The same pattern, over and over.
Michael has spent his career inside the numbers and the operations of small and mid-sized organizations. As a CPA, he saw the same pattern repeat: good businesses, run by capable owners, held back not by effort or talent but by the absence of a management system.
He has also lived the other side of the table. Michael built and sold his first business, an FDA-licensed pharmaceutical repackaging company, in a sale he negotiated with venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the investor behind Amazon and Google. He knows what makes a business worth buying because he built one.
Everything lived in the owner's head. Everything ran through the owner's desk. And when it came time to grow, step back, or sell, the business couldn't stand on its own.
The teaching came before the toolset. Michael created the Best Management Practices courses for the University of Chicago, lectured at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and DePaul University, built the Six Steps to SuperGrowth class for Loyola University, and wrote the ManageHub Strategy, the step-by-step playbook behind the system. Chicago's Duman Center of Entrepreneurship named his program Most Innovative Program of the Year.
ManageHub is his answer. By translating the U.S. Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework into four practical tools, Michael gives leaders a way to capture reality, structure decisions, drive execution, and build organizational learning, until excellence becomes the company way instead of the owner's burden.
Today, as an official partner of the Baldrige Foundation Institute for Performance Excellence, Michael teaches the QuickStart workshops, leads the Accelerator cohorts, and works privately with leaders in the Inner Circle.
Participants call him a great teacher. He'd rather you call him after your business runs a week without you.