Seth Morgan: It took me a while to finally look in the mirror one Sunday morning. I do not know what caused the meeting with myself, but I realized I'm not even following the advice I give my clients. I'm not making enough to keep showing up at Panera. And so I thought to myself, I either need to go get a real job and make more money, or I need to start building this business.
Drew Dinkelacker: Welcome to Bullseyes & Blind Spots, a series of The Marketing Accelerator Podcast where chief executives share the pivotal decisions that define their leadership and the blind spots that reshape their perspective. I'm your host, Drew Dinkelacker, President of MarketingAccelerator.com. And today's guest is Seth Morgan, CEO of MLA Companies. MLA is a strategic advisory firm that partners with business owners and leaders through growth, complexity, and transition by bringing together advisory, accounting, and capital in one integrated relationship. Seth, welcome to Bullseyes & Blind Spots series.
Seth: Drew, been a fan of your work for a while and so excited to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. It's gonna be fun.
Drew: I'm excited about this. This is gonna be fun. So let's dive right in. The first question is, in your career, and you've done a lot of stuff besides MLA Companies, where have you hit the bullseye? Just knocked it out of the park with some kind of executive decision that you made?
Seth: Yeah, so when I saw the list of questions, this was the hardest one. I don't know what other folks say, but thinking through a bullseye was actually kind of hard. So what first came to mind was areas where maybe I'd done that for a client or a firm had done that for a client. I think we have many of those. But I don't think it's false humility to say, Drew, I don't feel like there's a ton... I feel more critical of my role as CEO of MLA than I do a fan. The one that comes to mind is a recent move we made with our leadership team where we brought in a new president. And I'm gonna give credit to a peer advisory group chair that continues to pour into my life, but where he just looked me in the eye and said, "Hey, you need to trust what you need. God's given you a specific set of gifts. So what is it Seth needs to run MLA well?" And what that did was it led to us appointing a lady named Kelly McCracken as our COO. She later became president of all of our brands. And frankly, that was one of the best moves we made.
Seth: So the... You, in your kind of the subtitle of the question where you ask where you had to do... Make a tough decision, lead with conviction, hit the mark, in some ways, it was feeling like we had to make some sort of change. I had to take a risk on the decision. I did. It was a tough decision. It displaced a few friends. It reshaped our leadership team. It certainly was a lead with conviction. There was a lot of work that we did in prepping for the change. And frankly, the change went pretty well, as well as a change like that can go. And I think God's blessed that decision. I think it was a wise decision. It's probably the best bullseye moment that I've had in my time as CEO of MLA Companies.
Drew: You've added... You've brought in some leadership, which means you've delegated some leadership. What has been the ripple effect of that change on you?
Seth: That's also an interesting question. The first symptom, interestingly, is I'm busier than ever. So by delegating, Kelly very quickly aligned with me around, "Seth, here are the special areas that you can contribute to MLA. Let me handle the rest." And I've become busier than ever, and that's been a good thing for the firm. So the ripple effect on me is there has been a lot more self-reflection, I think, Drew, around who I am, the role I play. Certainly thinking a little more about succession. And this is not me announcing on your show that I'm exiting because I'm not. That's not the plan. But more thought of that because I have now the power, the ability to think about that, the margin to think about that with a leader I trust. But I'll tell you, downstream from that, the ripple effect, frankly, I mean, this is an arrogant, I'll admit, a blind spot. I used to say, and I still to a degree say this, this sounds cocky, is, give me a decision for MLA compared to any of my leaders, especially at the time, and I would trust myself more to make that decision.
Seth: What a cocky thing to say. My first revelation was, yeah, maybe I would make a better decision given the time, but I would make such a fast decision because I'd have so many decisions to make and have the business form of ADD, et cetera, that I would go so fast, maybe I wouldn't make a good decision. So the ripple effect of putting a good, trusted leader, this bullseye moment for me has been I've watched our culture tighten up and grow. It's been a pruning process in some ways and a growth process in some ways. The team has come together better than I've ever seen it. There's a momentum that's not just created by Seth. I think I've always been a pretty good... Cheerleader's the wrong word, it means I'm cheering for a team. Motivator. I've been a pretty good person that walks in the room and says, let's go here, and people go, yeah, let's go there. But the wake, there was very little process or follow through after that. So I just had to keep re-energizing the team. And so we would have these moments of conviction and these moments of kind of oneness that would very quickly dissipate.
