Meet Bud Michael | A decision for a lifetime

I attended a small high school in a small farming town in Central California. For most of the kids with who I grew up, their life’s ambition was to attend a local college, return to the town and live happily ever after.

I was very active in high school and graduated at the top of my class. It was a small school. When I was a senior in high school, the college counselor at my school suggested I not bother applying to major universities; instead, her guidance was to attend a local junior college and see where it takes me. That moment was when I made a life choice to follow my own direction. This decision was the most important decision I have made and has guided my choices in all aspects of my life from that moment on.

I have had many wonderful opportunities in my career, and I have not pursued my career in the typical straight-line progression. Rather than stay with large, publicly-traded companies and move up the organization ladder, many years ago I chose to forge my own ladder. I left big corporations because I wanted my fingerprints to matter. I didn’t want to be measured by incrementally better performance over the person I was replacing. And, I was impatient to make a difference – on my own terms.

I didn’t take the advice of my high school guidance counselor. I applied to Stanford University and got in. When I graduated from Stanford with an Economics degree, I was hired by Intel Corporation – this at a time when supposedly only Electrical Engineers were hired by Intel. Thus began my career in technology.

I often think about the advice I was given as a kid in high school. I have made decisions I would make differently in hindsight. But, I would not have ever strayed from following my own compass.

The path I’ve taken to where I am in my career and life has been untraditional. After graduating with an Economics degree from Stanford University, I found my way to a marketing job at Intel Corporation. That was forty-three years ago and I have never ventured far away from high tech.

Now, four decades later, I am giving back whatever career experiences I can to entrepreneurs who are starting businesses, who are leading businesses to the middle markets ($10M+ annual revenue), and who are planning for their eventual business exit. As a Mentor/Coach for TrueSpace, I work with CEOs committed to building their business to the middle market. TrueSpace has a proprietary methodology that was created after seven years of hands-on research studying businesses with revenue between $1M and $10M. The research was done in an attempt to discover why less than three percent of businesses who make it to $1M ever make it to $10M. The outcome of the research is the TrueSpace Five Conditions Framework. We use a 97 question assessment tool that was created for TrueSpace by Gallup to provide a data-driven, objective evaluation of the business. This Five Condition Assessment (5CA) forms the basis for our work with these entrepreneurs.

My career has spanned the full gamut of high tech – hardware, software and services. I have had the honor to be CEO of five businesses ranging in size from pre-revenue (a restart) to well into the middle market. I have successfully sold three businesses and have raised several millions of dollars from investors. I am now in a time of my career and life to give back to other business leaders by helping them avoid the cul-de-sacs I have found in my forty-three years. It’s great work.

I’d like to recognize two organizations that help build businesses in Colorado. Innosphere Ventures is a science and technology business incubator. Innosphere works with launch and startup stage businesses to help them figure out product/market fit and raise first institutional investor capital.

TrueSpace works with post-startup, emerging growth stage businesses to help them get to $10M annual revenue. TrueSpace has a proprietary, science-based model called the Five Conditions Framework that provides an objective assessment to give CEOs a data-driven way to know where to focus their resources.

Both Innosphere Ventures and TrueSpace exist to create jobs by supporting the growth of businesses.