Your Next Act: The Six Growth Accelerators for Creating a Business You'll Love for the Rest of Your Life

A Step-by-Step Guide to Reinventing You and Your Business
You—and every entrepreneur—will inevitably face challenges at some point in your career. These challenges might include:
  • Feeling stuck or stagnant.
  • Realizing you’ve outgrown who you are, what you do, why you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it for.
  • Desiring to do something new that brings more impact and joy but not knowing what it is.
If this resonates with you, it might be time for a reinvention.
Perhaps you’re content with your current business but need a total upgrade—better offers, higher-ticket products, and improved customers. Or maybe you’re ready for Your Next Act. You might have recently exited your previous venture, but assembling a team to quickly launch a new one feels hard, expensive, and time-consuming.

The solution? Reinvent yourself and your business by creating a Category of One brand—one that attracts ideal customers who are already sold on your products and services. This path leads to higher revenue, greater impact, and deeper fulfillment.

About the Book
This short guide, written by business expert and serial entrepreneur Mike Koenigs, will walk you through the key steps to reinvention:
  1. Mindset: Develop non-negotiable values to reimagine your business.
  2. Market: Identify your ideal audience by asking, “Who do you want to be a hero to?”
  3. Model: Design a profitable business model that delivers a brand promise, creates transformation, and simplifies delivery.
  4. Message: Craft a message that resonates with your perfect prospects, compelling them to raise their hand and buy quickly.
  5. Media: Select the right platforms to reach your audience and drive conversions.
  6. Multipliers: Leverage strategies to amplify your success and attract more customers.
Who Is This For?
Your Next Act is a powerful framework that works in nearly every industry for entrepreneurs and business owners worldwide. Whether you’re in funded startups, financial services, wealth management, professional services, private equity, insurance, coaching, SaaS, construction, real estate, or healthcare, this guide is designed to help you grow and succeed.

Praise for Mike Koenigs
“Mike is an extraordinary man. He’s brought me insights on how to reach people on the Internet that are so valuable. This is a man you should deal with. Take advantage of what he has to offer.”
 – Tony Robbins

YOUR REVENUES MULTIPLY
"Every time there's a significant tech marketing breakthrough, over the last 30 years, Mike's always been a trailblazing leader for ambitious entrepreneurs. If you're around him and his team for a day, everything in your marketing gets significantly easier, faster, cheaper, and your revenues multiply. This will an exponentially greater result now that Mike has mapped out how AI can transform both your back stage and front stage. This is my 50th year of coaching, and Mike makes my top three list of great, helpful marketing transformers."
DAN SULLIVAN
Co-Founder of Strategic Coach, Bestselling Author

“Mike Koenigs is a total badass. He's a trusted advisor and an early-stage investor in Bulletproof who I rely on for cutting-edge marketing and business advice."
DAVE ASPREY, founder BULLETPROOF COFFEE

“Mike Koenigs is a master of helping transformational entrepreneurs like me go out, get our message out to the world, and then give us the tools so we can go change lives and be role models to change everyone's lives.
[JJ Virgin]

Creators and Guests

Host
Mike Koenigs
Mike Koenigs is an entrepreneurial dynamo who doesn’t just play the game—he rewrites the rules. He’s built and sold four businesses, two to publicly-traded companies, racking up over $100 million in revenue and serving 54,000 customers across 121 countries. As a 19-time #1 best-selling author, he churns out hits faster than most people can read them. After beating stage 3A colorectal cancer, he penned Cancerpreneur, turning a personal battle into a beacon of inspiration. Beyond his own ventures, Koenigs excels at building brands, reinventing founders and entrepreneurs, and guiding them to their next big act through his work at Superpower Accelerator. Check him out on his website, LinkedIn, Facebook, or podcasts like Capability Amplifier and The Big Leap. He’s the go-to advisor for heavyweights like Tony Robbins, who raves, “Mike is an extraordinary man. He’s brought me insights on how to reach people on the Internet that are so valuable. This is a man you should deal with.” Peter Diamandis calls him the “Arsonist of the Mind.” Oh, and he’s raised $2.6 million for humanitarian causes, proving he’s as generous as he is driven. Mike’s story? It’s resilience, humor, and relentless hustle rolled into one.

What is Your Next Act: The Six Growth Accelerators for Creating a Business You'll Love for the Rest of Your Life ?