Seth: Kelly's been able to create through accountability and structure toolsets that I know about, but would not, either would not take the time to execute on or just am not as strong on. But she's started to create that culture, and I can see it. And two quick examples, if I have time for this, Drew, is just these are two distinct moments, unrelated people, unrelated situations. I was on a call with a client the other day that I don't even serve, that Kelly has been involved with, our Detroit, Michigan area president leads. And that client said to me what I want MLA to reflect. So this is a client that's been onboarded and served without my knowledge at all. And that client looked at me on a Zoom call and said, "For the first time ever, a consulting firm like MLA, I feel seen." And I thought, what an amazing living out of our culture and brand promise. And then completely separately, I was in one of our offices the other day and found out an employee was dealing with a very difficult personal situation. And by the time I talked to that employee, which was a little bit happenstance, and of course I spent a little bit of time with this employee.
Seth: One of the first things she said is she named two staff members that had more knowledge of the situation, that when she walked in the door, immediately pulled her aside and prayed with her. And these are just happening organically, and that didn't used to happen. And so the ripple effect has been phenomenal. I think it's been good for me personally. It's challenged me, it's humbled me in some ways, it's encouraged me and given me courage to move faster in others. And then the impact on the business has been phenomenal in that Kelly has taken the time to implement the tools and systems and even accountability to create a culture that's actually living and caring for itself, where folks are selecting in and getting on and off the train as they should, and not just relying on Seth to give another 30-minute rah-rah speech to create a moment of unity, so.
Drew: For 25 years, I've been working with business owners and CEOs, and they can talk about, they might have their list of core values. But it doesn't really matter what's on the list. What I have found with privately held companies is the core values of the company are the core values of the owner, the leader. And what I'm hearing you say is that as you transitioned some of the leadership of the company, you're seeing those core values also being played out in the organization without your direct involvement.
Seth: Yes.
Drew: Would you agree with that?
Seth: Yeah.
Drew: That is a dandy achievement. That is a good one. That is a bullseye. So you might not have started out with a bullseye, but to me, what you just shared there, that is a bullseye. And it wasn't one decision. That was a series of decisions over decades of creating that culture that can carry on even without your direct, as a matter of fact, it's given you freedom to do other things, and yet it continues to be a great reflection. So that's a great one.
Seth: It did come from kind of a moment decision, which is why I give credit to John McNeal, my... The Peer Advisory Vistage chair that I work with, just in that it took a long time for me to get to the point of saying, I have to make a move here and trust, frankly, a little bit of my own instinct. There was a moment where I just said, I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to decide that we're gonna take this chance. And it was a bit of a... Kelly was wise when I offered her the position, she said, everybody reports to me. And that was gonna be a new shift for me as a leader. And so I had to choose to say, I'm gonna trust Kelly, I'm gonna trust in some ways myself that we're gonna fix this quickly if it gets out of line, and I'm gonna trust that process. And it's paid off in droves, yeah.
Drew: You have to trust yourself. I'm aware of situations similar to this where the executive moving on, bringing in new leadership, he couldn't trust himself and he kept inserting himself back in, which then undermined what the new president could do. And so you're right, it goes both ways. That's a whole 'nother podcast on how do you trust yourself as a CEO.
Seth: Well, when you have that one, let me know, because I'll listen and learn, because that's still a challenge for me. Yeah.
Drew: Well, that's good. Those are some great bullseyes. You said you weren't gonna have many, and there were several in there. So that's outstanding. So let's move on. Every leader has blind spots. You can't avoid them. The trick really is discovering them and then not ignoring them after you've discovered them. Can you share a time when a blind spot in your leadership came to light? How did you discover it? What did it cost?
Seth: Yeah, I could go on a long time on blind spots. I'm gonna use the same story. We're just gonna back up a few years. So we started really to build the idea of a leadership team probably close to a decade ago, maybe, I don't know, I'd have to go back and look at our records, maybe it was six or seven years ago. And I started to assign these titles, but the truth is, Drew, and people would come along occasionally and say, "Look, Seth, unless you're gonna trust the team, unless you're gonna get out of the way, this isn't gonna work." And I'd say, yeah, whatever. They don't know what they're talking about. They don't know me. They don't... So I continued to struggle with this challenge of a team where I had three or four people reporting directly to me, and it was kind of like leadership by committee, which probably is the first problem. And this went on for years, and it cost us dearly. In some ways, we're still dealing with that cost.
