Damien:

Hello and welcome to 73 and sunny, the podcast about the journey of getting things just right. We talked to tech sales and marketing leaders about how they’re growing, dialing in best practices and getting closer to that sweet spot. I’m super excited to have.

Mike Bills join us today. Mike is a serial entrepreneur, avid skier and expert on higher education. Thanks for joining us today, Mike.

Mike Bills:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Damien.

Damien:
Of course. So maybe for our listeners, give us a little bit of a background about your journey, how you got to where you are today. Maybe we can start with some of the entrepreneurial pieces, because to me, that’s been a theme in 73 and Sunny. To me, super risky. To others, that’s just what they want to do. And so how do you get to that sweet spot of entrepreneurial entrepreneurship? And and you know, how do you balance everything to be able to make sure that you’re balancing the risk with reward?

Mike Bills:
That’s a great question. to some extent, I think I might be an unlikely entrepreneur because many years ago, I think I conflated being an inventor with being an entrepreneur. I thought you had to have some kind of phenomenally disruptive idea.
And that is what made somebody an entrepreneur. And then I learned that while that is a path, there are other paths. So early on in my career, I’m the first in my family to go to college. When I graduated from high school, my parents were basically like, good luck, God bless, hope life works out for you, but please leave. anyway, so I did want to go to school, which meant I needed to find a job that basically that would accommodate me being able to go to school. So I found a gig at a company called Feature Films for Families in Salt Lake City where I was selling, so this is in 1991, and I was selling G-rated movies over the phone between the hours of 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. Yeah, so this company, yeah, I know it’s a little strange. Indeed, yep.

Damien:
Kids today wouldn’t get it. Kids today, no.

Mike Bills:
Yeah, I’ve dated myself so many ways, both figuratively and literally. But I, and I turned out to be really, really good at that. In fact, I don’t, would dare say I’ve never been as good at anything in my life. So I peaked as an 18 year old telemarketer, which is sad. But it was a case of being right place, right time. That company was blowing up and pretty much anybody that stuck around for a few months had a decent head on their shoulders and would take their take promotions that came with a better job title, more work, but no more money and be happy with that. You could thrive in that organization. so so quickly, I found myself.

By the time I was like 20, I had almost 200 employees reporting up into me. I was still trying to go to school, but then the work just kept getting more interesting and then finally I started to get paid for the work that I was doing. So by the time I was 22, I became Chief Information Officer of that business and we were doing about 60 million a year in revenue. We had somewhere around like 800, 900 employees. So I had at 22 years old what I thought was the best job for somebody that age other than being the shortstop for the Kansas City Royals. So like I was happy. It was awesome.

 I was getting paid what seemed like stupid money for that that age. And you know, and also though, I was working like 70 to 100 hours a week. So I dropped out of school because I had the idea that going to school was a means to an end to get a good job. I had a great job, so why did I need to be in school? And then when I fast forwarded a few years later, I started to realize that the only thing I had on my resume was this one place where I’d worked. And there was this huge absence of and education. So I decided that I needed to go back to school, regardless of how hard it was, and at least finish my bachelor’s degree. So I took a few years to do that. It was really hard. I did it basically surreptitiously because the owner of the company that I worked for wasn’t particularly supportive of me getting education. I think he liked me not having formal education because it limited my options.
But I, so anyway, I finished and then I decided to just keep on going and get an MBA. So during the time while I was doing my MBA, I also got promoted to be president of that business. And again, so it seemed like I’ve got this great job. Why would I ever go do anything else? But when I was a student, I’d met lots of people from all kinds of different backgrounds that were doing interesting things.

