A company can invest a lot in its people and still watch the same problems keep coming back. The difficult conversation gets avoided. A decision gets reopened after the meeting. A high performer creates tension nobody wants to address. The CEO keeps getting pulled in to solve problems the team should be able to handle.

Julie Holunga calls those patterns part of the hidden cost of growth.

In this episode of the Sly Fox Podcast, Lindsay Sutula sits down with Julie, a Fractional Leadership & Culture Partner who helps professional services firms build stronger leadership habits into the way people actually work together.

Julie has spent years coaching and training leaders, and she kept seeing the same thing: people would leave a workshop energized, try something new for a few weeks, and eventually fall back into old habits. That experience led her to build the Trusted Leadership Operating System, six disciplines covering the everyday behaviors, decisions, meetings, communication, feedback, and candor that shape a company’s culture.

Julie and Lindsay talk about the gap between good intentions and actual impact, why leaders avoid difficult conversations until the cost gets much bigger, and how clear expectations help CEOs move from solving everyone’s problems to coaching their teams through them.

They also get into one of Julie’s simplest pieces of advice for leaders: pause. Give yourself enough time to understand your reaction, simplify what you actually need to say, and respond with intention.

About the Guest

Julie Holunga is a Fractional Leadership & Culture Partner who works with professional services firms to strengthen leadership communication, trust, and alignment in day-to-day work. She partners with senior leaders and teams to close the gap between leadership intent and impact—clarifying expectations for communication, feedback, and decision-making and embedding them into how teams actually operate. Clients describe Julie as a trusted, steady presence who helps leaders navigate difficult conversations and build confidence in moments that matter. Her work is grounded in the Trusted Leadership Operating System®, a practical framework for leading with clarity and credibility under real-world pressure.

Connect with Julie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieholunga/

Website: https://www.julieholunga.com/

Key Takeaways

Growth gets expensive when small problems keep compounding. Rework, unclear ownership, avoided conversations, and decisions that keep getting reopened can quietly cost a company time, people, clients, and opportunities. Julie describes them as small moments that can eventually become an avalanche.

Pay attention to the gap between intention and impact. A leader can have a perfectly good intention and create a very different experience for the person on the receiving end. Culture gets shaped by what people experience every day and by the behaviors leaders consistently allow.

Give people an operating system they can actually use. Julie built six disciplines around behaviors, meetings, communication, candor, feedback, and decisions so teams have shared expectations to return to when something goes sideways.

The goal is to become the coach people need less often. Julie knows the system is working when clients call her less. The same applies to CEOs: instead of stepping into every conflict, they can help their people handle it themselves and save their own attention for higher-value work.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with B2B leaders, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.

Episode Summary

Every operating system for running a company better — EOS, Scaling Up, take your pick — assumes you already know what’s wrong. Bud Michael has used most of them, and recommends them. He also thinks that assumption is where most CEOs get stuck.

Bud has sat in the CEO seat five times, from pre-revenue startups to middle-market companies, with three exits and four decades in technology that started at Intel. He’s now Managing Director of Renaissance Management Services and a certified advisor in the TrueSpace Business Builder Program, working from a 5 Conditions Assessment that TrueSpace built with Gallup across 2,500 companies.

He opens somewhere unexpected: the loneliness. The board has expectations, and there are things you won’t say to them. From there he walks Lindsay through the founder trap — Ichak Adizes’ term for the biggest reason companies stall after the first couple million — and shows how it’s really a hiring loop powered by the founder’s own competence. Then the harder discipline: telling a high-value customer from a customer who will quietly cost you, and being willing to say no to the logo you’d love on your website.

Along the way: why businesses exist for human beings rather than other businesses, why scale is about profitability rather than revenue, and what it actually takes to get an outside view of your own company — which, as Bud puts it, requires an out-of-body experience, and it’s hard when it’s your body.

