Cash Flow Explained: The Simple Way to Boost Your Business with Mike Milan

You’re selling, but still stressed about money. Why? Mike Milan reveals the hidden gaps killing your cash flow.

📌What’s Covered:

• Finding the hidden cash in your business and what it reveals about everyday business habits
• It’s not about the numbers, but the story your business is telling you -Listen. 
• The single financial mistake that causes fast-growing businesses to go broke
• Why gross profit, not revenue, is the real number you need to watch
• The 6 buckets every business problem falls into, and how to spot which one is killing your cash

Mike Milan “Cash Flow Mike” is a business advisor, author, and the creator of the Clear Path to Cash.He’s trained over 25,000 business owners, accountants, and bankers, uncovering more than $150 million in hidden cash.

Mike helps small business owners understand their numbers fast, so they can grow profit, improve cash flow, and build a more valuable business.

🌐Learn more about Mike at  https://cashflowmike.com

🎁Want to analyze a business in 7 minutes or less? Mike is giving away a free lesson from his Clear Path to Cash course. It teaches you how to read financial statements fast—and actually understand them.
Perfect for business owners, advisors, and anyone who wants to find hidden cash in their business.

🤝Connect with Mike at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemilan/

🌟Join the WAITLIST for The Faithful Founders Collective at https://reinventing-perspectives.kit.com/231f666d82

💛 Thank you for listening in! 😀

P.S. Don’t forget to leave a review! Much appreciated.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Have you ever been told that you're making money? You look at your profit loss statement, you go, oh, I made so much money. And then you look at your bank account and you don't have any. That's the difference. I made money. I just don't have any. But you're paying taxes on that money too. And that's what happened to me.

My first business as a hotel staffing company, and I did a thing called Growing Broke. Everybody thinks a cashflow problem is just for businesses that are failing and struggling. They can't sell. No, you can actually be too successful. And run outta money, right? Every sale that I made past that actually hurt me 'cause I had to have more money to cover the payroll.

Priscilla: Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Kitchen. Today, I've got a very exciting guest for you. I've got Mike Milan. He is [00:01:00] known as Cash Flow Mike to entrepreneurs. This is the conversation that we don't hear enough about. Mike. Even I hesitated a little bit. I was like, I wanna know, but I don't know if I can ask questions about cash flow.

But I'm so happy you're here. Please let them know who you are.

Mike Milan: Hey, live from San Antonio. It's a cash flow, Mike, right? Me I'm that serial entrepreneur. I built 14 companies. So I'm just like you. I'm just like your audience. I'm that person. Except for as I got later on in life I chose to be on a mission to eliminate cash flow as a reason that businesses fail.

So now I train bankers, I train accountants. I work with business owners on how to put more money in their pocket.

Priscilla: how do you get over that hurdle? People think. Financial statements, they think cashflow and automatically they zone out. They wanna hand it to someone else to take care of for them, but they wanna pay someone to do it 'cause they like. I don't know how to get over the mental hurdle of anything that has to do with numbers.

Cashflow. Mike, what is cashflow? Bring us to [00:02:00] speed and then let's get into the conversation.

Mike Milan: Yeah, that's a super interesting way to put it. How do you get over the hurdle? How do you get past it? Am I going. You're already past it, believe it or not. You're like going, you don't like not to have money. That's not something you like to do so you're already at the first place. What you've gotta do is be able to connect the action that you take to the dollars in the bank.

And the way you know what action to take is to actually look at these financial statements, believe it or not. So what I try to do is bring it to real life, but I don't know if you knew this or not, but my first job. Back in the 19 hundreds, like 1993 or whatever, I was a state trooper Missouri.

And I didn't understand math. I'm an MBA out of Baylor University here in Texas and I didn't really understand math that much. I just knew as long as I did repetition, I could memorize how to do this math, but it never really made sense until I was a state trooper, which is really weird, right?

