Join us on The Hero Show as we dive into an inspiring conversation with Mike Murphy, a growth leader with over 30 years of experience in healthcare and insurance. Discover Mike's journey from corporate success to founding Sunstone Management Advisors, where he helps transform businesses. 

Learn about his unique strategies, the power of out-earning your pay, and the challenges he faced while building companies. 

If you're eager to uncover insights on business growth and resilience, this episode is a must-listen!

Mike Murphy: Our mission to quality high touch as many companies we can and find a way to bring them value to help really grow their enterprise value so We're not a consulting firm that does big binders so that management can look good we're really want to work with founders, owners, investors, entrepreneurs, people that are stuck have a problem and want to dare themselves to be great and that's the mission I want to go on and that's always been my career arc and where I've had some success.


Mike Murphy: I am here. 


Richard Matthews: Awesome, glad to have you here, Mike, I know we didn't get a chance to talk too much ahead of the interview, where are you calling in from? 


Mike Murphy: Just outside of Washington, DC, Potomac, Maryland. 


Richard Matthews: Nice. We were visiting some friends up there and just outside of, I think it's Rockwood or something like that. It's right outside of Maryland as well. 


Mike Murphy: Sure. Rockville. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, we got a, Rockville, that's it. See, you know, the area better than I do. We just visited. 


But yeah, it's a beautiful place in the country. My martial arts instructor actually lives up there. So, we do virtual training and he's got his studio up there and right outside of Washington DC on the North side. 


Mike Murphy: Okay. Yeah. That's where Potomac is. We're Northwest and Rockville is just slightly to the North from here as well. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, awesome. So I always like to start these interviews off with just a brief introduction of who you are, so our audience knows a little bit of who you are. 


So I'm going to read your bio real quick that I got from you, and it says Mike Murphy is a distinguished growth leader with over 30 years as a C level executive specializing in healthcare and insurance as CEO, COO and CRO. 


With your hand on experience, these led to successful product launches, notably UnitedHealthcare's inaugural National Dental product portfolio. 


You got expertise that spans M and A, which is mergers and acquisitions, due diligence, post merger integration, turnaround strategies, consistently improving earnings and growth profits. Essentially you do a lot of work in the growth areas of business. 


So what I want to find out from you, Mike, is in your own words, what are you known for, right? What's your business like now? Who do you serve? What do you do for them? 


I love building and fixing things and love growing things. And that's always been, you know, I'm not a sit and still type person. I jokingly say that if the role you have for me is a maintenance role. Don't give it to me, cause I'll break it only make it interesting for myself. Right? So I can't help but tweak, you know, I've got, I want to be moving. 


And as I came out of my last assignment where I was pretty successful in some difficult environment, which I kind of proud of myself in. Talk to a bunch of friends and folks and said, you know, instead of trying to figure out to find the right W2 scenario and get locked in and work with a single company. 


Let's make our mission to quality high touch as many companies we can and find a way to bring them value to help really grow their enterprise value. 


And that's the mission I want to go on and that's always been my career arc and where I've had some success. And so, I'm looking to bring those skills to bear along with seven or eight other great partners to just help companies get discernibly better. It can be a lot of fun. I think the good news is you pick who you want to work with. 


Like they pick who they want to work with and also you pick who you don't want to work with. And so, I spent a fair amount of my time, frankly, in non commercial engagements where people just call it, just say, Hey, I'm looking at something, can I pick your brain? What do you think? And, I'm happy to do that all day long. 


Keeps me plugged into some of the cool things that are going on in the space. And, you know, the way I look at it is if I'm doing something that matters and I'm bringing value, the commercial side of this will work itself out. So that's. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, really. I love your thought about if your job is maintenance, don't put me there. Cause I'll break it just to make it interesting. Cause I feel that deep in my soul. I had to hire, and my ops manager is the make sure that all works all the time, because I'm going to break it all the time. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. Our target market is, I mean, my background is, you saw, is insurance and healthcare. And that's kind of our core expertise. And because of my experience and my partner's experience is that we have really deep domain expertise. 


Now, some of the stuff transcends, I mean, there's some of the fundamentals around strategy, finance, execution, management, culture, you know, that can cut across any industry. 


And we bring those precepts to bear, but primarily it's insurance and healthcare. And maybe to put a little, you know, fine tune that a little bit on the insurance side, it's all things, life accident health. 


So it's, we're not really property and casualty or you know, individual lines or international we're really fundamental life accident health, but all sides of it, individual group agency carriers, you name it, there's nothing in ecosystem we haven't touched and on the healthcare side we're not really biotech research forward. 


So, and again, our operating partners all have deep background in a lot of these areas and expertise. And so that's kind of our core strength. 