Seth: And so the blind spot for me continued to be, as things would get tougher, but we would achieve something financially. We would close a big deal, we would make up for the deficiency somehow, and I would just kind of dust off my shoulder and say, this is what entrepreneurialism is all about. We're gonna roll the dice again, we're gonna take the risk, we're gonna push this rock up the hill. And what I was kind of ignoring was, as time went on, more and more people kind of speaking into my life saying, something's not right. But honestly, it was accountability for me. It was accountability, meaning... And that's always two ways, I think. But it was my inability or unwillingness to hold that team accountable. And then it was, in a way, my own accountability in that no one was holding me accountable enough to say... It started to become more obvious, the numbers started to hold us accountable if nothing else. To say, this is not working. And so this went on for a lot longer than it should have. And so, I mean, I could put a dollar figure to it, but I'd miss dollars.
Seth: It cost a lot of money. Maybe more, it cost a lot in time. It cost a lot in momentum. It cost a lot in... I won't say client or market reputation, I think by God's grace, it wasn't like we had big faux pas in the market as a rule, but I think we failed to take ground that we could have been taking during that time. And man, did it cost a lot personally. Just in the internal angst, the pressure, the stress, even what led to a lot of the navel gazing, because as this team, for myself, moving into the bullseye moment, right? So as this team became more disjointed, they became against each other. I'm not saying that there was fights constantly, there wasn't. What ended up happening is I became kind of the arbiter of four opinions. This person wants this, this person wants this, and I found myself constantly playing politics between my own leadership team. And as time would go on, I fired all of them at one point in my imagination. And I would always work myself back to, I can't do that right now.
Seth: I just can't do that. If I fire Drew, then this calamity will happen, and if I fire PD, this calamity will happen. So I would work through those analysis and come back to freezing and betting on myself, which felt very noble, to grow ourselves through this and out of it, to create again enough momentum to cheer on enough that they would all kind of fall in line, that the positive upward inertia would just kind of grab and pull them into unity and into what we'd envisioned for the firm. Or I would say I had envisioned, because there wasn't even really a unified vision. We had a hard time getting there. And the blind spot, I think, for me was, if you unpack everything, I just said, there was some Seth in ability to the story. There was some Seth pride to the story. There was some I can pull this off, like, I can create enough momentum. And there's probably more to unpack, but those are the two that immediately come to mind. And I think what was happening was the organization had gotten to a size already that while I could do that maybe with five people or 10 people or maybe even 15 people or 20, and maybe I could do that at a certain revenue size, we had already gotten to a point where we just kept hitting the ceiling because I could no longer cascade.
Seth: I could not cascade a message through these people because they weren't aligned. And the hard part maybe for me that created blind spots where I would say it wasn't really my own... It's all my fault, I'm the CEO, but where maybe I was a victim, if you wanna use that word, I'm not trying to be a victim, but what then started to happen for me was that I started to even doubt myself more because now I have four different voices in my head, including my family, including add on to that my family, I should say my wife, who's like, "What's going on at work?" And I'm frustrated, and she's like, "Why are you complaining about that person? Deal with it. Aren't you the boss?" And I'm like, "You don't understand." And she was right, like she always is. And then other folks that maybe were looking in from the outside saying, "This doesn't feel right." And so that mental cycle was really tough. And in some ways, it's what led to the bullseye. It's what led to me feeling like that was a bullseye moment because for me to finally say, nope, I'm making this decision, I'm sticking to it, we're going to do this, whatever the cost, felt like a very serious leap for me. But, man, that blind spot went on way too long, Drew. Way too long.
Drew: Blind spots are like that because you don't know they're blind spots until you've discovered them. You can't say, well, I've had this blind spot for too long and I'm gonna address it. It just builds and builds and builds. So there's usually a moment when things have just come together and you're like, oh, I get it. I see. Do you have that moment? Can you tell me about that moment when you really knew it was a blind spot and it needed to be addressed?
