GrowthWays Partners

09/08/2026

I’ve learned more about leadership from my mother than from anyone else…

In the early 1990s, the Cleveland Clinic tried to give my mother an office.

Not just any office. One of the big mahogany ones. Corner view, her own secretary, the kind of office that signals you’ve made it inside a hospital system that size.

By then she’d earned it.

She started as an operating room scrub nurse and worked her way up over the years to administrative director of the entire Department of Surgery, an organization made up of thousands of people ranging from housekeepers to surgeons.

She turned the office down.

Her reasoning was simple, and she said it plainly. “I’m running surgery. I need to be in surgery.”

So instead of the mahogany office, she took a storage room inside the surgical department. No window. Barely enough space for two desks. She shared it with her assistant, and that’s where she ran a massive department for years.

I asked her about it once: why she’d trade the corner office for a supply closet.

She told me if you actually want to know what’s going on in a business, you have to be in it, not a 20-minute walk away. And you don’t learn about the department by getting to know the doctors or the administrators. You start with the housekeepers and patient transporters. The people doing the physical, unglamorous work that keeps everything running.

Then you work your way up. Nurses and techs next. Doctors and executives come last, not first.

I’ve sat in a lot of boardrooms since then. Worked with a lot of founders and executives who could tell you their revenue to the dollar and couldn’t tell you what their frontline team actually dealt with day to day.

If you want to really know what’s going on in a business, start at the proverbial “mail room” and work your way up to the executive floors. You’ll know all there is to know before you even get to the top floor.

I still think about that storage room more than most business books I’ve read.

09/04/2026

Naturally NorCal held a happy hour in Petaluma last week for the natural products community up here.

Founders, service providers, the people building this industry from the ground up.

Unfortunately, I was out of town.

So my associate, Santino, went instead.

He spent the night talking with founders, some early in the build and some further along, and with the service providers around them. The finance people. The packaging partners. The ones who keep the operational side of this industry actually running.

Nothing too formal. Just conversations, the kind that eventually turn into real relationships.

He said it was a good crowd, and he’s already planning to be at more of these.

Events like this are why this industry stays as connected as it is. Naturally NorCal puts in the work to build these rooms, and it shows.

Grateful they keep doing it. I plan on being at more of these myself.

09/03/2026

Last week we hosted a LinkedIn Live.

One of the best moments came from working backward.

Start with your EBITDA multiple. In our space right now, banking data puts that around 13x.

Say you want to sell for $100M. That means you need roughly $8M in EBITDA.

The part most founders skip: gross margin.

More in the clip below.

09/02/2026

The day we sold Ganeden for $155M...

I wasn’t the only one who got paid.

Every person in the company did. Equity, a transaction bonus, or both, was tied directly to the sale.

That wasn’t a last-minute gesture. We’d built it that way for years, going back to when Ganeden was a fraction of the size it became.

Here’s why:

I'd watched the other version of this story play out at companies around us. A founder and two or three execs structure the deal around themselves. Everyone else, the people who actually built the product, ran the plants, and managed the customers, finds out after the deal is signed.

Some of them lose their jobs in the integration. Most of them never see a dollar of the upside they helped create.

I didn’t want to build that company.

So when we structured comp and equity at Ganeden, the question wasn’t just "what do I need to stay motivated?" It was "what does everyone in this building need to stay bought in, all the way through an exit that might take a decade to happen."

When the BC30 business finally sold, that decision paid off in a way I didn’t fully expect.

Not just because people got paid, though they did, and that mattered. Because the business itself was strong enough to sell.

Kerry Group wasn’t buying me. They were buying a team, products, a process, a company that could run without me standing in the middle of every decision.

I’ve talked to other founders since who sold and watched the acquirer discover, months later, that the business only worked because the founder was still in the room. That the team underneath him was never built to carry it alone.

Building equity into the whole team wasn’t just the fair thing to do.

It was what made the business actually sellable.

08/20/2026

The best time to get outside advice isn’t when your business is in trouble.

It’s when it’s working, but not as well as it should be.

I see this all the time.

The product is strong. Revenue is growing. But growth is slower than expected, the commercial strategy isn’t quite clear, and the team is pursuing three or four opportunities instead of one clear direction.

Nothing is obviously broken, so nothing changes.

And that’s the trap.

Companies can spend years growing slowly. Not because they have a bad business, but because they never stopped long enough to decide exactly where they’re going and what deserves their focus.

Growth stage isn’t too early to get help.

It may be the best time.

Early enough that the big decisions are still reversible. Late enough that there’s real data to make better ones.

If your business is working, but you have a nagging feeling it should be working better, that’s probably worth paying attention to.

Have a great weekend.

08/17/2026

Last call.

Tomorrow, 10 AM PT.

My LinkedIn Live Event.

What makes a business attractive to acquirers, even if you never sell.

Hope to see you there :)

08/13/2026

We’ve built some really cool things for the Guardrailing Leadership Cohort.

One of them is a 53 question self-assessment across five dimensions.