We, you know, occasionally somebody will ask us to look at something that's outside of what we do. And, you know, we're happy to do it because of the precepts of what fundamentally makes good sound business operations trans, you know, go across industry and things like culture and focus. But our real thing is also the kind of our technical skill. So, 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, that's one of the things I love about running a podcast like this is we get to talk to people in industries all over the world and you find out that everything from your coffee shop in the Philippines to your venture backed capital firms in Silicon Valley to and everything in between, they run on the same basic principles. 


And they, you know, notwithstanding some of the nuances of industry, but they kind of cut across industry. And so it's fascinating for me. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So let's take a minute and talk about how you got here, right? Your origin story, every good hero has an origin story. It's the thing that made them into the hero they are today. And we want to hear that story. Where you born hero, or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, I got exposed to some nuclear waste and either became a hero or an idiot. I don't know either one of the two. So, there is a fundamental guideposts that I follow when I started my career. My father never went to college and got out of the military and was going to be an electrician, was going to trade school and then took a job loading tapes in the old computer rooms back in the day. 


And then basically became a computer programmer and stayed 30, 35 years in corporate America. And as I went to go into my first job coming out of college, he said a little bit of tips for teens. These are the three things that I do to, you know, that work for me. 


And that way you become more valuable to the job than the job is to you. So at any time you can tell your boss to go to hell. And so that was kind of variation on the out on earning your pay.. 


And then the second thing my father said is don't spend other people's money. Don't get caught up in the politics. So the green eyed goddess of envy and big corporations that happens all the time and you're posturing and preening and you're focusing on all the wrong things. 


You're not focusing on the out earning your pay. You're focusing on the politics. Stay away from that. 


And the third thing he said was, just make sure your boss knows who you are and what you're doing. And if you're doing something that matters, you're doing something well, and you're with the right organization, everything works itself out. 


And there's some check of box things you need to do. You need to learn how to grow a business. You need to understand sales. You need to learn how to manage and manage a customer service operation or a production environment. You need to understand marketing. You understand how to manage a P and L. 


And so it was a bunch of things he said. You're not going to get if you constantly do the same thing. So do lots of different things. And so I followed, you know, both those precepts. And the first part of my career was relatively blissful. I was 15 years inside the big company. 


I consider it my alma mater, but then I woke up one day and realized that, number one, that having a bigger job is not going to be having a better job for me spiritually, and that I'm really not a house cat, you know, I'm really not someone that's going to sit inside. 


So from there, I started my journey. I went to took a job at an entrepreneurial, very entrepreneurial company, and then really learned what it's like to truly, I mean, it wasn't a huge company. We had probably a hundred employees or so. It was a 13 years bootstrapping, the making, very, still very entrepreneurial kind of a startup, if you will. 


And I was a chief marketing officer and then I really feel people relying on investors, owners, you know, if you're in a big company, you're really kind of part of 50,000, a 100,000 people. I mean, you make a difference, but you know, it doesn't feel the same. 


So, I did a series of what I would call is intrapreneurial. And frankly, that was just okay. And those are build, fix changes inside the larger to midsize companies and you know, frankly, a lot of the companies, say they want change but what they want is a different result, but want to do the same thing over and over again. 


I'll tell you right now that don't, I'm not Warren Buffett. Don't hire me as a stock picker because If you hear me saying, this is the greatest thing ever, chances are pretty good, it's a disaster. You should short the stock. 


Cause I had four scenarios that I went into and I thought I was doing my due diligence where inside of the first 90 days, it was, Oh my God. And not like, Hey, you know, the executive washroom is what you promised me. No, like almost out of business, running out of cash, board up the door and all that stuff. 


So it was, had some really kind of scary things that I had to deal with as an executive. But overcame all of them found a way to bring value and had some pretty good success building companies from scratch, you know, turning around a badly broken small company. And I live for that stuff. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, and I love your story, too, because you've been sort of all over the place and like your dad's advice early on out earning your pay is such a great thing. And it's one of the things that like, I've told people a lot and I was like, you can't compete with me because I'll work you under a table kind of thing. 


Like, it's just like this, you can't compete with people like that. There's no competition for people who show up every day and we'll just outwork you, 


Mike Murphy: Well, and I go back to the great Vince Lombardi, I have two quotes that I use all the time and some of it looking to leverage my history major. Right? 


So the first one is the great Winston Churchill says, I mean, you think about what he went through as a leader. Sometimes doing one's best isn't sufficient. Sometimes you must do what is required. 


And somebody would go, Oh, you know, I look at that as empowering because you're not self limiting you're not looking at, you know, kind of what you think can be done, you think about what needs to be done and you kind of set yourself free. And the other. Just do it. Right? 


