Wearing All "The Hats" with Michael McClory

Brooke LeBeau: Let's start with a bit of history, which is that we have worked together a very long time and in a bunch of different business functions. How would you describe balancing all the awesome things you can do and how it translates into your day-to-day?

Michael McClory: I think to understand who I am, I'll talk about where I've been. I've been in sales my whole life in some capacity or another. The bulk of my career was at an established business that did distribution for vitamins, supplements, and natural products, and then suddenly turned into a tech startup 40 years later. I was one of two salespeople in that organization. Once we pivoted to being a tech startup as well as a distribution company, suddenly I was managing 5 individuals and then 10 and then 15. I wore a lot of hats.

Brooke LeBeau: I think we both know from that environment which, when we were in it, seemed like it was just how everybody was operating. Wearing all of the hats and doing all of the things felt like the norm. I don't know about you, but I feel like it's benefited me. I now work with a lot of different folks and get to see how a ton of different businesses operate. You've had several different positions since then. It's cool how all that hat-wearing now articulates into things that benefit us in different areas of our careers.

Michael McClory: For me, I thought it was normal (wearing all the hats). For somebody who went from being an individual contributor his entire life to managing a sales team, doing the comp plan, being pulled into projects with the developers, and being trained in agile.

Brooke LeBeau: I think you have creative tendencies, though. You were an English major. You obviously have that kind of thought-processing, which is out of the box creative problem solving. I think that translates into being able to function and pivot in different business facets, whether you're in sales, or operations, or even accounting.

All those skills in learning how to communicate taught me how to think.

Michael McClory: I was told while I was getting that degree that could do anything with this. At the time, I sort of believed it and I sort of didn't. But in a lot of ways, they were right. All those skills in learning how to communicate taught me how to think. You know? It was those critical thinking skills that allowed me to do project management type work and present at monthly ops reviews. We had all those hats that we were wearing, and translating it into executive level language helped to really sell it and move the business forward.

Brooke LeBeau: That's part of straddling the line between, like you were saying, individual contributor and sales leadership. You have teams of people who are executing tactical and data-oriented things while speaking to the c-suite folks who have to be a little more in the clouds. It's an interesting place to be in, doing both.

Michael McClory: If you think about your typical career arc, you start as an individual contributor to get that foundational knowledge and then sometimes work your way up into management. You grow your skill set from there and I think being able to go back to being an individual contributor, for me, was satisfying if I was building another foundation. You look back and say look at all this work that we did and I really like the idea of doing that again and again. If you have a vision and you walk into a place that either has no foundation or needs their foundation fixed, you can do the work and then hand the blueprints to the next person. For me, I can't wait until I hand the blueprints off to somebody but I do want to be in the weeds until things are operationalized. I want to create those procedures, that playbook, that process document, and get that done so you can scale.

Brooke LeBeau: I'm curious if you find as much passion in the fully-operational stage as the building stage.

Michael McClory: I think it's probably the building phase because I keep going back to that part of my career where you're building something foundational and there's nothing but blue sky. You could do whatever you want but at the same time, that can be very overwhelming. After doing it a few times, I'm ready to get to that point where you're not on cruise control because your work is never done. You're always iterating. I don't know if I'd ever want to be in a position where you're just cleaning the house, right? You're just taking care of the inside and otherwise it's done. I don't know if a business should ever be at that point where you're just tinkering around the edges. I think there's always innovation and being on the cusp of something that's going to feel bigger. That's what's exciting to me. That's what gets the adrenaline going.

Brooke LeBeau: Absolutely. If you go in and it's a fully functional machine, it doesn't really feel like it’s yours.

Michael McClory: I think if it’s a fully functional machine, there’s a lot of this is the way we're doing it because this is the way that we've always done it. They're just accepting the way things are done and trying to work around those processes instead of having those processes work for them.

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About Mike

Michael McClory is a dynamic sales leader passionate about driving revenue growth and delivering world-class customer experiences. Skilled in building high-performing sales teams, business development, and key partnerships.

About Brooke

Brooke LeBeau is an artist, educator, and the owner of Artfully Creative Studio. She has worked as a creative marketing professional for over a decade and advocates for graphic designers exploring supplementary revenue streams.