Seth: Yeah. I don't know if it was a moment per se, because there were a lot of moments that kept kind of building up to it. But the one that I'll give credit to is my wife was on me. She was on me repeatedly. That was becoming kind of... I don't wanna say it was a fight or that she wasn't supportive, but she kept seeing me come home or leave my home office here and just defeated. And she'd be so frustrated, like, "Why is it working like this?" But then kind of coming alongside of that was the conversation I had with our Vistage chair. He's a man of faith, we share that, and he just leaned in really hard one day and said kind of a version of what I already said, like, "Why are you listening to what everybody else is telling you you need?" And he didn't mean my wife. He meant my leadership team. Because what I would always come back to is, "Yeah, but Drew says..." and he was like, "Stop it. This business doesn't belong to Drew. And God's given you a unique set of gifts that you need to execute on, and you need a leadership team that matches you, not the other way around. Quit trying to comport to their opinion about the business or even about yourself."
Seth: Well, Drew, for a number of reasons, that was a flip on the head of what I was taught to believe. It was a flip on the head theologically for me, and I'm not trying to be all spiritual, but the idea of being like, trust myself, was really hard to just be like, you know what? I'm gonna trust myself in this decision. So that was probably the moment. It was the moment when I went, enough's enough. And it took longer because then I started having to work through, frankly, the politics. Like, when do we let that person go? Does that person get reassigned? What do I do with staffing? So it took probably still a month and a half of working through that logistically to actually pull the trigger. But that was probably the moment that I'll give credit to.
Drew: And you talk about the conflict. The concept of servant leadership works really good to a point to where you're not leading anymore, you're serving, and those people need to be led. And so it's a good concept, but just like anything, it can be overdone and can leave a vacancy in leadership if that's all you're doing is serving. And I would also say you absolutely need people that can speak authoritatively with only your best interests in mind to you. And that's your Vistage chair and your spouse. Oh, God, your spouse can speak the truth. And sometimes it's in love and sometimes it's just the truth, right? You know what I'm talking about, I can tell. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. Thank you so much for sharing that. But before we get to our final question, I just have a quick message for our audience. If today's conversation has you thinking about your own bullseyes and blind spots, I've created a companion resource, designed for chief executives. It's called The Bullseyes and Blind Spot Accelerated Guide. It's a fast 10-minute read. It's really interesting, and it helps you cut through marketing fog, confront blind spots, and gain the clarity you need to lead with confidence. And you can download that guide and even start an analysis at BullseyesAndBlindSpots.com. All right, now to the time travel question. If you could sit down with yourself 20 years ago, 25 years ago, you pick the time, and you could share some wisdom with Seth, Jr., about career, about personal life, what would you tell him?
Seth: How much time do we have left in this show, Drew?
Drew: It's open-ended. Go ahead, go for it.
0:21:26.0 Seth Morgan: Man.
Drew: Share.
Seth: Oh, well, in the business category, the first thing that came to mind as I was just reviewing the questions is, on one hand, I'm gonna be critical. On another hand, I'm gonna give myself some grace. And let me answer it two ways, then I'll get to a couple, maybe a couple other points that'll go quicker. So I wish we would have worked on scale a lot quicker. MLA is a service firm, as maybe many of your audience are, and laptop and a cup of coffee and I'm in business, right? Website. And when MLA started, ironically 20 years ago this year, I was in my late 20s. My ex-wife now, at the time, she didn't work outside the home. So my first goal was to quit borrowing money to pay for diapers and bread. I mean, it was that simple. And so once I hit that point within about four or five, six months, and I had a finance partner that was backing us, but I didn't wanna keep borrowing from him to make this work, I kind of went on autopilot. I was very involved in politics at the time, thought that might be the direction of my life.
Seth: It wasn't, but it did take a lot of me for a period of time, probably a good decade. And so it was just, it wasn't like a bad business. We developed a nice reputation, we were building momentum, but I call that time lovingly the Panera Club. It was me and the boys that would meet at Panera. We would sip coffee, sell market, share market experiences. I'd get a little override on whatever we did together. And it was fun. It was fun. In some ways, it was very simple. And I wanna say to the audience, by the way, no judgment. This rush for American business to all scale is, I think, a stewardship question. It's not a right or wrong question, it's a stewardship question. But for me, it took me a while to finally look in the mirror one Sunday morning. I do not know what caused the meeting with myself, but I realized I'm not even following the advice I'd give my clients. I'm not making enough to keep showing up at Panera. And so I thought to myself, I either need to go get a real job and make more money, or I need to start building this business.
