Mike’s entrepreneurial and executive background enables him to help most businesses in nearly every sector of business, however, there are areas where he is an expert.  These areas of expertise are discussed below.  Mike stresses the importance of working with counsel who doesn't just have the knowledge, but has also been there and done it, too.  Expertise shrinks the time and costs to get to organizational success and Value.

 

Organizational Value Architect (OVA)

Due to Mike's diverse business background, he has become an Organizational Value Architect.  An OVA is defined as a multi-skilled business executive who works with organizational leadership and stakeholders to design and implement strategies to improve the value of the organization and then works with the leadership team to implement the plan.  Value is the focus because it is the best indicator of true organizational health and success.

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Leadership - Assessment, Hiring, and Development

Mike is not sure how many leaders he has hired, trained and developed, but he estimates over 2,000. However, he is sure of one thing - he owes all of his success to these leaders' success.  He is most proud of how these leaders have gone on to be great leaders in other organizations, their own businesses, and entrepreneurs.

 

He has taken all of his experience and knowledge in all phases of leadership and developed a full complement of tools for other executives and organizations to assess, hire and develop Top Leaders.  All of these tools are under one banner of "LINO to Leader"™.  The tools include, but not limited to:

• Leadership Assessments (5 Sciences)

• Leadership Benchmarks

• Leadership Selection and Hiring

• Leadership Training and Development

• Leadership 360's

• Leadership Development Strategy and Planning

• And more…

 

Top Talent – Acquisition, Hiring, Development, and Retention

Mike is not sure how many people he has hired and managed, but it is in the thousands.  Mike uses all of his experience and knowledge to help businesses hire, train, develop and motivate their employees.  He has developed tools and methods to help his clients find, get and keep "Top Talent", these include:

• Systems and strategies to hire and keep Top Talent

• Employee benchmarking and assessments to ensure employee fit and success

• Assessments - Mike was an early user of assessments back in the 80's in restaurants.  Assessments reduced his turnover, and improved the quality of his employees so much that he has never stopped using them.  He has become an expert in the field and helps his clients experience the power of these instruments.  He even has a challenge for business leaders and executives that is called "The Talent Challenge" where he asks the leader to pick an employee s/he knows well and guarantees he will know more about the employee than the leader without ever meeting or talking to the employee. 

• Organizational Culture Strategy and Planning

• Employee 360's

• Employee Acquisition, Hiring and Retention Strategy and Planning

• Employee training and development strategic planning and implementation (including onboarding)

 

Business Intel

Early in Mike's leadership career, he learned the importance of business intelligence to ensure business success and value.   Starting with a fast growth restaurant chain and then an extreme growth financial company (2500 units in 7 years), he found things like benchmarks, ratios, variances and more are critical to organizational success and improved value.  Going through two IPO's was also very helpful to Mike's education and experience.  Many business leaders never consider these at their own detriment, usually because they don't understand them, or even fear them.   Mike is able to help business leaders realize that they do not have to be geeks and/or CPA's to understand and use these tools.

 

Another reason some business owners don't seek better understanding of these numbers is they believe they get this information from their accountant or CPA.  However, most accountants and CPA’s do not generally help the business owners and executives look strategically at their financials, or spend the time to help them implement profitable strategies in their business.  Just getting financial reports and filing tax returns is not good enough, the business owner must get educated about how these numbers make a big difference now, and especially in the future, and what actions to take to improve value.

 

Mike uses many business intel tools to help his clients make their organizations more valuable.  Listed below are some, but not all, of the tools he uses:

• Freedom Workshop - Mike developed this one-on-one workshop to help business owners learn about the present value of their business and how to improve the value of their business so they can make their business a Healthy Business. 

• Business-specific benchmark report,

• Detailed financial reports that include benchmarks and industry financials for easy comparison,

• Business Valuation (usually performed at least once a year to track value progress)

• Development of Business Intel strategy to support the information demands of the business, and the implementation of the strategy