What do you mean? Here's the thing they taught me in the highway patrol. To [00:03:00] investigate accidents, right? And you use calculus and trigonometry and geometry to be able to figure out what happened in these accidents. And it made more sense because I could see the evidence on the roadway, the length of the skid the, the ramp angle or the angle of launch from , a ditch if somebody went down the ditch and then went airborne.

All of a sudden, these. Equations came to life because again, I could see what I was doing. So what I've done is built a program that helps people do what they're already doing, but have it make sense. You're actually doing the X, you're doing the Y, you're doing the Z. So when you think about it as I'm doing these actions and it has a financial impact, I had a guy the other day, we found $125,000 He didn't know he had sitting on the shelf, just sitting on the shelf.

He had already paid for it over the course of maybe five years, and it was sitting there being unused. And what I'm talking about is excess inventory. . Can I tell a story? You guys like stories on this one, [00:04:00] right? Can I tell a story? Alright, so all. All right, so here's what happened.

Guy has a waterproofing foundation type company, right? Which means your basement leak is leaking and it's filling up with water and those type of things. So he goes in and fixes those type of problems. And the regular routine in his company was people would come in the morning, his employees would come in the morning, they would grab their cup of coffee, they would grab a work order and says, oh, I'm going to 1, 2, 3, 4, east los or whatever the address is.

And then they would go to Home Depot and buy all the stuff. They would buy cement, they would buy rebar. They would buy all the stuff that they needed and go do the job that day. After the day was over, whatever was left over, when they came back to the warehouse, guess where they put it?

warehouse.

And then year after year, it just stacked up. And every morning it was the same thing. They'd go to Home Depot, and he kept buying and buying. I said. Man. Dude, you got all this stuff you're not using. Is it still good? Of course it's still good.

It's just steel. It's just concrete bags, right? [00:05:00] So I said, why don't we go to the Homeier Depot for a couple of months, right? Which means pull from the warehouse first, and then if we are missing stuff, then we go to Home Depot. He did that in 90 days. We put $12 5,000 into his bank account because A, he was using what he'd already bought, and B, he wasn't going to Home Depot as much to replace it.

It was a crazy thing where all he had to do was nothing. Just use what he already had.

Priscilla: Wow. I'm so glad to have you here because I think you're part coach, part financial doctor, part storyteller, and you help the numbers tell a story. To the entrepreneur.

Who's thinking? Mike, I don't even know where to start in terms of, I know to look at my revenue. I know how much I'm selling. I have an idea of profit, but I don't know like where to look in terms of managing my cash flow. Where do I start?

Mike Milan: Yeah, so first thing, you gotta start with the pain that you feel, right? That's where most advisors and coaches [00:06:00] miss. They just say, here's my process. I go through step one and step two and step three, and I tell you all your problems. That's not the way to really get you to take action. When you say, I'm missing it, or I don't understand it, or I'm overwhelmed by it, or whatever it is where you don't wanna do it, it's because you don't feel it yet.

So what I try to do is get to people's burning issue. And that burning issue is the one that you feel, not the pain that I see. It's the pain that you feel. I might think that you have an inventory problem, or I might think that you have a valuation pro. It doesn't matter what problem I think. If you're sitting there worrying and wondering while I'm talking to you, I don't know if I'm gonna make payroll next week.

That's the problem I gotta solve. So I've gotta use conversation to get there, and I use conversation techniques like clear the noise when I first start a meeting, Priscilla, I'll ask you, am I going, Hey, what's going on in your world? It's been a week or two since we talked. What's happening in your business?

And then people just like unload. They're going, oh, I don't know if this is gonna [00:07:00] happen. We had this problem at work. I had, employees calling sick and we had a quality control problem. They'll unload and I'm like going, alright, let's start there. It doesn't matter. What I see is the problem. I wanna start and fix the one that you feel because that's what's gonna get you to take action, right?

We all wanna solve our own problems.