And so, that balance of desiring to be perfect, right? And being on that journey and understanding that journey, knowing you'll never get there without turning yourself nuts. 


Like you're a story that kid that got straight A's and got the college, got a B plus and blew their brains out. None of that somebody that's constantly chasing that there, you know. 


And the last, the other one I love is Marvin Hagler. And I do this when I used to talk to folks, you know, about culture. He says, and as great as he was, we'll sit across the ring and look at his competition and says, that dude wants to take food out of my children's mouth. 


So, he never had a hard time getting up for anybody in competition and stuff. Like, so to your point, I'm never going to be outworked. You know, I have a humility about, I am not perfect and it can always be better and I live to kind of make it better and I get up every day and that's my mission. 


And along the way you surround yourself with some great people. Suddenly, lo and behold, you do some miraculous things and it's awesome. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, I know I. 


Mike Murphy: Feel a lot, you feel a lot, but when you're successful, it's just amazing. 


And it's almost like becoming a polymath is not an option, right? Like, you have to go through and learn enough about every category of what's important in business so you can succeed, so you can actually provide the value you want to provide to the world. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. I've self taught on a lot of things. I mean, I just go back to, you know, and I got to delegate myself, but you know, there were no, we didn't have desktop computers and there was one for the department and everything was still paperback and the old days of insurance. 


And today, I can do anything in Excel, right? And so it's, you know, you get that, well, there's a willow away in that curiosity, you know, and even right now, to your point, I'm building new muscle memory, I'm doing things that I never as in this business that I never had to do, which is organic lead generation, social media content. 


I never did any of that. I was able, you know, I built sales organizations, did all that, and I'm still learning and it's awesome. You know, it's exciting. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, it's one of the things that I think sets entrepreneurs apart from, you know, the non entrepreneur part of our world is that desire to constantly want to learn new . And it's like, I go so far as like, I've always got little things in my life that are outside of work, even like I'm learning to play pool or I'm learning to do wind surfing with my son or whatever it is. 


I've always got something that I'm like, Nope, I've got to just constantly work this learning muscle because it's such an edge giver in any space to be the kind of person that can go in and pick up a skill. And then leverage that skill in your work. 


But you have a confidence and a humility that drives you to master that skill or overcome it. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, my, uh, 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, it's awesome. 


My kids and I will always talk about, 


Richard Matthews: Anytime you're learning a new skill. We call the first little bit of learning a new skill is the great succotude, right? where that humility comes in, right? That you're like, you have to through the part where you're not good at it, Yeah. right? 


And that's where that humility comes in. You're like, nope, I'm not going to be good at this and it's okay that I'm not good at it. That's part of the process of learning and so like, I love being able to show that to my kids by doing it regularly in my own life but also like, that's how you get mastery. 


That's how you get to be good, is by going through and actually learning the skills and going through, like I said, that, that great succotude so you can get good at something and then leverage those skills for to make a bigger impact. 


I had to hire a medical director. I had to build a health services function inside of a health plan. What do I know about that? And 


Richard Matthews: They know a whole lot, right? 


Mike Murphy: Not a whole lot, but you know, you just. You know, you do what you need to do. And again, when that learning is taking place while you're doing it there's a level of excitement and enthusiasm. 


It doesn't feel like you're working, right? Cause you're learning while you're doing it, you're developing new skills. And that's to say, it's the same thing as a hiring philosophy, right? You can hire the school to been there, done that. 


Or you can hire that young person or, you know, the young person or somebody who's looking to set a new skillset, but has that kind of runway to get beyond where they are, they'll have the double excitement of learning while they're going in and you flash forward a year into the job, they're far outperforming the school have been there, done that. 


If they have that attribute, those key that you're looking for. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. 


Richard Matthews: I hire because, yeah, because those like your willingness to figure something out. And like, we actually designed like our test projects for new hirees around that kind of stuff to be able to find the people that are going to figure out how to solve a problem that's intentionally built into the project. And like that's how we like select for that trait in particular, because it's more valuable than someone who has the skill. 


Mike Murphy: I mean, what happens is that folks like that and that, you know, and again, I got there and it didn't happen overnight. It wasn't like, I mean, I had some great manager of the time and some of them were really hard. And I used to joke that every day was an interview, and it was. And then you were used to that kind of well, it's not my fault. Right? 


You know, don't create your own little box that limits your level of authority so you can feel good about your failure. No, just figure it out. You know, I used to joke at this one boss, I swear, if I came out to be in a meeting and a tree had fallen on my car, he go, well, you screwed it up. 


You parked your car in the wrong place, you know, so it's, but again, when you get into that and you start getting inside that head suddenly, wow, you know, there's nothing you can't do. 


