Clockwork and Mike Michalowicz helped me deal with cancer

This is an open testimonial to Mike Michalowicz, Adrienne Dorison, and all the team at Run Like Clockwork.

Early this year, I was diagnosed with cancer and at the same time, a pretty serious kidney condition was found which means that I would need four rounds of surgery and ongoing treatment.

Even when recording this video, I still have a few more tests and chemotherapy to come.

The first thing that entered my mind was, “How on earth am I going to run the business if I’m unable to work?”

Luckily, because of the systems that Mike, Adrienne, and Run Like Clockwork have taught me, I ended up making more money during my time off.

In total, I took five months from April to August, pretty much completely off. During that time, our sales stayed stable and even grew.

We produced a daily email, weekly video, podcast, and a blog. Our leads list still grew as did my audience and followers and my coaching clients still got coached.

We even secured affiliate deals and partnerships, and we even had a member of our team leave and replaced, and I was barely involved. I did this with a team of three people.

The number one problem that most business owners face is that their income is tied to their work hours.

Even if they aren’t the ones doing the work, even if they have a team of people if they leave the business crumbles. That’s called having a job, not running a business.

When I was in the hospital the first time my kidney was literally rupturing, the agony was unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

Even morphine wasn’t dulling, the crippling pain, I sent one text to my team saying, “I’m in the hospital. I’m going to be okay, but will be out of action for a while.”

Even if I wanted to work, I wouldn’t be able to, I wouldn’t be able to keep up the level of work that I’d been doing.

Now, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be decided.

I trusted my team to let customers, suppliers, and partners know, and basically slipped into a pain/drug-induced sleep.

A few days later when I came home after my second surgery, I was chatting to a member of my team, Kate Smith, who recently came on board as a coach.

I didn’t think that Kate was ready to coach and I want to be super clear, this was my internal limiting belief and the proof was that on the call with Kate, she basically told me, ” Mike, I’ve got this.”

Kate took me through the programs and calls. She also talked about how she was booking guest speakers and making sure that all the reminders and replays were going out.

I remember ending the call and turning to my wife Liv and saying, ” I think I’ve just made myself redundant from my own company.”

What Run Like Clockwork, Mike Michalowicz, and Adrienne Dorison gave me was the freedom to focus on my health.

I was able to take five months off to focus on recovery and let me get surgery and a ton of other treatments, but they also gave me the systems to not just run the business, but grow the business without me being involved.

I think it says a lot about my management style, that the business does better when I’m not involved but you decide.

Hey, if you could take time off from your business and have it run by itself like clockwork, ah, get it. Then let me know what you do with your spare time in the comments down below.

This seems like a pretty good time to thank my team, Clarence and Kate, especially for rising to the challenge and being the absolute best team members I could have asked for it. Thank you so much to you guys.

Run like clockwork has the goal of giving you a four-week vacation. Too many business owners, four weeks sounds like an impossible task to take off.

How about 20 weeks instead?

If you’re a funnel builder, and you’d like a little more clarity around what you need to focus on in your business, I highly recommend my 6A Report, which you can find here:


Inside you’ll find a free, personalized report that will audit your business and tell you exactly what you need to do next to land a $25,000 client and grow your funnel business.

So, how did Clockwork, Mike, and Adrienne helped me run my business way better without me? There are a lot of tools and processes and techniques, but the most powerful three tools were defining a core role, giving team members clear objectives, and self-documentation.

These tools and techniques I’ve picked up from clockwork. I’ve also seen Mike talk at a recurring revenue retreat. In fact, I actually gave a speech just after him, which is a bit like following the Beatles, in my opinion.

I did the clockwork accelerator training, which I highly recommend. I’ll make sure to put the links in the description below, but if you head to https://www.clockworkaccelerator.com/, that’s the best place to find out more about that particular programme.

1. Defining a core role

Point number one, defining a core role. This was probably the most impactful of all the exercises. Like so many things, a strong foundation is key.

The core role helped me do two things. First, it helped me decide on what was important and it helped my team understand what their job was.

This was called the QBR or Queen Bee Role. It’s basically the primary function of the business. What would you hinge the success of your business on?

Overall for us, it’s content. Specifically, content that builds confidence in those who consume it.

Our coaching calls, videos, blog, posts, emails, all the content we produce needs to inspire confidence in our audience.

At the time I was doing 100% of that work, but with the QBR defined, it was easy to get others to look at that work and take it over.

it also showed me that each team member, including me, needed to have their own core role. While we might share work and tasks, every team member needed a core role that they could focus on as a priority.

2. Giving team members clear objectives

This leads me to point number two, giving team members clear objectives.

I think a lot of business owners confuse tasks with objectives, a task is something like edit this video or answers this call.

It’s the action that someone is going to take. An objective is something that. Reduce refunds or grow our email list.

Too many business owners, focus on the task and not the objective. Objectives give true ownership.

This meant that I would have to let people make mistakes. It also meant that I had to think long and hard about what the real true outcome was that I wanted.

A really good example of this is creating YouTube thumbnails. Since Clarence has taken over our content, she’s created all the thumbnails.

The task is to create a thumbnail for our YouTube videos, but the objective, the thing that really matters is to increase our click-through rate for videos.

Since Clarence took over our content of views click-through and average watch time have on average gone up all because she and I decided what mattered was the outcome, not the task.

Yet sometimes the views go down or the click-through rate isn’t as good as the last video, but by allowing ownership of the outcome, the task becomes more efficient over time. It means I don’t have to micromanage it.

3. Self-documentation

Point number three is self-documentation.

This is my final killer exercise, self-documentation. I learned to let go of the writing process and creating documentation for each task.

Now, each team member is responsible for creating their own standard operating procedure for tasks.

At the very most I’ll record a loom video and someone will go away and create a document with the steps involved. But following my video.

The difference is now I just record it once and we take it from there. This has made hiring way easier and met the tasks, get done more efficiently.

Again, it also gives ownership of the task to the team member and prevents everything from staying in my head.

Now, I started doing all of these things back in 2019 and I’m so glad that I did because, without it, I wouldn’t have been able to take the time off that I needed to.

What’s really funny is that since coming back, I feel more positive about the business than when I took a break.

At first, there was friction, of course, my team even had to tell me to butt out and take a longer break.

But I’m beginning to come back to work and I’m able to see the progress that’s been made and I feel we have an even stronger platform to take the business to the $1 million level.

So, thank you to Mike, Adrianne, and the team at Run Like Clockwork.

Of course, thank you to my team for taking what we’ve learned and built something awesome with it.

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Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.