And I had professors that, that had done interesting things. And so it just sort of expand my idea of what was possible. the more I got out of that little parochial bubble of that feature films for families organization where I worked. And I started to have an itch that was developing that the only way to scratch it was to go to do my own thing. So I didn’t have an idea of what that meant.
I just had an itch to scratch, and I also had doubts because I’d worked at one place. And I knew that I’d gotten lucky of right time, right place. And so I had doubts, like could I be successful somewhere else? So anyway, one of my professors, we became very close friends and I talked to him about this dilemma and he was the one, his name’s Dick Fontaine, he’s still a dear friend of mine. He’s almost as close to me as my father. anyway, Dick started to ask me questions about my career to that point, like what I had liked, what I had disliked, what I gravitated toward, what I avoided. And the answers to those questions were the reason that I had risen to be president of that organization is because every time some area was broken, I got sent in to go fix it.

Mike Bills:
And so it didn’t matter if it was our distribution center. We had a DVD and VHS replication business. So another way of dating myself and sales, customer success, all of those things. So Dix, he looked at me and said, Mike, it seems like you might be a turnaround guy. because it didn’t matter the functional area and said there’s a world of opportunities for entrepreneurial folks that can turn things around.

And so that was the spark that caused me to realize, OK, so I may not be an inventor, but I do know how to fix things that are broken. And I know how to pivot things that have found themselves, like the market sort of fell apart. We need to pivot and move. So upon graduation, I decided to quit my job.

And the timing was not awesome. My wife was eight months pregnant. We had just bought a home and I didn’t even talk to her. I just decided to, I quit and decided to basically go look for a business to buy as my full-time use of my time.

Damien:
So that to me is is crazy. Like you’re you’re waiting until the most risky time, right? With your wife’s eight months pregnant, you’re not sure what what to do. You think that you’re what you say is this turnaround guy pivoting, moving. How do you because it’s that to me is foreign. It’s a foreign concept to me. How do you how do you just leave all that doubt? You talked about doubt. How do you leave that doubt behind and say I’m just going to do that. What’s the mental shift there that needs to happen in order to take on that kind of risk?

Mike Bills:
So obviously this was forming over time, but I can remember one moment that really sort of catalyzed and it increased this sense of urgency that I need to do this and it was when the CFO of our company, his name is Fred Healy, we were friends, colleagues, Fred was old enough to be my father, so in a lot of ways he was kind of like a father figure to me. Anyway, Fred asked me what I was going to name my, and we knew that we were having a boy, he’s like, what are you guys gonna name your boy? And I told him, said, we’ve narrowed it down to every possible name except one.
And I like, what are you talking about? I said, there’s not going to be a Mike Jr. And Fred’s response to that was, no, no, Mike, you should really, you should do that. You should name him after you because, you know, that sends a message about you, that you want him to grow up and be like you. And I mean, I was like, I don’t, I don’t want him to be like me. And part of the reason I didn’t want him to be like me is because of those doubts and fears.
And so it caused me to reflect on that I think I need to run into the thing, those things that I was afraid of, those doubts. And so it really did become, even though like practically it’s kind of insane, but the fact that I was about to become a father really had something to do with the spark to actually go and say, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna just go give it a shot and see if it works.
Damien:
I guess we just have to be open to those times, right? Those nexus, those times of change. And for a lot of people, is having a baby. It’s a big life moment, getting married, the passing of someone in your family or whatnot. So you go forward into this entrepreneurial world and then what happens?

Mike Bills:
Yes.

Mike Bills:
So another thing that Dick Fontaine was helpful about was he helped me to establish criteria for businesses to buy. So that was step number one. And so the criteria, I think I can recall them all off the top of my head was, first of all, I didn’t have any money. So I needed to buy a business that I could finance in some way. But I knew I was looking for a turnaround.
So it needed to have problems that I knew how to fix. So that was number one. Or that I was close to somebody that could help augment areas where I was weak, but we could fix it. It had to have the realistic ability to grow 20 % a year for the first five years. There were some competitive characteristics that I wanted to have as well. But that’s basically what I was looking for. The most important one was a business.

that I could get financed and have problems I knew how to fix. I, and I did, and a friend of mine from business school, we, you know, we had this, we were, decided we were going to do this together. And we had, he was a CPA by training. He built up a really successful tax practice, but he hated it. was destroying his soul. And so was like, we had an idea, like I had the operational expertise. He had the finance expertise.

