The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz. Book summary.

First of all

I’m writing this summary for people who doesn’t have enough time to read it on their own. I’m gonna give you the most important thoughts of mine from this book. Of course it’s worth to read it because everyone can have different reflections about it.

About the authors.

Mike Michalowicz is an American author, entrepreneur and lecturer. Michalowicz had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies.

The most important lessons

• Entrepreneurs identify the problems, discover the opportunities and then build processes to allow other people and other things to do the work.


• Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them; find out what they want more than anything, and if it’s in alignment with what you do best, give it to them. Then, replicate that same service or product for as many of the same types of top client as possible. If you can defy their imagination and solve a crucial problem for them, they will love you— and do business with you— for a long time.


• Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths.


• If your dream is to just be big and get rich, that’s not enough to grow a significant, successful business. What purpose are you serving? What gets you stoked? If you know your “why” it will resonate with your clients.


• Visit the dream that inspired you to launch your company in the first place. Write it down and keep it handy to review it.


• There are three types of innovation: quality, price and convenience. Nobody can be the de facto leader in all three areas simultaneously. Choose only one.


• Systematization is what will allow you to leave the business for a four- week vacation knowing that everything will work just fine without you.


• What tasks do you handle yourself because you think that’s easier than teaching someone else how to do them? Make a list of all these things, because these are the places where you need to start creating systems.


• Having bad clients isn't better than having no clients at all.


• Define your Immutable Laws that will work in your company.


• Under-promise and over-deliver. When you do this, you need to avoid being too consistent. Meet your promise some of the time (in other words, exactly deliver), but over- deliver most of the time. If you always over- deliver, people will come to expect it.


• The customer is NOT always right, but the right customer IS always right.


• Figure out how your business will treat your key client group like VIPs. Make that policy very clear to your team and start implementing it immediately.


• When you launch your new product or service, make it available for a limited time and in limited quantities. And by all means, limit it to only the people who helped you bring it about.


• Never launch a new offering without getting feedback from your top clients first.


• If you label yourself in the same way your competitors label themselves, customers won’t be able to distinguish how you are different.


• Questions that, when asked in a particular sequence, allow employees to think and to reach decisions that are always in the best interest of your company.
  a. Does this decision better serve our top clients?
  b. Does this decision improve or maintain our Area of Innovation?
  c. Does this decision grow or maintain our profitability?


• You have to teach your employees who the top clients are, and why they are top clients. In other words, you need to give them a sense of ownership in the outcome.


• Analyze the parameters and identify the common rules of your industry and figure out how you could flip them to create something totally new and unexpected.

If you liked it, feel free to check out my previous book summaries.
Thank you for reading. Have a good day.