And then again, you may not turn it all the way around and it may not always work, but you know, you're not, don't have that anxiety, I'm like, I can't do this. You're like, you're trying to make a difference and you want to own it. And so it's great. 


Richard Matthews: It's that mental sort of framework you use, or at least I use regularly, that if it's not my fault, I can't fix it. Right? 


Because your fault, you have all the power. Right? And that's, you know, if you have the power, then you can make anything happen. Right? And like I said, it's a very freeing mentality. 


And some of them, I was like, Cheap marketing officer was like outside of, and I just sat there. So I'm just not going to let this happen. How can we do this? And you know, it's not lone wolf McQuaid hero. You're surrounded by people and you say, okay. 


Cause I have to navigate that, I got to convince my bosses to do things. I got to convince colleagues to do things. And I just have this, Willis said, no, we will find a way to fix this. 


And I remember, and in years later, I had friends that I had worked with in the big company and come to see me in a smaller company and they go, how do you do this? 


I mean, I just said, it's a muscle memory you build over time. You encounter resistance and problems and you learn that you can overcome it. 


And then you have the confidence to be able to overcome like, you know, it's the old Jake LaMotta. I didn't go down Ray, you know, it doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. 


It's like, okay, bring the next one on I'll figure it out. You know, it becomes a sense of pride. But it also, you can build that in your teams and if your teams have that, well, then your job, you're not worried about shining a clean light on what's going wrong. 


So. I don't know. When get to find those people, it's magic. And again, they don't have to be like you, but if they've got that will to win, that chase of perfection, that humility, curiosity, sense of humor, joy, and you want to be around positive people and you put those people around you, magic takes place. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, it really does. I'm starting to find those people in our company and it's already making a dramatic impact as we grow. So, and I'm really looking forward to having more leadership in that space. 


So, it's definitely powerful. And it's one of those things that you don't really know as a small company, you know, when you're a sub 10 people, right? 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, no doubt. And the tough thing too, is when you're navigating that, cause a lot of times and said, you know, it's a prototype where you're, you, as you start to move, you know, your company along the folks that were with you sometimes at the start, aren't the folks that with you, the finish, because as you start to move along, the challenges get different. 


Well, not everybody makes the jump. I mean, I worked, you know, in enough smaller companies where great people, but they were used to kind of the limiting side of a small business, that's kind of bumping along. 


And then when it starts to hit hyperdrive and pace picks up and some of them struggle with it and that's always hard, especially for the founders. 


But it's human nature. Just sometimes the people that you start with and who they are great folks in their own right, and you do them a disservice if you're not honest with them about what's going next. And so, that's always a challenge I find with smaller companies. 


In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over the course of your career that really energize all of your other skills. 


So the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at, you Like all the skills you develop over the course of your career so far. There's probably some common thread that ties all those skills together where you would find your superpower. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is? 


But, and sometimes, you know, there's the Greek character, Cassandra, I think her name was, and she had the gift of sight where she could see into the future. The downside is that you could see your own death, right? 


And so that was a little bit of my, where I've gone in a situation, got in and just, you Got in, diagnosed, broke the thing down, look at it and looked at it through, you know, a couple of critical eyes and say we're going on the ground like a dart. 


We're, this is going in the wrong direction. No, we're not. Things are great. And no, we're not. And then of course, in that scenario is if it's, you know, I'm not the CEO. Even if I'm just on the executive team, that's where I could see my own death because I could see that they're on the river in Egypt called denial. 


They don't understand what's going on. It's there. There's a combination of things. Some of it is kind of a gut feel, but a lot of it's just kind of fundamentals, which is like, you know, all right. Tell me your business, your why, and how you're bigger, faster, better, cheaper. 


And again, it sounds simple, but so many companies, that they're, you listen to their value proposition, their proprietary distinction, or what they think about the competition, and it's wafer thin. And you go, then it doesn't sound like an advantage to me. 


Or you look at what they're doing in terms of their instrumentation and how they're managing the company, that there's obvious problems that they're ignoring. 


I know they're actually taking a grease pen and go on the field page and pretending the full is empty or empty is full or they're not looking at it at all. So yeah, I think my ability to strategically assess a business in relatively short order, some of it's gut feel just from, you know, years and things that I'm looking for. 


Some of it is an organized due diligence approach about marketing materials, website, listening to the executives, you know, does their calendar reflect their mission? And I can sort that out in relatively short order. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, talk for another minute about does their calendar reflect their mission? Because I think that's incredibly important and I don't want our audience to have missed what you said there. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, I mean, and it's a battle that I know, I've felt, especially if you're, you know, in a smaller company and you're CEO, COO, and you got a lot going on, there's a ton of things that you're doing day in and day out, 


And I know I would wake up at the end of the week and just say, did I work on the things that I needed to work on to truly move this business forward strategically? Or was I caught up in a bunch of tasks related, tactical related things that didn't do the things that I needed to do to truly move? 