Priscilla: Oh, I love that. It made so much sense to me. 'cause sometimes you find people that are selling really great financial products. The only problem. Is, it's not something that I need immediately., It's great for some later time

I trust the product you have. I know the value, but that's not my situation right now. So I like that. That's the approach that you start with. I think a lot of people in their various businesses will carry. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Milan: no, I think that's just it. Again, everybody's product is so regimented, and what I've built is a process that says, Hey, listen I can't be on my own page because everybody I work with is fighting a different problem at the same time. Everybody has a different battle that they're fighting now.

[00:08:00] What you find out is that over time, and again, I've been in business almost 30 years now. Over time, there's a similarity, right? Meaning there's the same problem that kind of comes up in different places at different times, and there's six different buckets that problems fall in, right?

, Then again, I don't have a big business anymore. If I only got six buckets of problems, and that's either an education problem, which means. I don't really even know what I'm looking at. They gimme these financial statements. I don't know what to do. I've got a way to help you understand, what you're looking at.

Matter of fact, I give that away for free on my website. It's how to read financial statements in seven minutes or less. 'cause we all are busy, right? We're all too busy. So you just go there, download the lesson on how to read your financial statements@cashflowmike.com. The second one's a debt problem.

We get too much debt. We don't know how to manage it. We're using the wrong debt to buy something. It's like buying a house with a credit card. You won't do that 'cause it sucks money out of your, business in the form of interest. 30% versus seven. So there's learning how to actually finance something in the proper [00:09:00] way.

You got a cash flow and a profit problem, which are related, but they're different. Profit is a business model problem. I'm selling and I'm spending. Cash flow is the timing problem? Money coming in versus money coming out, right? So it's two different problems, but they're related. So there's four of the six right there.

The other two are the future about what the value of my company's worth, or starting with the end in mind, why do I even run this company to begin with? And. The last one is an operations problem. It's something that is clunky that messes up the flow so my business doesn't run smooth, and it could be just the way we hand paper to each other, right?

It could be as simple as that's clogging up the process and slowing down things and giving us a quality problem or a timing problem. A delivery problem. So, if I can put you in a bucket, we can easily get you to a solution.

Priscilla: I like that. It's makes the problem, you can handle it.

Mike Milan: Of us can. Yeah.

Priscilla: yeah. It's not, my whole world is falling apart. It may feel like it, but [00:10:00] you just need to identify the right bucket I like that approach.

There's cashflow and there's profit, and those are two separate things. I'm wondering what you find commonly around that. 'cause sometimes people are revenue. Revenue and they never get to thinking about profit. And sometimes people are like, have no idea about cashflow, and it's killing them because they're not thinking about it the correct way.

Mike Milan: Yeah, super interesting. So here's what I ask people when they say, aren't they the same thing? Am I going, have you ever been told that you're making money? You look at your profit and loss statement and you go, oh my God, I made so much money. And then you look at your bank account and you don't have. That's the difference. I made money, I just don't have any. But you're paying taxes on that money too. . That's what I tell people is that one is a business model. Yeah. You made money on paper, you don't have any, 'cause they haven't paid you yet or you've already paid out all your money and you're waiting for more money to come in.

And that's what happened to me. My first business as a hotel staffing company, [00:11:00] and I did the thing called growing broke. Everybody thinks a cashflow problem is just for businesses that are failing and struggling. They can't sell. No. You can actually be too successful and run outta money, right?

You're like going, wait, how, and here's where sales actually hurt you. Because I was growing. I opened 27 offices in nine states in three years. That's money going out because I got payroll every two weeks. All these employees that I'm paying to work in these hotels the hotels aren't paying me every two weeks.

They're paying me every two to three months. So I gotta cover 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 different payroll periods. I'm paying the employees waiting for the hotel to pay me for the very first week, right? That means I have to have that much cash up front. So every sale that I made past that. Actually hurt me 'cause I had to have more money to cover the payroll.

