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.