A Step-By-Step Guide to Reinventing You and Your Business

You and every entrepreneur, at one time or another in your career, face any or all of the following:

You’re stuck. You’ve outgrown who you are, what you do, why you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it for. You want to do something new that has more impact and joy…but don’t know what it is…
You need a reinvention. You’re okay with your current business but need a total upgrade—better offers, higher-ticket products, and better customers.
You’re ready for Your Next Act. You’ve recently exited, but finding a team to create all the “stuff” to get it off the ground quickly is hard, expensive, and time-consuming....
The path to higher revenue, more impact, and greater fulfillment is to create a category of one brand, where the ideal customers and clients come to you, already sold on your products and services. This short book by business expert and serial entrepreneur Mike Koenigs will help you:

Develop the right MINDSET of non-negotiable values to reimagine your business
Target the ideal MARKET who you can effectively serve, “Who do you want to be a hero to?”
Design a profitable business MODEL to deliver a brand promise, transformation and simplify delivery
Pinpoint the MESSAGE that resonates with your perfect prospects, makes them raise their hand and buy quickly
Choose the proper MEDIA to get in front of your audience and drive them to buy now
Amplify your success with a variety of MULTIPLIERS that attract and close your market
Your Next Act works in virtually every industry, for virtually every business owner or entrepreneur, anywhere in the world: from funded startups, financial services, wealth management, investing, professional services, legal, private equity, insurance, business coaching and advising, space, software, SaaS, construction, manufacturing, real estate, and healthcare.

Mike Koenigs
Chapter Three: Market, Claiming Your Turf

Important, many people are reluctant to even think about who they would love to work with, because they think they can't have that. This is why it's critical to address mindset before doing anything else. If you move into defining your market and you're holding limiting beliefs about what you're capable of and what you deserve and what the universe can bring to you. You're already starting off a foot race with your pants around your ankles. Now make sure you spend time with the mindset chapter before moving forward. I find that anytime I violate a mindset, non negotiable, the result is frustration, aggravation and chaos. Never let the inmates run the asylum. Do you let your clients or customers bully you? No, really, this is a serious question.

In fact, it's the very first question I ask when I start working with a new client. I want to know what percentage of their customer base is low frequency, meaning they're bullies, they're abusive, they whine, they complain. They're cheap, always angling for a deal, looking for a discount. They play people against each other as threaten to escalate every interaction. And working with them is never clear or cut. It's always chaotic, black. They occupy way too many of your waking hours. But when you even dare to think about cutting them loose, you quickly backtrack. Well, they always pay on time, or they've been with us forever. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So if that sounds familiar, you're in good company. In my estimation, it's likely that a good portion means 20% if you're typical of your current customers, possibly even more fall into the pain in the ass category, meaning they're more trouble than they're worth. You make all sorts of justifications for keeping them around, but what it comes down to is that you're scared to fire them. They've got you whipped, and they know it. And despite your hopes that they'll improve, I guarantee their attitude will only go one way, and that's down. Don't feel bad if this hits a little too close to home. The situation is so common that it's one of the very first things we address when working with the founder.

So first I ask permission to be direct. I say, Look, you got a problem here. You need to earn the trust and respect to your team, and you need to do something drastic to do that. And what I want you to do is empower them, give them the right and the responsibility to get rid of the bottom 20% of your clients who are probably causing 80% of the aggravation, damage, frustration, resentment and anger inside of your organization. When I say this, most people sit back like I've slapped them. They can't imagine cutting 20% of their client base. It immediately makes them think about a shrinking bank balance. But as we covered in the last section, there's a lot more to life than money, and no amount of money is worth being miserable on something else, the hole that opens up will be filled quickly with better clients, leading to growth and revenue and happiness, especially if you do number one mindset. You know what your non negotiables are.