So if I opened a new city, , I had to have the money to cover that opening, right? Of covering all the payroll. So don't [00:12:00] think that more sales will get you out of it, because in my case, more sales actually created a bigger problem where I had to get a second mortgage on my house, and dip into savings and do all kinds of crazy things just to stay alive.

Priscilla: Now, how do you solve that one, Mike? Let's say you fall behind on your taxes and then the more money you make, you couldn't pay the taxes. And then you, and then now the more money you make, the more tax you owe. So then that bill that you already couldn't pay.

Getting even bigger and all the things you need to operate are getting even bigger. And on the selling front you are killing it selling, but you're creating bigger and bigger problems financially.

Mike Milan: Yeah that's a different problem than I had because mine was, if I sold, I had costs associated with the sale. I had a cost of good sold problem. What you're describing is if you say taxes and all that's a result problem, right? That's at the end of the day, which means that you should be planning as part of your expenses.

To put a little bit aside, right? Hey, listen, I know I'm gonna get hit with [00:13:00] taxes and I'm gonna have to suffer now that I spent all the money. You gotta remember, if you owe taxes, that means you already got that money and you spent it,

right? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

I'd love to, but you gotta pay your taxes. And if you didn't pay it, then you gotta pay it now and it's gonna hurt. It didn't hurt before. Matter of fact, you probably felt like you had a lot of money, right? It's gonna hurt a little bit, right? And it takes time to work outta that problem. But there's strategy to do it and I've, used mining your business for hidden cash to be able to find and tap into cash that you didn't know was there in your business.

So we can get outta that problem faster.

Priscilla: Now I see where the problems are different.

The issue where, okay, you're selling but you get paid 30, 90 days later, but your bills to fulfill, you've already incurred those bills and you're gonna continue to incur the more you sell, but your pay the actual cash in hand, you're only gonna get it. 30, 90 days from now, how do you [00:14:00] solve that?

Mike Milan: Yeah, so I've got this technique I call the fast money formula, right? And it's about optimizing cash flow and it all centers around this whole concept about the financial gap. Now believe it or not, every company has a financial gap and that's the difference between money coming in versus money coming out now.

Now you're like, what are you talking about? Lemme explain it this way. I'm gonna use a company with 'cause I talked about a service company. I'm gonna use a company with inventory. Here's what typically happens. I go and I make an order, right? 'cause I need t-shirts or whatever I'm gonna sell.

I go make an order. They bring the boxes of all the t-shirts to me. They gimme the box of t-shirts and an invoice, right? 'cause I gotta pay for the t-shirts. So I take the T-shirts and I put 'em on the shelf and I take the invoice and I put in my desk because I'll pay it right then. I just, I wait.

Sometimes it may be taking me 30 days to pay it, but the t-shirts that are on the shelf, they sit there for a certain amount of time. It might take a month for somebody buys it. Let's say that I make an order and I [00:15:00] sell it to somebody else on credit. It, which means I now gave them the T-shirt, so a sale happened, but instead of getting the money, I give them an invoice.

And what do they do with their invoice? They go put it on their desk. . Now we got a sale that happened. And two invoices, one on my desk, one on the customer's desk. I pay mine, and then the customer pays theirs. The difference between those two things happening is called the financial gap.

It's the difference between money coming in and money going out. Your working capital. If you ever hear anybody talk about working capital, that's really just money you have or that's available. Working capital is designed to cover the financial gap, meaning I still have to buy t-shirts to keep up with sales, or I still have to make payroll to keep up with sales.

This is how you determine if you need a line of credit or not, because maybe I don't have enough cash. My line of credit helps me cover that amount of days, so if it's. 20 days of waiting for money to come in and I'm [00:16:00] paying my bills in 10 days. I need 10 days worth of money so I can keep buying t-shirts and keep making sales.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So the larger the gap, it's natural , to know that it takes you more money to run your business. So your goal is to make the financial gap as small as possible Priscilla, if I ask you to jump over a crack in the sidewalk, you wanna jump over a large one or a small one?