Let’s go out and find something to do. And so we did, we found this funky business called H &K Truck Equipment. We didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know that industry existed, but it was a business that would take any, well, it sold truck-mounted equipment. like dump trucks, service trucks, et cetera, anything that, so we would, bring in these truck bodies and our people would mount them up and make the hydraulics and electrical stuff work. And so our customers were mostly municipalities, state of Utah, Salt Lake County, et cetera. And our thesis was, so what we knew about the business was it had a really, really stable revenue, particularly from all that government work lousy cash flow management, they had lousy inventory management, they had no sales and marketing. So it had some stability to it, but it also had an owner that didn’t want it. He’d inherited it from his dad. It was the guy that we bought it from, a wonderful guy named Bruce Markosian. He was a Stanford trained architect that inherited this industrial business from his dad. He didn’t want anything to do with it and just felt burdened by it.

we managed to convince him that he should sell it to us and that he should finance it. yeah, so we had to, it was like the most protracted job interview slash sales pitch about selling the two of us that we could do this and pay him back. And so I’m forever grateful that he believed in us and financed the business for us. yes.

Damien:
So, I mean, that’s everything in one, right? Because you’re having to be an expert in trucking or equipment and working with municipalities, which is another whole ball of wax and all these things, which to me is a super risky proposition, especially for someone knowing that the owner wants to get out of it. To me, that would be red flags all over the place. Super risky at the same time.

You do have your PhD, right? And you said thesis, had our thesis. I don’t think a lot of people have a thesis for a trucking company, but fair that you have a thesis, but at the same time of doing these risky, what I would consider risky business propositions, you’re also putting your foot firmly on, an industry in an industry that is typically pretty conservative. And that is the.

Mike Bills:
Yeah.

Damien:
The higher ed market, that’s the higher ed space. And so maybe, maybe let’s, you know, this is all about balance. So we’re taught, we’ve been talking about the, you know, the risky side, talk to us a little bit about the, you know, your journey in higher ed, higher ed administration, higher ed governance, and, you know, getting your, your PhD and your experience in that.
Mike Bills:
So, yeah, it’s interesting because the buying of that business and that manufacturing business, and then I bought another one that we put together. Somehow, because I went to school, this little school called Westminster College, now it’s Westminster University, and during my time as a student, I happened to end up on the, when Utah Business Magazine did their first 40 under 40 thing, I ended up, being in that first group of 40 under 40 folks. Because I was the least fat and the least bald, I ended up being on the cover of that. Again, because I’m at this small school, they’ve got this MBA student that is on the cover of Utah Business Magazine. The president and the dean of the business school, wanted to meet me. I got to know them pretty well at that point and then the president, Michael Bassas.
He and I became like the most unlikely friends in the world. Like he was a East Coast Brahmin that went to the finest schools, looked like the archetype of a college president in, know, Tweed and, and boat stuff. And I was an aspiring ski bum that barely managed to graduate from high school. But anyway, we, we became friends and he asked me to join his board of trustees and

I didn’t know what a board of trustees was, but I thought it was pretty cool. I thought it would look cool on my obituary. So I said yes.

Damien:
And that’s how most people choose their profession is, hey, what would look cool on an obituary? So I’m glad that,

Mike Bills:
Yeah. Thank you. as a board member with and so Bassas, even though he looked like this very, like said, the archetype of a college president, he was a radical and he, you know, he was way ahead of this idea of that the cost quality is broken, that we need to serve different markets, et cetera. So Michael was a he was an educational entrepreneur.

And we bonded really, really closely, him as president and me as a board member, because I was too. I was trying to fix this broken business that I bought, that was in this sort of anachronistic industry, and I’d been successful at it. So we really rethought everything about that business and turned it around quickly and had success, and we ultimately sold that company.

I got turned on by Michael’s vision about disrupting the college, because Westminster College is exactly what you would imagine. It was the archetype of a liberal arts college, beautiful, leafy campus, totally traditional students and offerings, et cetera. And that market has been cratering for years. And so it’s a market that needs a lot of change.