Even, you know, like I map out, I sit down, you know, I, how long is it going to take me to do something? How long did it actually take me to do it? Because one of the things that you do is in your own time management, I notoriously think I can bend the rubber tree plant. 


It used to show up in my conversation with my wife where I'd be at the office and you say, Oh I'm wrapping something up, we'll be on a half an hour, three hours later, I come in the door. Didn't take you a half an hour. It took you three hours. Right? 


So at any rate, you got to have the tools to be able to go back and your gut will tell you, am I working on the things that I need to do in my role as a leader to truly move the enterprise value to drive the return for this company and its strategic success? And then it's always, you get caught up in the tactical as you're firefighting. 


But then you say, well, I'll do that next week or I'll do that the week after. But at some point then you've gone now three months and you've been doing nothing but tactical. And you're now setting yourself up for failure because you need to do the tactical, but you need to find a way to make sure your calendar reflects what your mission is. 


And so I, you know, you can do that with your gut. Some people do with their gut. I'm a little more anal retentive than that. I actually, I have a to do list. I break, it probably takes more time for me to put something on a to do list than it does to do it. But then at the end of the day, I go back and analyze, I go back and say, it's not perfect. 


They say, well, you know, how many times did I say it was going to take five minutes and it took an hour? You know, how many times, you know, did I plan the day where I said, well, you sit there and you plan a date, wait a minute. I just planned a day for 15 hours worth of work. That's the way I'm getting 15 hours worth of work done. 


So there's little tools that could use to try and do it. 


And, you know, the entrepreneur has to wear a lot of hats still. You have to like, which ones are the things that I need to do that are going to grow the company? 


And so like for a company like mine It's like how are we building the systems and building the ops to get me out of that so I can work on more important things? Right? 


And You know, I know that's different for every stage of the company. But you have to know what are the things that make the difference and then do those things. 


Mike Murphy: Here's a horrible experiment. But I had a boss who used to do this and he worked inside. He was very successful. Part of it is that he never touched a piece of paper. We juggled, he would take the mail stack and break it in half and give it to the two AVPs. I was one of them and we did all the stuff and he stayed away from all that. 


And he did what he wanted to do, which was to manage this gigantic, successful sales organization. But he once said to me, he goes, I never opened my mail. I go, what? If it's important, they'll send me another one. And so when you think about it, I was like, well, no, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that could be the IRS calling you, but there is something to be said. 


I love all that stuff. And my partner's constantly got smacking me around and go, we got people to do that. We need you to focus on this. 


And so that kind of, you know, is, and there's a little plaque that I used to pass out wherever I went. Actually, it was my original company. And it was a little plaque that says, do you know what your customer would say about this? 


And there's two questions there. One, do you really understand what your client would think about what you're doing right now? And is what you're doing right now, helping you with your client or ultimately your business? 


So it's a great little reminder to just say, how important is the, because we can get trapped when I get into the same thing. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk about the curse side, right? You know, your fatal flaw, every Superman has his kryptonite, every wonder woman can't remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. 


So you've probably recognized that you have a flaw that's held you back, right? That's something you struggled with. 


For me, I've always struggled with, we talked about already a little bit, perfectionism and using it the wrong way, right? Like keeping it from letting me ship things, right? Or lack of self care, which, you know, letting my clients walk all over me, not having good boundaries, things like that. 


Or, you know, being a visionary and having, lacking the discipline to actually implement and realizing I need to hire an implementer and bring them in. 


But I think more important than the flaw is how have you worked to overcome it so that you can continue to grow and hopefully sharing your experience here will help our listeners learn a little bit from your experience. 


And I go back and it's just a scenarios where I've been in, well, I've had some, certainly some super bowl wins, you know, I've had some instances where, you know, it wasn't a super one, a company went bankrupt or they got delisted or something bad happened. 


And I've always tried to do my best to make an impact and found ways to bring some success for the company or irrespective of whether the financials wrote it, but I've still struggle with it to this day. 


But you know, I have to go back and think about how, what could I have done in my communication style where I could have convinced the CEO that this was a disaster we needed to avoid. 


And some of it is that I'm like a pit bull on a pet leg. If I see it, I can't unforget it and I can't let it go. And so I have to kind of work on my communication style. 


The one piece of bad news, it's just a one off. It's not consistent. It's not part of the whole organization. And that happened to me in relatively, recently where it was a business where the financials weren't going the way we thought. 


And I consider myself pretty, you know, technically astute and I was tearing apart and looking apart and I was like, Oh no, it's just these things over here and it's a one off and Mikey, the dope should have been remembering the things that I've said. 


