Ah, the thrill of success as a budding entrepreneur. Michalowicz is a lifelong entrepreneur with many impressive wins in his portfolio. But in retrospect, some of his early efforts weren't as successful as he thought at the time. These days, he's not so thrilled with his early years. On paper, his ventures made a lot of money and influenced a lot of people. It just turned out that his measures of success were all wrong . “I got sucked into the vanity metrics…how big was my business in terms of revenue and in terms of people,” says Michalowicz.

With these as references, he approached other entrepreneurs and asked them about their own vanity metrics, gauged their income and team size, and then fought to employee email database stay on top. But even when his own numbers were high, his businesses weren't thriving where it really mattered. “I didn't have an appreciation around money. I had arrogance and ignorance,” Michalowicz says, “and [these two] together are a deadly combination. Despite growing revenues, Michalowicz's businesses posted horrendous profits and cash flow. This made for an extremely stressful time, and Michalowicz found himself begging customers to pay early just to cover basic expenses. "I foolishly thought that if I took care of [income], the rest of the business would take care of itself," Michalowicz says. This is not the case, and he now opines that income is actually a stress point.

The more revenue a business generates, the more stress it creates. Michalowicz's skewed outlook on income and money was not the only factor in his ultimate demise. It was when he sold his businesses that Michalowicz embarked on a path of false success and security, a path that ultimately led him to lose everything. After selling his businesses, Michalowicz called himself an angel investor. But his investment practices were hardly angelic. It only took two years of brazen investments to leave his bank account empty. Ten bankrupt companies later, Michalowicz had gone from a millionaire in his early 30s to penniless. “I prefer to be called 'the angel of death' because I was so bad. I was so out of place, in an area that was not in my skill set,” Michalowicz says. Rebuilding a career with heart As despicable as his corporate failures were, what happened next for Michalowicz was even more humiliating — in the face of his family.