Priscilla: A small one.

Mike Milan: Because it's easier, right? . So that's the same thing in your business. The smaller the gap, the easier it is to run your business. And that's what I work on with people all the time, is how to make the gap smaller.

Priscilla: Now you mentioned your business that the more branches you opened, the more you created that problem for you. So I'm thinking in hindsight, the things that you learned from that. There are probably people who are in, not exact situation, but similar situation where that gap is wide.

Mike Milan: Yeah what I explained was a service company, right? So I always try to go both service and somebody that has inventory. So you could see both sides. In my case, I [00:17:00] had to make payroll while I was waiting for money to come in from the customer, right? So I had to have enough money to make payroll before I even got paid.

If you have an inventory based company, you have to. Keep buying inventory right. To keep it coming in. So , when this is happening, we've got to be able to keep money on the shelf you ever heard of Elf on the Shelf?

It's like this thing that people do around Christmas times where they have this little elf, they move around for kids and it creates a little mischief around the house. You ever seen that? Alright. , Most people don't want that, elf on the shelf because it creates mischief. It's always , making messes and stuff like that around your house.

If you don't want Elf on the shelf. I call inventory wealth on the shelf. You don't want that either, right? You don't want your money sitting on the shelf doing nothing. So when you talk about that gap, there's a perfect amount of inventory to have, and I'm gonna tell everybody the calculation to know first of all, if you, have too much inventory.

Just run it down to the [00:18:00] perfect level. Here's the calculation. I know podcasts are not great for calculations, but this one should be easy enough. You take the, the average number that you sell per month. So let's pretend I sell cases of beer. I dunno, I'm just making it up. Let's say I sell 200 cases of beer normally on average per month.

And then you divide it by, how often can I get it? Let's say I can get it once per week, so in a month I can get it four times. So I take 200. The number I sell divided by four times and that's what 50. So I should have 50 at the beginning of the order cycle, which means on Monday if I gotta order beer and I go in there and I see 60 cases of beer, I order zero.

So I don't spend any money that week, because on average I only sell about 50 per week. If I have 30, then I don't go in there and guess at how many I have to order. I only order 20 to get back to that 50. So that's one way to manage cash really easily in your company is to understand how much that [00:19:00] you're selling on average, so you're not guessing and how much to buy.

Priscilla: That's really good. 'cause I can see how sometimes we fall into patterns of behavior, like you mentioned , with your first example of they were just going to Home Depot. I can see sometime, right there they could have stopped and looked, but we all fall into sort of patterns of the things we do on a monthly and we're not stopping to check, but I think, like you said, the numbers would tell you that, which is something that I wanted you to speak upon.

I know you've written three books and I'm interested if you could tell us. What common thing you've seen maybe working with clients where you'd say, oh, okay, if you look at that number that might just tell you something's wrong, or, a story or something like that.

Mike Milan: Yeah, so I got a couple things I wanna go back to. Remember the service company, the inventory company thing, where every sale actually hurt me. Here's how an inventory based company where every sale could hurt them. If you misprice your [00:20:00] goods. Just mispriced it. And I worked with a company that did that, right?

They were a manufacturing company and part of their raw material was made of aluminum. At the time, aluminum skyrocketed, but they didn't change their price. So the cost of every assembly, every piece went up and it actually exceeded what they were selling the part for. So think about that.

The part cost them $10 and they're selling it for eight. If you keep selling and you sell more and more, you're just losing $2 every time. It's like they take $2 and tape it to the part and say, Hey, here's the part and $2, right? So the more you sell, the more you give away, right? That's one of the things about that is as understanding your pricing model.

Now, the books in the seven minute conversation, seven minute conversation is how to analyze. Any financial statements in seven minutes or less. I have one technique I call expense control, and there's a hard, fast rule, and if you violate it, your company will die. Nobody can live forever and keep violating [00:21:00] this rule.