It's just a lot of things, there was a runoff because when you dismiss something as a one off, okay. Yeah, that might go away, but it's going to replace with another disaster right behind it. And by the way, same one off could be the good guy, right? 


Where you're carried. I've seen this before. That's kind of concentration burnings where you're carried by some one gigantic client or whatever is holding the whole thing up and you're healthier business is not defined. You know, like you gotta get a look at the details. 


And then the other is, avoiding the trap of the one off the, you know, the assuming that something is going to rise, just, you know, it's an aberration and cause your gut tells you it's an aberration. You're going to learn the hard way if you're not constantly checking yourself on that stuff. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, I really like that because I feel that in our own business, especially the one off stuff. You're like, Oh, that's, you know, it was a problem this month. It's probably not gonna be a problem next month. And you realize that. Okay, that actually is a problem. We need to figure out how to solve that. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. And you can do the root cause thing, you know, the one on one stuff root cause. And the root cause may tell you it's a one off, but the reality is that a lot of business is just a series of one offs, positive and negative. So you can't put your hand over the negatives and pretend the positives aren't one offs as well. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I love that mentality. Something that I need to think about regularly as we're continuing to grow. So, I want to shift gears off of our superpowers and fatal flaws and talk a little bit about your common enemy, right? 


Every superhero has what we call an arch nemesis, and that's the thing that you constantly have to fight against in your world, right? 


And so in your world of consulting, when you're taking these clients on and helping them, you know, do their growth and stuff, it's a mindset or a flaw that you constantly have to fight against so you can actually get them the result that they came to you for in the first place. 


So in this world of, you know, business consulting, I know you're specifically in the healthcare industry. What is that common enemy that you have to fight against regularly now? 


And so that's a hard thing. Cause we exist, frankly, and again, I'll put a fine edge on it. I don't like to use the word failure, but effectively we're not being brought in with everything's great. Right? 


We're being brought in when something's broken and we need some help from the outside and there's this stigma, especially for the entrepreneur, this, I think our clients are great folks. 


But that's a real tough pill for them to swallow. Right? I had to bring you jabronis in here to help me fix this. And, again, it goes from either, I can't fix this on my own. You guys can help me. This will be great. But there is that overarching like, you know, it's an admission of something's wrong and I'm realizing. 


Richard Matthews: That maybe I don't have everything it takes to do this and I need help. And that's a hard thing to swallow. 


And you know, we're your team. We can help you. And you know, a bunch of them go, nah, I don't know, I think we'll be okay. And so that to me is more than anything else, that kind of, the great thing about these entrepreneurs is their spirit and their drive and their thick skin. 


The bad thing is that, it's like doctors that make bad patients, just, you know, and we're, yeah, we're not, we so tiptoe around, I mean, I don't speak like, and, and I've said to them, and I've had conversations with clients and I go. 


I don't have a vote. My W2, my mortgage isn't riding on it. I love you guys. I think you're great but you're out of your mind and I try to appeal with sense of humor and it breaks my heart because I know I can help, right? I love the people. I love the committee, but it's just this kind of like, Oh no, you don't understand. 


We're here to help and you know, and, but yeah, that is the enemy. The enemy is complacency and stubbornness and it's hard. 


Richard Matthews: If that complacency and stubbornness is what you're constantly have to fight against, the flip side of that is of course, what you're fighting for, you're driving force, right? 


Your mission, so to speak, just like Spiderman fights, save New York or Batman fights, save Gotham or Google fights index and categorize all the world's information, what is it that you fight for in your business? 


Love that stuff all day long. And then obviously, collaborating with management and then creating the tools and the things that our collective experience that makes them just a great company going forward. And some of it's turnarounds and it's building things and it's fixing things. 


But above all else, it's making an impact on the enterprise value, either saving it from themselves and putting them on the path to, you know, some magic, or it's, you know, putting some things in place that just allow it to take it up a notch or two. 


So, you know, we tell folks that, number one is we're hands on. So, it's not like you talk to me and I cajole you into getting a deal with Sunstone and then we pass to grad students. Our operating partners are all senior executives with dirt on the fingernails and real life experiences. You know, wide range of scenarios to help our clients with their business. 


And then we have a couple of marketing geniuses and some other folks that are, you know, have great financial backgrounds. 


So even something as simple as a go to market strategy, we can bring talent in, even if they're doing light touches on it. 


And the last thing is our economic model is built around. Yes, if it's the no, because we're not chasing big projects with binders. We want first and foremost to make a discernible impact on the company. And that means we want to reduce our SG& A expend. 


And so can we do some clever things with how we're apportioning talent, leveraging their skill sets versus ours? Doing things on success fees. So it's not some cost it's tied to a success. 