About the Guest

Bud has 45 years of experience in high technology for industry leading hardware, software and services companies. He has held executive level sales, marketing and general management positions with large, industry-leading product companies including Intel, Tandem Computer, Sequent Computers and KANA Software. Bud has been CEO at five privately funded technology and data services companies where he led the scaling of these businesses, selling three of these companies to strategic buyers. In addition to serving on the Boards of these five companies, Bud has been an independent Board representative for two privately held technology companies.

Bud is Managing Director at Renaissance Management Services, a management consulting firm that works with the CEOs of emerging mid-market businesses to help them scale. He is a certified advisor in the TrueSpace Business Builder Program.

Connect with Bud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/budmichael

Renaissance Management Services: https://renaissancemgtsvcs.com

Key Takeaways

The first thing that changes in the CEO seat is that you run out of people to talk to. Asked what five turns in the chair taught him, Bud didn’t go strategic. He went human.

The founder trap is a hiring loop, and it runs on your own competence. This is the biggest reason companies stall after the first million or two in revenue.

The call almost never starts with strategy. It starts with a chair you can’t fill.

Alignment starts with a human being, not a market. “Businesses don’t exist for other businesses; they exist for a human being.” That’s where Bud starts: why the company exists and who specifically it’s for.

A high-value customer is a partner. Growth doesn’t come from selling your ego. The high-value customer buys into your purpose first, costs less to keep, fits culturally, and refers others like themselves.

What a good advisor does is stay unencumbered by gravity. Bud is specific about who he won’t work with: CEOs who think they’re the sharpest knife in the drawer, and anyone whose board or investors pushed them into it.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with founders and leaders from across B2B, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.

Episode Summary

There is a specific kind of trouble that only comes from winning. The company grows, and the growth starts breaking things. Decisions pile up on one desk, the same problems keep coming back, and holding it together starts to depend on a few people being heroic on a Tuesday. In this episode of the Sly Fox Podcast, Lindsay Sutula sits down with Alecia Huck, founder of Maverick & Company, who has spent more than twenty years helping companies through exactly that.

The companies Alecia works with have entered what she calls Phase Two: that messy stretch where a company has outgrown founder-led execution but has not yet built the systems to scale. Her position is unusually blunt for her industry. She does not do motivation, personality coaching, or culture work disconnected from how the business actually runs. The work is structural, moving authority, decision rights, and accountability out of the founder’s head and into the organization.

The centerpiece is accountability. Alecia reframes it from an emotional, moral idea into a design problem built on three things: clarity, structure, and ownership. She and Lindsay get into why your org chart is usually a lie, how to delegate with her goldfish, puppy, and baby test, and why the goal is a company that runs without the founder in the room.

About the Guest

Alecia Huck is a management consultant who specializes in Phase 2 companies. Organizations where growth and complexity have overwhelmed the existing management structures. She installs the structures, accountability, decision-making processes, and operating discipline required to operate at scale. Working directly with executive teams, Alecia helps teams go from managing by proximity, effort, and personal relationships to systems, processes, and tools that can continue to growth with the organization.

Connect with Alecia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleciahuckmaverick

Maverick & Company: https://www.maverickandcompany.com

Key Takeaways

The trouble Alecia works on is the kind that only comes from winning. Growth breaks the informal systems that got a company here: the founder is still the operating system, decisions still route through one desk, and everyone is busier than ever while quality starts to slip. Working harder does not fix it, because the problem is structural.

Most leaders treat accountability as a hard conversation they need to get better at. Alecia reframes it as a system. We inherit our accountability models from parents and teachers, so it turns emotional and even moral, where good people are accountable and bad people are not, which she says is neither true nor useful. The move is to design the conditions that make accountability possible.

Her accountability system rests on three things: clarity, structure, and ownership. Clarity is the biggest precondition: name one owner, define what done looks like, and set when it is due. As Alecia puts it, you could save six figures in consulting fees just by training your team to ask who is responsible, what needs to get done, and when it is due.

Her goldfish, puppy, and baby test is a memorable way to match oversight to the stakes of the work. The bigger point is founder independence: get the special thing out of your head and onto paper so it can run without you. Her closing idea doubles as a marketing truth. If your company sounds like everyone else, the right clients will never find you.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with founders and leaders from across B2B, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.