This week’s Entrepreneur University comes thanks to Mike Michalowicz who  is the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and has written two other posts for the Young Entrepreneur Blog.

Congratulations! Your company has officially turned a profit! What? You didn’t get the memo? You thought your business was months, years away from the blessed black? Whoa! You must be thrilled to get this news. You must feel like doing a little happy dance, maybe even hopping down to the corner store for a celebratory six-pack.

Hold on, bucko. You’ve got two teeny, tiny, no-big-deal steps to take before you can count your chickens, err, cash. It will take all of five minutes, I promise. And then you can call your Mom.

•    First, open an interest-bearing escrow account online, one that even the entire Ocean’s Eleven team can’t access. You’ve got to guard those pennies from that thief in your office – YOU.

•    Next, transfer 5% of your last deposit into the account. That’s it. You’re done. (Until your next deposit, that is.)

Yeah!!! Tell all your Facebook friends, write your hometown newspaper, and stop total strangers on the street. Your business just officially turned a profit!  And will do it CONSISTENTLY!

The simple truth about cultivating a profitable business is you already have a profitable business, you’re just putting the profit back in the pool to be spent on new desk chairs and late night pizza runs. You’ve got to take that profit FIRST and put it where the sun don’t shine – or in the bank. Whatever you prefer.

This system, what I refer to as the Profit First Account (PFA), allows you to make a profit off of every sale. Not bad. Not bad at all. I know, I know, you’re wondering how the heck you’re supposed to run your business when you’re skimming 5% off the top? Easy. You adjust.

Five percent is doable. After a few weeks, you won’t even notice. You will adjust your spending, planning, and even your thinking to accommodate the swelling profits in your PFA. You’ll forget about the things you thought you needed and make do with what you have. (Come on, do you really need all of those paper clips? Join Office Depot Anonymous and get on with your life!)

Better yet, you will come up with scathingly brilliant ideas about how to best use the remaining 95% of your inbound revenue. In fact, you may actually come up with a remarkable innovation, one that could, say, catapult your business into the stratosphere of success. Imagine that.

The cherry on top of the PFA? Every quarter you get to take some of the money out and distribute it – TO YOURSELF. Eventually you’ll increase your percentage, transferring 10%-20% of each deposit into your PFA (at my company, we take 20% of every deposit). Whoa! Now you’re turning a massive profit for every single sale, building a multi-million dollar business one deposit at a time. Nice.

So, are you ready to party? Or you do you need to wait a minute for that transfer to go through?

Congrats!

You know what I say to people who call themselves failures? You wish! To fail is to have tried, to have given it your all and failed regardless. Most people don’t fail; most people give up too early or never even try. Those people are not failures. You’ve got to earn that title, man.

People who talk and talk…and talk about starting a business but never so much as conduct a Google search to learn more about it are not failures. Those who go to every seminar, read every book, and sign up for every coaching planet under the sun but still haven’t committed a business idea are not failures.

And the people who claim to have a business but really just have a few business cards and a nonfunctioning website, they’re not failures either. They’re all talk and no action, dreamers who never get off their butts and take action. How can you be a failure if you haven’t even tried?

For every person who spends most of their time wishing and hoping there is someone who started a real business with the intent to succeed, but gave up way too soon. They choke; they let competition and cash flow challenges spook them right out of achieving their dream. For whatever reason, be it fear of failure or fear of success, lack of self worth or other limiting beliefs, many would-be entrepreneurs jump ship at the first sign of trouble.

Some people have preconceived notions about entrepreneurialism that are a load of crap, believing starting their own business will free them from the grind of work and help them get rich in seconds flat. So it’s no surprise those people throw in the towel early on when they realize nothing could be father from the truth. But they’re not failures. Not even close. They’re quitters.

Failure happens. Sometimes you miss the mark, and sometimes circumstances are beyond your control. Remember, the best baseball players have a batting average of around 300, which means they fail at least more than half of the time. What they don’t do is sit on the bench and think about playing baseball, or give up on the first strike.

Mike Michalowicz is the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.

Launching a business is like going all in with Texas Hold ‘Em – you do it only when you know for sure you’ll win the hand. If you’re not sure, if you’re worried you might lose, you can call to see what happens for a minimal risk, or fold and hang on to your chips. But you can’t go all in. And you can’t launch a business until you are absolutely certain it will succeed.

Uncertainty is the death of great ideas and big plans. If you’re even the slightest bit wary of staying in, chances are you’re going to lose. Call it instinct, call it inexperience, something in you knows you might not win. Whether it’s based in realty or insecurity, your feeling is right. Once you open up the possibility of a different, losing outcome, odds are you’ll end up a loser.

In order to succeed in business – and in poker – you’ve got to be willing to bet the farm. When you go all in, you hold nothing back. No hedging. No waffling. No plan B. When you know you will win, there can be no retreat. So you better be sure you can pull it off.

Does this mean you need a fancy business plan and a room full of angel benefactors kissing your ass in order to launch with confidence? Nope. In fact, your chances of succeeding in business are much greater without them. Would you need an office, a staff, and a stack of embossed business cards in order to feel ready to go in to start-up mode? Heck, no. The trappings of “playing office” are distractions – expensive distractions – that have little to do with getting your business off the ground.

What you need, what you must have in order to win in poker, in business, and in life, is the unwavering belief that you will make it. Yes, you will also have to do some recon to make sure your idea is as innovative as you think it is, the timing is right, and your methodology is spot on. But none of that will make a bit of difference if you’re not totally convinced you will pull it off.

If you know for sure, go all in. The entrepreneurial world is high-stakes game and you’ve got to play to win.

Mike Michalowicz is the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.