The Fed doesn't know. You still have to make payroll.
The Federal Reserve released its meeting minutes this week, and the headline is not a decision, it is a confession. Officials are deeply divided over where inflation goes from here. Some see it cooling. Others see it sticking. The people whose job is to know do not know. What that means for you is not abstract: interest rates stay uncertain, borrowing stays expensive, and the cost of carrying debt or financing anything continues to bite. A steady owner does not wait for the Fed to agree before adjusting. You look at what you owe, what it costs you per month to owe it, and whether that number is something your current margins can absorb. That is the move. Not prediction. Position.
Mike Michalowicz built the principle this way: revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality. Most small businesses that close are not closing because no one was buying. They are closing because money came in, got spent on the next thing, and there was nothing left when the bill came due. Michalowicz watched this happen enough times, including to himself, that he built an entire operating system around one uncomfortable truth: if you wait until the end of the month to see what is left over, you will always find a way to spend it first. He documented this in *Profit First*, and the case behind it is his own company, which showed strong revenue right up until it nearly destroyed him. The fix is not complicated. It is a separate account. You move a percentage of every deposit into it before you pay anything else. The business then runs on what remains, which forces the business to be honest about what it actually costs to operate. With the Fed divided and input costs still unpredictable, that account is not optional discipline. It is the difference between being open in ninety days and not. Mike Michalowicz made a TEDx talk that walks through the formula in under eighteen minutes, find it by searching his name on YouTube, or start here: [Mike Michalowicz on TEDxFultonStreet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3HZef0YWoI).
Learn from someone who's done it: Mike Michalowicz — 'Profit First' is better for entrepreneurs than 'G.A.A.P.'