Now, there's a great exercise you can fill out to help you get there. So think about it. Are your customers dreams or nightmares? The dreams are the easy to work with, agreeable, trust, the process, appreciative. Great results are inevitable. They don't argue, they don't complain. They pay on time, and the nightmare of the emotionally draining a daily battle. They're abusive, they're always have some kind of uncertain income or outcome, and they're just a pain in the ass. Now there's this old saying, This is not in the book, by the way, that Dan Kennedy used to say, if I wake up more than two nights thinking about you and we're not sleeping together, it's time for what time for one of us to go. I'm gonna mark that again. Here's something Dan Kennedy used to say, if I wake up more than two days in a row thinking about you and we're not sleeping together, it's time for one of us to go and think about it. What kind of people keep you up at night? I guarantee you it ain't the good ones. So let's do a little exercise right now. Imagine for a moment the top three customers or clients you've ever had who are genuinely you genuinely love working with them, and they like working with you, and it's easy to provide value to them, and you easily help them implement and get significant results. They didn't complain, they don't hag over price. They didn't question or your process or threaten your team members. These unicorns may only represent your top 2% or even the top point 2% of people you've ever worked with, but can you imagine what your life would be like if your entire customer base was made up of clones of these customers, what if every minute of every day in your entire organization felt appreciated, effective and well compensated? How would that feel?

Now, contrast that feeling with the nightmare customers I asked you about at the beginning of this chapter. I won't insult your intelligence and ask which you'd rather work with. We all know the. Answer. Now you might be wondering why it matters so much that you like the people you serve. After all, money is money, right? Well, hell no. The founders and business owners I work with tend to want meaning in their lives. They're impact driven. They want to feel like what they do matters, and in Steve Jobs, words, puts a dent in the universe in some way. You can't do that if you're viewing what you do is a transaction with a nameless, faceless entity.

Every interaction you have with someone takes something from you and gives something to you. Some may take joy and give frustration. Others may take stress and give pleasure. It's a transaction, sure, but it's a relationship. First and foremost, here's a truth we don't always acknowledge. We have limited capacity. If your maximum customer base is, let's say, 100 units, there's a one to one relationship between these two groups. For every lousy, annoying customer you have, you're sacrificing working with an ideal customer. It's a zero sum game. So if your business is 80% pain, misery and chaos, you only have 20% available for happiness, joy and abundance. That's why your first move must be to fire the worst offenders to make room for your ideal clients and a go so far as to say, the bad ones take up a lot more than one unit. So in the rest of this chapter, we're going to clearly and precisely prescribe and describe your perfect audience or market in such a way that you immediately know if someone is a good fit or if they're going to bring chaos. And important, you're a business, not a charity. People who are broke or broken are not your problem.
That's what charity is for. Those who serve the broken broken will wind up broken broken too. So if you feel moved to help those who are not in the mental, emotional or financial space to work with, you allocate a percentage of your profit to charity, but don't make it part of your business to work with the broken broken. If you do that, it will create absolute misery in your organization and sap the fun out of your work. Your business isn't a charity, but your business can support a charity. Don't confuse those two things.

Let's cover your perfect client. When we talk about your perfect client, we're looking at both demographics and psychographics. Demographics and psychographics are like two magnifying glasses that allow us to define a person's objective and subjective worlds. Note that mindsets and values precede demographics and psychographics. Demographics refer to objective characteristics within a population. Demographics include things like education level, position or job title, age, income level, industry, gender, marital status. Psychographics can it be difficult to measure. They include attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria such as, what's their perfect life? What prevents that from happening or being true? What opportunities do they wish they could take advantage of? But can, for some reason, what are their superpowers, unique abilities or zones of genius they want to express hobbies, values, personal profile.

I particularly like the Kolbe assessment, K, O, L, B, E. In fact, one of the things we do when we bring on a new client is we have them do the Colby strengths, finder, print, disk and Enneagram. I'm a huge believer in it, and when I know those, I immediately know how they score, how they think, what they value, what they're going to be great at, where they're going to be problematic, and what kind of psychological barriers we have to overcome in order to help create a new identity. I spend my time inside the minds of my clients. That's why I know I can mind read and talk to them in any circumstance. And when you know your customer and you can speak to them in any conversation or any podcast or any speech, they're like, Oh, my God, you're reading my mind again. Don't confuse this and think that it doesn't apply to whatever business you have. Your business isn't different. Speaking to people and relating to them is what makes them want to buy. They've got to have that deep emotional connection and feel they know like and trust you before you can engage that left logical brain, the 30 minute avatar.