Michael was a change agent as president. Most of the board was not very amenable to change. mean, most boards of trustees are filled with people that grew up with generational wealth and just have life experiences that are unrelatable to their students. And I didn’t, I didn’t grow up like that. I grew up quite poor and like I said, I’m a first generation student. there were no…

like sacred cows for me in higher ed. with, yeah, but for Michael Bassas and being on the Westminster College Board, like I wouldn’t have, I don’t know that I would even care so much about what’s happening in the US higher ed market, but that experience totally turned me onto it.

Damien:
And that’s what you wrote your thesis on, right, was about boards of trustees, right?

Mike Bills:
Yeah, my dissertation was on small private tuition dependent colleges that flirted with going out of business and then managed to do a turnaround. so, and not just that they didn’t go out of business, but I established criteria of like what a turnaround meant. so, yeah, so I examined schools that had done that and how their board of trustees went from being a board that contributed to their downfall and then manage to become one that could contribute to their tournament.

Damien:
There’s a great cliff, what they call a great cliff in college applications that they are looking at this year and next year because 20 years ago, 2007, 2008 was the mortgage meltdown. And during that time, the birth rate went down. Now colleges are seeing that they know that there’s going to be less people applying.

What do you see in terms of the next couple years in higher ed getting over that cliff? are some of these colleges just not going to be able to make it?

Mike Bills:
So it’s really easy to give you a succinct answer to the last question that you asked. Yes, lots of colleges will not make it because they’re ossified. They’re built to support 18 to 22 year old full-time residential students. And that market, even pre-Demographic Cliff, had dropped a ton.

and for lots of reasons. There’s competition now, there’s lots of good online programs, there’s lots of bad online programs too, but they’re all competition. There are credentials that are offered by companies like Google that are in some respects for certain jobs, they’re better representatives of what people know than a college degree. A degree is just a proxy for things that you should know. But if you’ve got a credential from Google, you know, in data science, you know what they’ve learned. And you know, and you can, and you trust Google, mean, Google, because Google will hire their own people that got that credential. So there, and there’s just been this sentiment. In fact, the former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, he wrote a great book, basically his college

Damien:
Sure.

Mike Bills:
worth it anymore. because we’re spending the, and so many people debt finance their higher education, and to jump the hurdle, to be able to support that, your debt service and have a good life, buy a home, the kind of, have the kind of career that you want, that math doesn’t necessarily work out great. And so you’d had a lot of people just deciding not to go to school.

Damien:
Well, tell me this in four years, because my son just got accepted yesterday to my alma mater, and he’s super excited about it. He’s going to go to Santa Clara University, so that’s great. yeah, we’ll just feign ignorance for the next one.

Mike Bills:
Damien, can, look, so regardless, is, getting a degree is expensive, not getting a degree is way more expensive. So it’s the right, it’s absolutely the right thing to do.

Damien:
There you go. now we don’t have to read the book. So good. So let’s talk about another balance. We’re talking about the risk and reward in industries and entrepreneurship and in the conservative nature of some higher ed. Let’s talk about another balance. For the past several years, you’ve been president of Atlas RTX. And Atlas was actually bought by a large public organization, nice.com.

Mike Bills:
Hahaha

Damien:
Maybe tell us a little bit about the balance between being part of a small organization and then being thrown into the throes of a very large public institution.

Mike Bills:
Yeah, I mean, it’s disorienting as can be because like my whole career, so it started at Feature Films for Families, which was owned for its entirety by its founder. So I ran the business for him. Then I went and started my own business. That manufacturing that I bought a couple, rolled them up and then sold them. Then I started a BPO contact center business with the same partner that I did the manufacturing stuff with. We sold that to Private Equity. And when I sold that to Private Equity, we merged with one of their portfolio companies.

first like I had a proper job at that point. I was CEO of this now it was pretty at that point we had like 1300 employees and like eight locations or so and I hated it. I hated that job of being CEO of a PE backed business. like because we sold the majority to them so I was working for the man. It was the first time that I really felt like I was working for the man.