Seth: And it's taken a long time to even get to the point where we're at today, and we still don't have it all figured out. We're literally going through a rebrand, remessaging exercise as we speak. Some of that's around scale. But I really wish back then that I would have listened to some of my mentors and the folks in my life, including my now deceased former partner, wonderful man named Harry Loyle, who was kind of the old gentleman that put the money up and helped me get started. He was my former boss at Moto Photo, but I left and started MLA. And Harry would get mad and be like, "Seth, I'll write you a bigger check. What do you need? Let's grow this thing." And the truth is, Drew, I couldn't get there mentally. And I think had I listened to some of that advice, many of the mistakes, many of the things that we had to now go back and undo to redo, could have been addressed up front. Now, that's the criticism.
Drew: Okay, hold on, hold on. Before we move to the next thing, that's the criticism. So if you had to, you're entering the time portal and you only get 30 seconds with Seth, Jr., what are you telling him out of that all good stuff that you shared? What... You got 30 seconds to really hit... To give Seth, Jr., some great wisdom. What are you telling him in that short period?
Seth: Decide what you're building and then get about building it.
Drew: Decide what you're building and get about building it.
Seth: Yeah.
0:25:03.7 Drew Dinkelacker: Very good. Very good. Alright, good, good, good. Now move on.
Seth: Well, the grace to myself, because I want your audience to hear this too is, we work with a lot of clients who are struggling with this very question. And I'm convinced there were things I needed to learn along the way before I could get to the point mentally where I said, let's build this thing. I can now see a future of MLA and am investing in that, frankly, that I couldn't do at 27. I just mentally I was not there. I was in kind of that first layer of Maslow's hierarchy, right? It was all about security and bread and diapers. I couldn't think ahead to what would it look like if we had multiple disciplines and multiple markets and we had a purpose beyond let's do finance well. And I just could not mentally get there. That's what Harry was asking for. I couldn't get there. And so I'm careful with young entrepreneurs to say, listen, you should be taking the 30-second advice I just gave, decide what you're building and build it. But there's also, I'm convinced, just as human nature, there's this iterative cycle of growth that we have to go through.
Seth: What I wish I wouldn't have done is stayed in that cycle for so long, distracted by politics and everything else. I think the couple other things I would say is, Drew, vulnerability is your friend. I think that is a very loaded topic and I would not encourage people to be sharing their crap with everybody. There's a wisdom side to that statement that I think is utterly important. I'm not even an open-book business guy. Like, a lot of people would assume that that statement would mean that Seth's about gathering the entire team and sharing every nook and cranny. I'm not. I've seen that go very poorly inside businesses, partially because 27-year-old Seth and 48-year-old Seth are very different people. And so we hear information very different. The AR clerk is gonna hear it different than the factory floor worker, that's gonna hear it differently than the purchasing manager, that's gonna hear it differently than the CFO. So I think vulnerability is something you need to be careful with. But having a band of folks, brothers, sisters, that you can be vulnerable with, I think is utterly important. And I think early in our careers, certainly in mine, it felt a lot more like, no, I need to hide that information so that I can rise to some level so that I can achieve. And some of that was imposter syndrome and being 27 in a world of 50-year-olds. But vulnerability is our friend. And I could have used a whole lot more of that in my personal and financial life back then. So I think those would be the couple of things that just pop out. I could say more.
Drew: No, that's good. This is really good because you talk about vulnerability. Well, this Bullseyes & Blind Spots podcast is about authenticity. And there's a component of authenticity that is tied to vulnerability. If one is willing to share blind spots, that is what I have found in the marketplace a very attractive thing because it opens the door. Vulnerability opens the... Can open the door to more authentic conversations. When you get more authentic conversations, boy, oh boy, do you... You go way past weather and sports and you get to the meaty stuff, and that's where relationships are built. So I like that. Vulnerability is your friend if you handle it correctly. That's great. I appreciate that very much. Seth, thanks so much for sharing your journey with us. The bullseyes that gave you confidence and the blind spots that shaped your growth. Your candor and insight remind us that leadership is not about perfection. It's about learning, it's about adapting, and staying true to what matters most. Subscribe to our podcast today and find out where your bullseyes and blind spots are with the resources at BullseyesAndBlindSpots.com. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.