10 start-ups. When these failed, Michalowicz questioned the traditional accounting and business methodology he had always believed in. His failures prompted him to develop the Profit First system, simplifying business finances and coaching entrepreneurs to embrace frugality, efficiency and habitual profits.

Michalowicz’s years of experience as an entrepreneur makes him a reliable source of information about the ups and downs of managing a business. However, his experience is limited to particular industries, and he method may not work—or may work differently—for sectors that have unique features, such as highly variable income or seasonality. Michalowicz takes on a persuasive tone as he urges the reader to adopt his Profit First system. But he does not share any testimonials of people who experienced failure or confusion while using this system. This is a common omission in self-development books, which creates survivorship bias, or success based only on a limited number of successful cases, not taking the full range of a population into account. This approach makes his work more convincing on the surface, but it is also quite one-sided, and readers may keep this in mind as he explains his methodology.