I did my 18 months post-sale and then I left. And then I started another, then I started a software company with a couple of partners and we went from zero to a pretty material amount of recurring revenue in five years. And that was selling into higher education. My partnership dynamics were a little funky because my two partners got married to each other. They’re great people. The business is still successful, but it was like, I think I need to, I need to.

Piece out of this one, so I sold to them. And then I joined Atlas because its founder was Sam Salem. We had got to know each other over the years, respected each other. And when he found out I was a free agent, said, you know, he, hey, I need some help to come run this business. And I reminded him, like, dude, I haven’t had a proper job since like 2004. So I don’t know if I’m properly employable.

Mike Bills:
So we did a 90-day contract to see if if I was I passed the test and then and so and we and and so for the next two years but Sam and I ran Atlas and had a lot of fun had a lot of growth and that put us in a position to be acquired by publicly traded nice and this is and like it’s Disorienting as hell to to come into from this entire life experience of just being a founder, owned and run businesses to a big public company. So fortunately I had, I was way more humble than I was when I sold my company to private equity. And I was much more deferential to the fact that, hey, other people own this business and I need to serve them.

And so it’s been and I came into it with a real open mind. I think also, you know my PhD Training was helpful in that because you know all about organizational development, etc. I understood at least intellectually that there’s a reason for all of the processes and procedures and There’s a reason why they can’t make a million exceptions like you can in a small company

And so that was helpful to come at it. And also with an appreciation that all the people that I’m dealing with now in the post merger integration, they all mean well, they’re all, and they have a job and that job is usually somewhat siloed. They don’t have a ton of decision-making authority beyond that. And so when I run into what’s felt like a brick wall, then the thing that always kept me and still does, is that I know that there’s somebody at some level that has enough perspective that’s going to understand the issue that I have and I’ll get through it. it has, so it was at first I did, I felt like I was hitting brick walls, but then once I started to realize that there is somebody there that as soon as I explain this problem to them, they have enough perspective and enough authority to help clear it. And that’s what I’ve experienced thus far. Now I still run into new challenges.

Damien:
Yeah.

Mike Bills:
on a weekly basis, but I don’t get frustrated about it and I managed to find a way because Nice wants us to be really successful. That’s why they bought us. They’re not trying to be in the way, but they’ve got 9,000 employees that they’ve got to deal with. we’re not that special, I guess. And I just have to remember that.

Damien:
Right. And full disclosure to our listeners, 73 and Sunny verse.ai was actually also just purchased by by nice.com and have merged with Atlas RTX. And this is actually my second acquisition in three years, which is a lot. It’s a, it’s it’s a lot of change and similar to you saying, you be more humble, be deferential. It made me think of what I tell people when they’re going through these types of changes is be the read that bends, be the read that bends. You can’t keep doing exactly what you were doing in the past, whether that is technology, know, earlier today I was having problems moving from a Mac to a PC and you know, these types of things, you know, just holistically be that read that bends, you know, personality wise, work wise.

Just psychologically being able to have that change, I think is exactly what you’re talking about is, hey, I’ve learned something from here and now I can maybe take some direction from someone else. This is not my entire business right now and I can be that read that bends and I can be flexible. And speaking of being flexible and being open-minded about things, and maybe even risky about things, switching to a

A more personal side, Mike, you are an avid backcountry skier, which to me is the athletic equivalent of being an entrepreneur, because it’s not something like a backcountry. Not not something I would be really doing a lot. So tell tell us a little bit about this is, think, the rush that you need now that you’re in a public company and you’re not, you know, you’re settling down. You need that adrenaline push. Tell us a little bit about it. And you live in Park City. So tell us a little bit about your backcountry skiing love.

Mike Bills:
Yeah, I can talk for a long time about it. I mean, skiing, just anytime you’ve got the whole idea of skiing, it’s just incredible to have boards strapped to your feet that you get to slide around on. I guess it’s just so insanely fun. And we’re so privileged to be able to recreate. then, you know, obviously we have such great mountains here in Utah. you know, skiing in a ski resort is fun and you can do really cool stuff there.