Go back to the question I asked you earlier about your favorite customers or clients to work with, bring one specific person to mind and answer the following questions, what are their demographics? What are their psychographics? And then map as many points on four by six cards, or any kind of tool you have these days, I just use Google Docs and I write them down, and I brainstorm there, but then go back and repeat this process with a second member of your favorite clients group, and then a third and a fourth. Now, truth be told, I like to have 10. I can work with as few as one, but the more I have, the easier it is to do. Everything we're about to do now, then what you do after you go back with this process, and you create 2345, of them, and you have a stack of cards, you look for the similarities. Are they all in a certain industry? Do they all have specific, identifiable personality type? Are they all recently married or recently single? Do they share an affinity for long distance running. Are they former athletes? You gather as much info as possible and create a single avatar with commonalities. You can also do this with the customers who make you nuts.

And this is where you involve your team. You have them fill out cards on the people who drive them crazy, getting as much detail as possible, then you'll be able to identify chaos the second it walks in the door. Your perfect Prospect Profile, the 30 minute avatar exercise, is good for quick wins. It's like a rough sketch or outline. I wouldn't base an entire new business model on it, but it can give some good insight and unveil some hidden patterns that you can use as a starting point. This next exercise is a much more detailed process. Your perfect Prospect Profile is something you could use as a standard operating document for a brand vision. Now, the following document is excerpted from a strictly internal document. It's an abbreviated version of my own perfect Prospect Profile pop up that I'm sharing with you specifically because it's explicit and unapologetic.

Now you may read this and think it's a little obsessive, too specific, or over the top, but it's this level of detail and intention that enables us to attract the right people. And this is the level of detail you need in your own perfect Prospect Profile. You're instructing yourself. Here are the types of people I want you to be on the lookout for. Also, these are the types of people I want you to avoid like the plague. You will have different criteria for your target market than we do. What you want is a picture so clear in your mind that you intuitively react to people when you meet them, listening for clues that tell you they're a hell yeah Or hell no.

Now for ours, I'm gonna go through the basics right now. Title, business owner, Founder, CEO or partner. Why we don't work with employees? Okay, someone can bring them, but we only work with founders, decision makers and check writers. Next business description, B to B. I prefer that over b to c for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. In my particular case, a B to C usually is selling a cheap product to a lower ticket audience, not always, but usually so they're business to business. They're usually in the two to two $50 million range. Why is that? It's because if they're below that, they're usually dealing with some financial constraints, and I don't want to deal with it anymore. This isn't an always, but it's a most of the time. North America, my particular case, will gladly work with people overseas in any country, but I found that, especially in the United States right now, the value of the dollar, like in Canada, for example, they have to come up with a lot more cash. Australian Dollar is very weak right now. So is the euro. At the moment. I'm recording this. So it all comes down to the investment size. It's capital. Next 10 to 250, employees. If they're too big, chances are they're going to be answering to an advisory board, board of directors. The CEO might have to get permission to write out a check. I don't want to wait.

Okay, they must have client transformations and social proof that their products and services work. Very rarely will we work with a brand new startup, with someone who hasn't built and sold a company before. If it is a startup and an experienced founder, then we'll do it, and ideally they're selling a product that's $10,000 or higher, ideally more. Why is that? Because we can go in, and if we're selling a 50 or $100,000 product, they don't have to make a lot of sales to justify the investment in us, and we know we can produce several million dollars worth of value very, very quickly.

Again, this isn't an always, but it all comes down to creating movement and success. So some of the personal demographics, men and women, 45 years and older, typically, they have a 2 million or greater net worth, quarter million or higher income. They're usually married, and they have kids and pets, and they're English speaking, and ideally in a US time zone. And the key reasons for all these is people who are a little bit older, have some experience under their belt. They're more likely to be coachable and listen and again, this isn't always we've got a couple 20 somethings, but once you got some years under your belt, the ego is tamed, under control, easier to work, with the exception being if you've been coached and. Belong to coaching organizations that helps a lot.

Some more self identifiers, they're a speaker author or best selling author, a podcaster, a TEDx or TED speaker, or they belong to any of the organizations like EO, YPO, tiger, 21 Strategic Coach, Genius Network. They know that investing in a group of high functioning, communicative, successful people will rub off on them some of the psychographics, they meditate. They have a background of collaborating. They paid for coaching in the past. They're interested in personal growth, meaning they belong to Tony Robbins organizations, they've done personality profiles and personality tests like the Colby and one of the things that we looked for now is we look for people who are Colby Quick Start, eight, nines or 10s. That basically means they know what they want, they hear it, and they make fast decisions. If they're fat, if they're typically the kind of person who is a high Fact Finder, that means they need to know a lot of stuff before they can make a decision. They have to think about it. Talk to someone.

