The signs were always there. Now you can read them.
Most business crises are signal failures no one read in time. Vital Signs gives entrepreneurs the diagnostic framework to see them coming.
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Warning signs hide in everyday decisions, team dynamics, and balance sheets, and they go unread until it's too late.
The problem is rarely effort or talent. Most entrepreneurs simply have no reliable way to read what’s happening under the surface of their business while there’s still time to respond. That is, until now.
Over two decades working with founders and executives, entrepreneur and advisor Jakob Michaelis kept watching the same forces decide which companies lasted and which came apart. Vital Signs connects the work of more than 75 leading thinkers across six disciplines that rarely speak to each other, and examines the outcomes of more than 45 real companies, from breakout successes to public downfalls. The result is a traceable pattern. The Vital6™ are six elements that determine the health of any business, in any industry, at any stage.
The Vital6 are Mindset, Strategy, Market, Execution, Finance, and Leadership. Strength and balance among all six elements are the new measurement of business vitality. Balance without strength stalls growth; strength without balance collapses companies. Monitoring these six elements is how you pick up on the signals long before the numbers on a scorecard catch up.
Whether you're launching a startup, running a small business, or scaling a company toward its next stage, you'll learn to diagnose your business honestly, act on the signals early, and lead with clarity.
The Foundation
Part I reveals why business failure follows a predictable pattern, and how the six elements function as one interconnected system.
The Six Elements
Part II builds your fluency in each element, with the tools, mental models, and diagnostics to read any business, including your own.
The Application
Part III puts the Vital6 in motion, showing how the system embeds in your team and moves through the seasons of growth to build something that lasts.
The Author
Jakob Michaelis is a lifelong entrepreneur, eight-time startup founder, CEO, and transformation specialist who has spent more than two decades in the field building companies, advising founders, and studying the patterns that separate businesses that last from those that don't. He is the CEO and founder of Auxigen, where the framework powers a diagnostic purpose-built to make the invisible conditions of business health visible early enough that leaders can choose to act on them.
Twenty years of direct work with founders and leadership teams, combined with deep research into well-documented failures, revealed the same systemic truth: strength in isolated domains doesn't ensure survival. Equilibrium across six interconnected domains does. Jakob built Auxigen and wrote Vital Signs to operationalize that pattern recognition and put it in the hands of every leader bold enough to build something durable.
Jakob also speaks and leads for executive groups across the United States and works with a growing network of accelerators, incubators, and entrepreneurial support organizations to bring diagnostic intelligence to founders at every stage.
He lives in Conway, Arkansas, with his wife and three children.