But it’s also kind of, you know, it’s a safe amusement park. Yes, you can get hurt really bad, you can get, but there’s, there are whole bunch of people looking out for you and they close areas off when they’re too dangerous. The ski patrol is there early morning to make sure that the mountain’s safe and ready, which is great. And there are certainly days that I like to go and ride chair lifts and go shred the mountain, but.

When you go out into the back country, you leave all that behind. Like you are on your own. So you have to have the fitness, you have to have the education, you have to be paying attention the whole time as you’re going up. And because you also have to go up safe ways. So I love the complexity of it. I love the fact that like I’ve had to invest a lot of time in education. it’s very much a, there’s a cerebral aspect.

To it that is connected to the physical piece of it. And then there’s a whole spiritual component because when you’re out there in the back country, and there’s plenty of back country skiers in Utah, but nevertheless, it’s pretty easy to leave everything behind and be out for hours and see nobody. So that self-reliance, also, it does sound a lot like entrepreneurship. You’re on your own, the risks,

And the risk can, they’re grave, right? Every year we’ll have two to eight avalanche deaths here in Utah and other accidents. And so there, yes, there’s serious risks and that’s just the most grave. You could just get hurt out there and if you get hurt, you gotta get yourself out of there. And there’s no cell phone service. so it’s, yeah, but I am, attracted to that risk. It is, that risk is part of the reason that I love it so much. And now I’m not like, I don’t have a born to lose tattoo. So I’m not like just running out there trying to, to court risk. No, in fact, backcountry skiing has somewhat of an ethos of risk mitigation. We’re not Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan with maximizing risk.

So I read the avalanche forecast every day, whether I’m skiing or not, so I know what the snow layers are like. So that when I’m out there and I’m on a certain aspect, I know what’s underneath my feet and what could happen. So anyway, I can keep going on and on, but yes, it very much does sound a lot like entrepreneurship.

Damien:
No.

Damien:
It is and I am I am also thinking of one of my CEOs from two companies ago are my first acquisition three years ago, Umberto Moletti, CEO of Inside View, a bought by demand base race car driver, right? It’s entrepreneur needs that adrenaline hit needs, know, that pushing the limit, pushing the edge and to your point about, you know, just having

the self-reliance, the education, the complexity, all of that, you’re on your own. And so it is, I love the dichotomy or the parallels between being an entrepreneur and the backcountry skiing. Last topic, last question actually. What is so great about the most preposterous band in the history of Arena Rock, Rush? I don’t see it. What’s so great about Rush?

Mike Bills:
Yeah, it’s well, I’m not sure. So when I was a when I was a kid, I I don’t know. I felt so hard for that band. I think that like there was I believed that they had some kind of high intellectual element to them because their lyrics had been influenced by Anne Rand. And but I didn’t appreciate just how dumb that they actually were.

So I fancied myself some kind of young intellectual. They had a kick-ass drummer and a preposterous bass player who also is their singer with a polarizing voice, I guess you could say. But yeah, I’ve seen him in concert like nine times. And it’s just like, even though I certainly recognize them being preposterous, it’s because I connected with them in my youth. very would rare, like if I hear it on the radio, I’m likely to change it. But it’s also a connection. My younger brother and we were best friends all of our lives. He took his life 11 years ago on December 10th. So the anniversary of that just, and we actually buried him in a Rush concert jersey.

And so it’s a connection that whenever I think of them, I also think of my brother whom I miss dearly.

Damien:
Okay, sorry to hear that, but now I understand the connection and the love. think I was thinking, like Rand, I was about to shrug, but now I understand. That’s a literary joke for those that don’t know, Atlas shrugged. So Mike, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Mike Bills:
It’s a different good one.

Damien:
If our listeners would like to get a hold of you, feel free to connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Mike Bill’s PhD, or visit atlasRTX.com. Mike, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Mike Bills:
My pleasure.

Mike Bills:
Thank you.