We just quietly in the back, it's kind of orchestrating them. 


Richard Matthews: Help them make it. They call it the guy in the chair in comic books, right? 


Mike Murphy: The guy that's here, right? 


Richard Matthews: Guy in the chair. 


Mike Murphy: We don't need to be the hero. We want our client to be the hero and kind of look back and go, thanks guys. 


Richard Matthews: Well, speaking of being the guy in the chair, the next thing I always like to talk about is your tool belt, right? Every, you know, the practical portion of our show, every superhero has a tool belt, right? With their awesome gadgets, like their batarangs, or their webslingers, their laser eyes, or, you know, if you're Alfred, for that big giant computer screen that Batman's got. 


And I'll talk about the top one or two tools you couldn't live without to do what you do today. Could be anything from your notepad, to your calendar, to something you use your marketing tools for product delivery. 


Something you think is essential to getting your job done as founder of this kind of company. 


I mean, I built sales organizations, we either bought leads or whatever, but I knew how to ingest them. So I knew all that stuff. I never was on the other side of that. But I have, you know, an intellectual curiosity and an affinity and a skillset are being able to, and again, I'm effectively like the CEO of the firm. 


I don't have folks to toss it to. So I had to kind of build this muscle memory to build on our marketing program, which is buying domain, setting up code, figuring out software, coding the software, analytics, connecting into the CRM, all kind of dirt on the fingernail stuff. 


So I would say first and foremost, my comfort level with technology, everywhere from access to Excel. I mean, I can go from 30,000 feet to turn on the fingernails like that. I don't have to wait for somebody to get me out of a situation and get right to it. 


Even if I'm looking at a just a business strategy, there's a cockpit that I'm thinking about if it's a financial, you know, thing where we're finding the profitability, there's a cockpit, there's analytics, I think about. 


So, I would say those are the two main superpowers that I have, or I'm in my tool belt. Allows me to be pretty functional. 


Richard Matthews: I love the thought about being comfortable with technology because you realize today that's such a thing that it sets you apart because there's so much technology and you have so much power you can use with it. If only you're just not afraid to push the buttons and see what happens. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. What do you do if you're in the middle of something again, you're, you know, running your own firm. And, I don't have anybody to toss the ball to. I can't say, Hey, go buy 11 domains for me. Get them set up, get them all, you know, do the thing, warm them up. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So I love all of that. I want to talk a little bit about your guiding principles, right? And as we get near the end of the interview here, one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, for instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only brings them to Arkham asylum. 


So as we wrap up, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you live your life by. 


Maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero's journey. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, so, I would start off with that, when I think about, especially in a role of leader, you know, I jokingly say it's, you know, I make use of my history major, but when I started off as a leader, it just intuitively, I knew I needed to sit down and I used to call it Mikey meets. 


So I got my Mikey meet section. And so sit down and do one on ones with everybody and just get to know them. And then over time, the organization got bigger and it couldn't really do that. 


And I start off by saying, you know, built around trust and I will instantly trust the person, my subordinate or my colleague instantly trust. They don't have to earn that from me. I will give that to them right out of the gate, there's to lose. But I'm on my side, my marker is I have to earn their trust. 


And I'm going to earn their trust, not by being an indulgent parent and giving people whatever they want. I'm going to earn their trust, through reliability, fairness, open communication. 


So, you know, I have three things I talk about is, you know, one is, divine right of Kings. And I don't believe in the divine right of King. So the fact that I'm in charge or quote unquote a superior does not make me a superior. I'm not going to be the alpha wolf by gnashing my teeth. 


Second thing was open covenants openly arrived at and full and fair communication. I build an environment where people can say anything they want to me and I'm literally, I tell them, please do not rehearse your speech. I am wonderfully flawed, right? 


I make mistakes. I'm not perfect and I'm okay with being told I'm flawed. So don't think about how you need to tell me something. Don't politic for me. Just let me have it both ways. You want to call me names? Call me names. 


My only thing is that don't shoot at me from behind rocks. Let me have a chance to defend myself first and cause either I've under communicated something and we got to fix that. I'm doing something wrong and we need to correct that. 


And the third thing is we may agree to disagree. And my only little sense of humor there is that we each reserve the right to say, I told you so. And sometimes I'll pull rank and sometimes I won't, but certainly having that level of high amounts of task pressure, not relationship pressure is key. 


And again, I can't take that. I have to earn that and I'm not successful all the time, but I started having to put that stuff in writing and sharing with folks. And as I left various positions, people would come out and say. I kept your letter and you were true to your word. 


So that honor, integrity, decency, you know, ethics, not only in terms of doing the right thing, but communicating, you know, that aboves all. 