It is when gross profit comes down. Now everybody thinks, oh, I just sell. We're talking about selling more sell sell, and sometimes it can hurt you. Selling to me is only a measurement of how much work you did. It is not how much money you made. That's just how much work I did. The amount of money you make is gross profit, so you have to manage the gross profit.

Gross profit is the most important number on the income statement. It is the only place you can get cash to spend on your operating expense or put in your pocket gross profit. So when gross profit comes down, you have to cut expenses by the same amount. Wow. That's the hard, fast rule. And what I mean by that is gross profit is the amount of money you have to spend operating expenses, how you spend it.

If I have less money to spend, I should

less money. Same thing in your house. If you took a $2,000 a month pay cut, would anything change? Yeah, most likely. Even if you can make all your bills. You might not [00:22:00] save as much, you're darn sure not going to Taylor Swift concerts, right? Stuff like that, or anything like that.

It's just you have to change your life if your income changes. That's what has to happen in your business. And if you do that, it doesn't matter the sales level. You can make the same amount, no matter the sales level. If you just manage gross profit comes down, I manage operating expense down as well.

That's the hard, fast rule.

Priscilla: that's a good one. I suppose if you have a financial background, but when you don't have one, you don't think about responding to changes in the financial statement. You don't think about looking at the gross profit and making changes based on that.

We're all responding to everything else. We're responding to marketing up and down, we're responding to sales. We're responding to all these things, but I like that you said you will not survive if you don't follow. This rule to learn to look at your numbers and respond accordingly. Make changes accordingly.

That's a really good one. Now you've got one that I [00:23:00] said, oh, okay. Don't be a dumb business owner, which is bold. Now I want to know what's the dumbest smart thing business owners do with their money? You can let us know.

Mike Milan: all right, so first of all, dumb doesn't mean unintelligent to me. It means I don't understand my business, right? So think about that, right? So don't understand my business. So the dumbest smart thing. So dumbest smart thing people do with their money.

I don't know that it's dumb as an unintelligent, but it's smart is if you're taking it to fund whatever you want to do next, just because you're in this business doesn't mean you're in it for life. Maybe you wanna buy into a bigger business. Maybe you want to just do it till you're happy enough to retire on a lake and be done with it.

So the dumbest smart thing is instead of don't. I do understand my business and I use it to build transferable value. I use it to fund whatever it is I wanna do next. That's the smartest thing you can do.

Priscilla: Yeah, that's a good one. 'cause sometimes we don't think about that until something [00:24:00] forces us to think about it. And by that time it's a little bit too late to react to what do I wanna do next? But if you're already thinking about that and you're already taking those steps financially to set yourself up for the next thing that really flips the dynamic.

Now you have a clear path to cash framework. Which is very exciting. Please let us know about that.

Mike Milan: Yeah. So the clear path to cash is eight steps to maximizing cash in your business, right? And what that is that we're all fighting a different battle. So these are eight things. From start to finish, which means I start with end in mind. That's one of the steps and that's really identifying why is it that I'm here, why do I go to work, why do I put my relationships on the line?

Why do I, drain my savings to make this thing work? So starting with end in mind gives you focus on why you are making decisions in the future. Then I move into the home run financial system, which is understanding where the biggest fires are in the business at the time. [00:25:00] That's the seven minute conversation

analyzing financial statements fast. Then you've got mining your business for hidden cash. These are six calculations that look at your business from the profitability standpoint and the conversion or the timing standpoint, and see where the biggest problems are there. Then I have the fast money formula that's about optimizing.

Those cash flow conversion levers, having less inventory or the right amount of inventory, collecting faster, paying a little slower when you can. That's about the fast money stuff. And then I've got forecasting by the numbers. There's five steps to forecasting a business, including the balance sheet, and determining how much you can grow without taking out a loan, right?

I teach people how to do that. Then I've got how to deal with their banker, understanding debt, using the right debt, preparing to get debt, those type of things. Then the simple valuation formula are the drivers about your business and how you can get the most out of it when you go to sell it. And then lastly is the deliberate exit plan, which is about the emotional side, not necessarily the [00:26:00] financial side.