My attitude and what I tell people is, look, that's the investment right now, if you got to go and talk to someone and you take a lot of time, I'm gonna have to charge you double okay? We're for people who are fast decision makers. They know what they like, and they know how to think on their feet. Right now you want to have fact finders on your team, but they're usually not great founders. They're also cause oriented. They give back, they do philanthropic investments or work in the past, they're usually libertarian minded people who have strong political motivations and think strongly about something they feel a little too fundamentalist to me, usually going to be a pain in the ass, and I find them to be unlikable. So in general, we find spiritual but not particularly religious. Are easier people to work with. Again, open mindedness. So in my experience, any form of fundamentalism is a deep warning sign of a mental disease. How do you like that? Polarization is part of the game here, ladies and gentlemen,

All right, next, avoid at all costs. High fact finders already mentioned that they're great team members, pain in the butt as clients, fundamentalists, social justice warriors, not interested in your politics, not interested in your politics, not interested in your politics. Blamers, whiners and malcontents, snowflakes and victims, what I call alphabet terrorists, or anyone associated with cancel culture, a holes, extremists, litigation attorneys, or anyone with a history of litigation, or people, typically, who are only speakers, only coaches, too hard to create massive leverage unless they've got some really, really great business experience as advisors, okay, coaches and speakers, a little bit difficult, All right, so now it's your turn.

There's a worksheet inside the book, but go and do your own or model mine. And again, one of the things you can do is make sure you check out the bonus video that I include. Actually go through some of our own stuff, so you can see how I present and perform that how to read minds. After speaking with hundreds of 1000s of business owners, I have a more holistic view of those I can best serve and those I most want to work with. There's certain things they say that make my ears stand up, and I know I can help them. By the way they talk about the pain they're experiencing. And once you've spoken with enough of your ideal clients, you'll also have the same sixth sense. Once you master messaging, you'll know exactly what to say to trigger their intrigue buttons so they want to become a client. Now here are the three main pain points that I solve. Category one, just sold. I just sold my business. Now what?

Now, what's going on inside their head is what I really want to do is, or the reason I was doing what I was doing so that I could, or I have all the money I need. I want to create bigger impact, more purpose, and do something as lifestyle compatible, without so many moving parts. I want simplicity, I want elegance, but I'm not ready to retire. I have more in me for another act or two. I'm bored. I'm ready for my act. 2345, but I'm not sure what I should do next. What do you think I should do? Mike, those are magical words, by the way.

Now Category Two are seeking to maximize revenue. Here's someone who says, I know I'm leaving money on the table. I want to 10x my revenue so I can sell my products and services for a higher price to a better customer. What's going on inside their head is, how do I get my message out there? How do I go big and grow an audience? How do I become more relevant? How do I monetize this vision beyond my company, we want to grow our business 10x or more. We have a great stake, but we lack sizzle. We have a great product to sell, but I know we aren't charging what it's worth, and our messaging and positioning is off, or we're looking for ways to create MRR that's monthly recurring revenue, or turn our IP or intellectual property into new products, services or passive income.

Category three, I've outgrown my current business. As I like to say, this happened to me. I've outgrown who I am, what I do, why do it, and who I do it for. I'm stuck, I'm bored. I've forgotten how to think big or think outside the box. I'm depressed, suicidal. I'm afraid to admit this to anyone around me, because I don't want to scare them away or admit that I don't have all the answers. I'm supposed to be the leader. I'm pigeon holed into category X when I'm capable of doing so much more. Now, what's going on inside their head is, as a founder or CEO, I don't feel valued in my own organization. I've evolved as a human being, and I want to express myself creatively and be valued for who I am versus what I do know or appear to be. I want to grow this business and sell it so that I can create my next act.

Okay, now you have three strategies that you can stack to help you define the perfect people you want to be a hero. To start with simplest exercise and map out the demographics and psychographics of your favorite people, your favorite clients, and add dimension to that exercise by creating your perfect Prospect Profile. If you have the experience to amplify that profile, use the pain approach. Once you have a detailed description of your market, you can use these assets in a number of ways, from onboarding team members to preparing marketing collateral. Our next step is to figure out how you're going to make some cash.