Episode 438 — AMMA — Lessons Learned From 5,000 Days of Crisp
“If I failed, I wanted it to be 100% my fault.”
In this special episode of The Game Changing Attorney Podcast, Michael and Jessica Mogill reflect on 5000 days of building Crisp. They walk through the dark ages of working out of a dental office with $500 and no idea what they were doing, the years of building real infrastructure and systems, the $8 million Game Changers Summit at Mercedes-Benz Stadium that became their moon landing, and the final evolution where Michael removed himself as the bottleneck entirely. This is an unfiltered look at what building a nine-figure company actually requires at each stage: pure grit when you know nothing, relentless focus on brand when everyone’s watching, and the discipline to build systems that work without you.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why working 100 hours a week got them to seven figures but would have capped them there forever
- How the brand became the only competitive advantage that matters and why people who hated them still respected what they built
- What it means to go from hustler to manager to leader to CEO to owner, and why each evolution requires letting go of what got you there
5000 days. Zero debt. 100% ownership. Built by people who believed before there was anything to believe in.
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Show Notes:
Working 100 hours a week is a terrible competitive advantage. “If you’re listening and you’ve said things like, ‘I could outwork anyone, this is a badge of honor.’ I think you were there for the early years. Later on, it’s no longer the competitive advantage of how hard you can work. If you have a team of 100 people and you are the hardest-working person in that place, how do you scale that?”
Ownership of the success or failure for your business creates accountability. “I would rather live in a world where if I failed and the whole business went under, I would know 100% that it was my fault. If I was working for someone and they made certain decisions, I could be working really hard but the business could still go under. I wouldn’t have that control.”
Brand is everything in the age of commoditization. “I have learned that it’s all brand. Especially today, in the age of AI, commoditization, and saturation. People hire those they know, like and trust, and that means they have to know you. If you don’t have a brand, they probably don’t know you, they certainly don’t like you, and they certainly don’t trust you.”
Freedom is built by designing a firm that runs without you. “The value of your business is inversely proportional to its dependency on you. The more your firm depends on you, the less valuable it is. If something happened to you, if you were in court, if you want to go on vacation, if you really want to create true freedom, then you create a business that’s not dependent on you for the day-to-day.”
Nothing depends on me anymore. “I kind of don’t do anything anymore. What I mean by that is nothing is dependent on me. If I’m not here, everything still gets done. It only took us 5000 days to get to that point, but that’s also enabled the business to really scale without its dependency.”
Zero debt, 100% ownership, built on lessons learned. “We have zero debt on the business. We own 100% of it. We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. We’re well-resourced. We can invest in hiring the people we want. It’s just because of all those lessons learned over the last 13 plus years.”
Connect with Michael
- Text directly at 404-531-7691
