Earlier than I get an opportunity to ask about his entrepreneurship methods, or his quite a few bestselling books and even the nonprofit work that’s meant to be the main focus of our dialog right this moment, Mike Koenigs has a complete string of questions for me.

“Would you like me to file this?” he needs to know. “I can do it in a number of methods, together with a full transcript and every thing else. And would you want high-quality video as properly?”

By the point I ask Koenigs a single query about his work with startups or the fundraising he’s achieved for the Simply Like My Baby Basis, he’s despatched me a personal YouTube hyperlink to a 4K video of our Zoom dialog, a real-time transcript through Otter.ai and a handful of different property I gained’t even have time to dig into till after we grasp up. “Full nerd assault, whether or not you prefer it or not,” he chuckles.

It looks like Koenigs in a nutshell: energetic, enthusiastic and very useful, utilizing all the cutting-edge know-how he’s mastered over the course of his profession to make everybody’s life a bit simpler. He has the instruments to succeed; he needs to be sure you have them. He needs us all to.

Who’s Mike Koenigs?

Koenigs is an immensely pushed man. Generally known as “the Superpower Accelerator,” his days are spent serving to companies and people reinvent themselves to be the absolute best model they are often. Principally, he says, “We construct complete manufacturers in per week.

“We meet with founders, and we’ll invent the model—we’ll do the packaging, positioning, messaging, content material, movies, the supply—and have it prepared so you can begin promoting one thing inside days,” he continues. “And we do round 20 of these a 12 months. We’ve achieved over 100 since I began doing this.”

Simply Like My Baby Basis

However Koenigs’ penchant for entrepreneurship is rivaled by his charitable work, particularly with the Simply Like My Baby Basis. Based by Koenigs’ spouse, Vivian, in 2006, Simply Like My Baby has delivered packages in well being care companies, schooling, microenterprise, social justice, management and empowerment to greater than 200,000 individuals in rural communities of central Uganda and Senegal. (The work is a household affair: For his bar mitzvah, Koenigs’ son Zak raised sufficient cash to construct a library in Uganda.) Their main focus is on supporting girls and younger women; the thought is that specializing in adolescent women can impact generational change in these communities.

“To me, we now have a social duty, not simply to our personal communities however to the world, to maintain younger women protected,” Koenigs says. He believes that to interrupt the cycle of poverty, younger women must be educated—each at school and in realizing their rights—and saved out of hurt’s approach, in order that they’re not solely empowered, but in addition totally able to making their very own choices on whether or not to get married or have youngsters.

To this point, the group has constructed seven college constructions and reworked the Bishop Asili Hospital in Uganda’s Luweero District from a struggling well being clinic to a state-of-the-art medical facility—full with an working room and dental heart. That might be spectacular sufficient by itself, besides it’s not all Simply Like My Baby does. Koenigs is very happy with Simply Like My Baby’s Lady Energy Challenge®, a program designed to maintain women at school and train them about their our bodies, stopping unplanned pregnancies and compelled youngster marriage. It’s a self-replicating curriculum, taught in easy, easy language that may empower younger girls and actually change lives.

Mike Koenigs needs to democratize know-how

In every thing he does—with private {and professional} growth, with Simply Like My Baby, and with Wealth Longevity Worldwide, the early detection well being care firm he based after surviving stage 3 most cancers in 2012—Koenigs makes use of the identical know-how that’s turn into basic to him in a enterprise software sense. “I’ve a view that the democratization of know-how goes to deliver much more wealth and abundance to the world,” he says. “And I additionally imagine that entrepreneurship is a global language of peace and abundance.”

As AI companies turn into each extra highly effective and extra accessible, Koenigs has a imaginative and prescient of bringing these instruments and the mindset of integrative various medication to creating nations, “the place not solely do they not have the mindsets, they don’t have the instruments and the sources,” he explains. He references a program referred to as DoctorGPT, which might truly cross america Medical Licensing Examination—what if everybody, in each group, had a software like that, letting them take actual possession over their medical care?

To be clear, Koenigs doesn’t see himself among the many “unrealistic entrepreneurs” or “big-hearted givers,” the individuals who—well-meaning as they could be—don’t have a scalable, cost-effective plan to empower the underserved.

“I feel handouts breed resentment and entitlement,” he notes. “Immediately, you suppose that in some way you deserve one thing that you simply didn’t earn. That isn’t to say I don’t imagine in social duty. However I feel an entrepreneurial mindset is wholesome as a result of, once more, it’s centered on offering worth.”

Mike Koenigs is right here to assist

Earlier than we are saying our goodbyes, Koenigs has a number of extra affords of assist. He’ll ship over a current webinar he did with Tony Robbins (“there’s nice instruments in there”), and he’s glad to provide away copies of his books (“I feel it helps you dream greater and higher”). Amongst his bestsellers is one referred to as Referral Social gathering, which helps construct a referral enterprise; one other one, Punch the Elephant, covers the difficult matter of promoting extra successfully. “Punching the elephant within the room as quickly as you stroll in, principally,” he chuckles.

What he actually needs is for individuals to have the facility—and the instruments—to make nice modifications of their lives, whether or not that’s by certainly one of his talking engagements, by working with him straight or by any certainly one of his books.

“Essentially the most profitable individuals are nice storytellers,” he smiles. “Essentially the most profitable leaders are nice storytellers. You’ve gotta encourage to maneuver mountains.” 

This text initially appeared in January/February 2024 problem of SUCCESS Journal. Picture courtesy of Simply Like My Baby Basis.

Cassel is a Minneapolis-based author and editor, a co-owner of Racket MN, and a VHS collector.