Think of it kind of like a work style/priority assessment, but hyperfocused for leaders.

The areas it focuses on:

→ Strategic Clarity: Do you actually know your Destination.

→ Decision Architecture: How you decide, not just what you decide.

→ Values Alignment: Whether your actions match what you say matters.

→ Leadership Style: How you actually show up, not how you think you show up.

→ Sustainability Index: Whether the pace you're running is one you can keep.

Every member does it before we sit down for their first coaching debrief.

It will be taken twice: Once at the beginning of the cohort, and also at the end.

I’m really excited to see the life-changing transformations people have.

Have a great rest of your week,

Mike

(P.S. if you may be interested in joining, drop a comment or DM)

08/12/2026

Sophomore year of high school.

My guidance counselor called my mother in for a meeting.

He'd looked at my grades. He had a recommendation.

Skip the rest of school → Go to vocational school → Become a welder, like my dad.

He wasn't trying to be cruel. He was reading the data in front of him, I graduated with a GPA under 2.0.

No college was recruiting me. We couldn't have afforded one even if they had been.

So I went the only direction that was open. A two-year technical program. $655 a quarter, lab fees and books included.

I worked 7:00 to 3:30 every day as an entry hospital equipment technician to pay for it.

I didn't walk across a stage for my bachelor's degree until I was 38 years old.

By the time I finally got that degree... we'd already done four exits.

Four. Before the piece of paper the guidance counselor thought I'd never receive.

I think about him sometimes. Not with any anger. He was looking at the only evidence he had, and the evidence said I was going to struggle.

He just didn't know what he was actually looking at.

So till this day, I keep this story in mind when looking at the founders I work with now.

I don’t care about the résumé. I care about what's actually there.

If you're building something and want another set of eyes on it, drop a comment or shoot me a DM.

08/06/2026

I read an interesting insight from Informa's *Navigating Natural* last week.

They argued that purpose-driven innovation is no longer just a marketing strategy, it's becoming a competitive advantage. Consumers care about what a company stands for, and increasingly, so do investors, partners, and acquirers.

I think that's true, but I'd take it a step further.

Earlier this month I joined the year long “Purpose Fellowship” at the Modern Elder Academy and even during this first week’s on-site workshop I've learned that purpose isn't something you write down. It's who you are and the framework by which all of your decisions are made..

A clear purpose acts like a Destination. It doesn't just inspire people; it creates Guardrails.

It helps you know which opportunities to pursue, which partnerships to embrace, and, perhaps most importantly, which ones to walk away from.

I've watched companies say no to meaningful revenue because would have taken them away from what they were trying to build (their purpose/destination).

Those decisions weren't easy, but they created businesses that became stronger, more focused, and ultimately more valuable.

I've also seen the opposite.

Companies with inspiring mission statements that slowly drifted off course because every opportunity looked too good to pass up.

Over time, they lost clarity.

Not because they lacked ambition, but because they lacked a Destination that guided their decisions.

Purpose isn't a substitute for building a great product. Your product still has to deliver.

But when purpose and performance are aligned, something powerful happens.

🔹 Decisions become clearer.
🔹 Teams become more aligned.
🔹 Your customers know what you stand for.

One of the things I've appreciated most since joining the Purpose Fellowship is being surrounded by leaders who don't view purpose as a branding exercise.

They see it as the compass that shapes the decisions they make every day.

That's where purpose creates its greatest value, not in what you say, but in what it helps you choose.

What's one decision your company's purpose has helped you make?

08/05/2026

I’ve seen it happen to countless businesses…

The investment that makes you look more like a real company can quietly make you worth less.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

A company reaches a certain size and starts wanting to build its own manufacturing capacity. From the inside, the logic feels airtight.

→ You stop depending on co-packers
→ You own your quality and your timelines
→ You have real infrastructure, real ownership
→ You finally have something concrete to show for the years of work

And on a company tour, nothing strokes an ego like walking someone through a plant with your name on it.

Here's what that logic misses.

Most founders in this spot have a rough idea of who may eventually buy them. A strategic. A larger player already operating at scale.

And a player already operating at scale typically has manufacturing capacity. Often more than they need.

So when they look at your company, your brand-new facility isn't a capability they're excited to pay for.

It's a redundant asset. Something they'd consolidate or shut down after close.

Redundant assets don't lift a valuation. They drag it. You spent real capital building the exact thing that hands the buyer a reason to negotiate down.

The plant made the ego feel good. It didn't make the company more valuable to the one buyer who mattered.

None of this means owning production is wrong. For some companies it's the entire advantage, and a smart acquirer will pay up for it. The point is you can't tell which situation you're in until you're honest about where you're actually going.

That's what Destination clarity does. It takes a decision that feels huge and emotional and makes it almost obvious.

These calls are some of the highest-leverage ones I've been part of. Not because they were flashy. Because they quietly saved companies a fortune at close.

I’m hosting a Live Event on LinkedIn on the 18th of this month. I’m going to be talking about all things exit readiness, common founder misconceptions, and tactics I use to make great decisions.

Come join us! Link below.

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