And the flip side of that is if you don't have integrity, if you're not being honest with me that's a non starter, you know, that's non negotiable. That's where we part company quickly. But I would say that, you know, that's it. 


So it's a sense of humility about the consent of the governed and earning your stripes as a leader. But it is also driven by fundamental rigorous approach to honor and decency. 


And I think a lot of people don't understand that. And so as a leader, it's something that you have to model for people because a lot of people will hold trust and then wait for you to earn it. 


And then like that, it just doesn't work as well that way. It's not a good way to operate an operating relationship. So as a leader, you have to model that and be like, you have my trust to keep or lose. 


Mike Murphy: There's an adage, which is a variation on a theme and applies. It is an old joke that says that nothing kills a bad product, but in good marketing, it's the same thing with leadership, right? 


And trust. if you're not the embodiment of what you say you are, that cynicism creeps in and you're dead. 


So you've got to be, when you put the words out, you can't have the cognitive dissonance and then do something else. Well, except I didn't mean it in this case. No, you mean it. And you hold to it all the time and you build consistency and again, not everybody's going to work 


Mike Murphy: Yeah. You know, I've said, look, I hear what you're saying, but I'm taking the bat out of your hands and it's not a democracy. We can have fun and we can yell and holler and have good, serious debates about stuff and more often than not. 


You're going to have the authority you need to execute your job. But if I looked and see something that's just fatal flaw, I got to take the bat out of your hands. And then, you know what, if I'm wrong, you could say, you told me so. 


And so I don't know that kind of honesty, task pressure, integrity. 


You know, that I don't really like being part of organizations when I've been there where it's the disingenuousness to the conversation, you can tell you're being, you know, lied to, It's a cancer. I can't stand it. And I certainly I wouldn't tolerate that. And anybody that worked for me, and I certainly don't tolerate it myself. 


Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of my favorite questions on this. These interviews is just asking that because it's still to this day, over 300 interviews surprises me how consistently entrepreneurs answer with some variation of integrity as being their core value. 


So I think that is a great place to wrap our interview, but I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call it the hero's challenge. And it's simple. Hero's challenge is to help us find and get access to stories that we might not otherwise find on our own. 


Richard Matthews: So the question is, do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? 


Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you. 


Mike Murphy: Yeah, so I would say this, it wasn't necessarily a happy ending for this individual, but he was a boss of mine, John. And John was a successful corporate executive going up the corporate ladder, doing great things, making good money and one day woke up like I decided and said, no, I want to do something more and cashed everything in and bought a small, tiny insurance company, became CEO. 


And even though this company didn't take off the way it should, we went to hell and back. And I was his aid to camp and I just so impressed by his self awareness, his introspection, drive, his kindness. 


And, so we stay in touch over the years and actually came to work for me at one point. But not the definition of great, successful, unreal, but just an all world human being. Yeah. All world human being. 


Richard Matthews: If we can reach out and get an introduction. Sometimes they come on the show. Sometimes they don't, but they always end up cool interviews. 


So our send off here is, you know, in comic books, there's always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism, right? 


But I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to reach out and actually light up bat signal and ask for your help. 


Mike Murphy: Sure, so, yeah, I mean, they can come to me at SunstoneManagementAdvisors.com>/Hero 


So, got a learning page for, you know, extol your virtues as well. So it's all one word, sunstonemanagementadvisors. com forward slash hero. 


I'm happy to talk to anybody that's trying to sort something out and you can make an appointment with me. And, I'm happy to spend some time with folks on the phone. 


So. I mean, generally, our bread and butter is an insurance and healthcare space, but if somebody is dealing with some other issues, you know, where I might be able to provide some pearls of wisdom, I'm happy to do that all day long. 


So one of the joke that I saw was I was thinking about it is, it was a comedian was talking about Sully Sullenberger, the hero that landed the plane on the Hudson 


Richard Matthews: Yeah. 


But, I was thinking about that when I was coming on your show. I thought I was a little joke tidbit there that the committee was saying that Sully Soderberger said, no, I'm not a hero, which means, okay, that's the first thing you have to say, if you're a hero. 


Richard Matthews: Of course not. Yep. I love that. And, thank you so much for coming on today, Mike, and sharing your story and just getting a chance to see through your lens of what it looks like to grow companies at the level that you've grown them. 


It's a very cool way to see your principles and some of the phraseology that you use to help people progress. 


So anyways, it's fascinating to hear your story today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before we hit this stop record button? 


Mike Murphy: You know, no, I mean, love the journey, stay on the journey, every problems that arise are just steps along the way and opportunities to overcome and stay positive because, you know, don't get down and if you want some help staying positive and we're here to do our part. 


Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you very much, Mike. 


Mike Murphy: Thank you.