'cause I got seven lessons on that. It's the emotional side of leaving your business. Some people actually freak out when they sell their business. They don't know what to do next. They just don't know what to do. So we talk through the emotional side of leaving.

Priscilla: I love that you talk about how every business owner needs a financial strategy. I think it's something that we don't hear. Commonly is something that we don't think about commonly. In most cases we shy away from anything that has to do with numbers. So it's great that you're doing that.

I know that you're working on something right now that is really interesting and combining ai. So maybe you can tell us first, like what are you looking forward to personally yourself, Mike, we'd like to know a little bit more about you and then let us know what you're looking forward to in terms of the future of the marketplace as well.

Mike Milan: Yeah, that's very kind by the way. And I'll tell you, like everyone else, we're trying to figure out how AI fits into our world, right? And. I don't trust it as much. Maybe you don't either. 'cause I [00:27:00] think it hallucinates and it lies just sometimes just is wrong. So I like to say that AI does not equal me, right?

But in order to get it there, we have to combine it. So I'm taking all the things that I teach, that I put into spreadsheets and I've built an app. And the app combines both things. The mi, which is my intelligence. And then the ai, which is the things that, make my intelligence a little bit more richer, right?

Without impacting the validity of it. I don't want it to be untruthful. I don't want it to guide people the wrong way. So I build an app called the Clear Path to Cash. It incorporates both processes and I'm training it very hard towards thinking the way I think. I've. Taught it my books, I've taught it, my spreadsheets,, I'm teaching as much as I can about what I do, so it can make decisions very similar to what I do.

And I'm really confident that we have a great product right now that's gonna help people out.

Priscilla: That's exciting. I'm so glad to have had an opportunity to speak. You, Mike and I thank you for coming on the podcast. [00:28:00] Like I said, I know we probably need to talk about cash flow, but even I'm afraid to talk to Mike about cash flow. Grateful and thankful that you've made it something that people can understand and grasp onto with practical aspects of what's happening in your business and use this as well now because.

You said every business needs a financial strategy. I'm thinking to the entrepreneur who's I don't have a financial strategy. I don't really know much about reading financial statements. You're actually saying cashflow and I probably need to Google it right now so I can understand what you're talking about.

What do you think is the first step for that person?

Mike Milan: Yeah, the first step is mentally you have to be there, right? Because I can teach anybody's skill. I can teach you how to do the math, I can give you the tools, those type of things. If you don't have the heart to want to do it, it's not gonna work for you anyway. So let's have the heart and.

The thing that gives you the heart a lot of times is your bank account. If you look there and you don't see [00:29:00]enough, or if you are stressed out and losing sleep and you feel bad and your relationships are on the line because you've put everything into this business and it's just taken from you and it is not giving back.

If you're in that position, then your first step is this not go hire a coach yet your first step is. To decide that you don't wanna live that way anymore, right? Decide that, and then if you want to know how to just start. Go to my website, cashflow mike.com, get the free lesson called You Know the Sub Minute Conversation, and learn how to look at three financial statements with six calculations.

I'm not trying to teach yourself or you know how to do financial management as deep as an MBA or a CPA or an investment banker, or any of that. Six things that point to where big problems are so you can spend your time wisely while you learn other things. Start there. It's free. You just have to [00:30:00] have the heart to go do it.

Priscilla: Thank you for saying that, and I think to the audience, please, this is something that I think. We get into trouble because we run away from, or we try not to look at it and have the heart to do it. Some people are really talented at, making money, that is such a great gift to have and to develop the financial literacy and the financial strategy. Thank you so much Cashflow, Mike. Thank you Mike Milan for joining me. I appreciate it.

Mike Milan: You are the best. This is fun. Thank you very much and let's make cash flow of the conversation. Appreciate you.

Priscilla: Truly.