The Pumpkin Plan

Picture a county fair in October. Thirty pumpkins sit in a row, each one round, orange, perfectly nice. Nobody looks twice. Then somebody wheels in a half-ton monster on a flatbed truck, and suddenly there is a crowd, a camera crew, a kid in a Spider-Man costume trying to climb it. The ordinary pumpkins might as well not exist. That image, more than any business school case, is the engine of Mike Michalowicz's book. He read a newspaper article one morning about a backyard farmer who was chasing the state record for biggest pumpkin, and he realized that the farmer's odd, ruthless little discipline was the exact thing his own company was missing.

Michalowicz had a computer services firm called Olmec. By his early thirties he was the Small Business Administration's Young Entrepreneur of the Year for New Jersey, his bank president was offering him a quarter-million-dollar expansion loan, and his face was breaking out in red stress blotches because his receptionist was taking home more money than he was. He was the textbook small-business owner who had won every prize except the one that mattered, which is being able to breathe. The Pumpkin Plan is his account of how he climbed out of that hole, and the playbook he hands you so you do not have to live in it for as long as he did.

The Half-Ton Pumpkin That Saves Your Life

The book begins with a mentor named Frank. Frank was a seventy-year-old who wore a three-piece suit to dinner at home, looked like Regis Philbin, and had once taken a medical services company from eight million dollars to eighty. Michalowicz met him at his first chamber of commerce breakfast. Out of a room full of people pitching, Frank was the only one who did not. Instead he gave Mike a definition of entrepreneurship that would haunt him for years. An entrepreneur, Frank said, is not the person who does most of the work. An entrepreneur is the person who identifies problems, spots opportunities, and then builds processes so that other people and other things can do the work, consistently and well. If you cannot teach it, you cannot systemize it, and if you cannot systemize it, you cannot grow it.