It’s true what they say that it’s lonely at the top. Former CEO Todd Ordal says he gets where CEOs are coming from because he’s worn their moccasins and felt their pain. Todd’s new company, Applied Strategy, was developed over years and years of screwing up and making mistakes. He now works with CEOs and helps them lead better, profit more, and sleep soundly at night with coaching strategies that work and has more organizational effectiveness. Todd talks about the problems he came across and the growing pains of setting and building up an organization.
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In this episode, we have Todd Ordal who is the CEO of Applied Strategy. He is the author of Never Kick a Cow Chip on a Hot Day, a great book. I’ve been through the book. I would recommend if you have not. It is a how-to and it tells you specific things you can do. Todd, thanks so much for being a guest on the show.
Thank you, Bob. Welcome to the People’s Republic of Boulder.
Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.
I’m a former CEO and I now work with CEOs and help them lead better, profit more, and sleep soundly at night and hopefully without narcotics. That looks like coaching strategy work and has more organizational effectiveness, mostly CEOs of $50 million to $10 billion in range that I work with. Industry diagnostic and my work’s all over the country, a little bit of international. I hail from Boulder but don’t do much work here.
For the folks who don’t know your background, when you’re out in the space, there are a lot of consultants around on there. You did this for a living before consulting?
Yes. The reason I have a voice in this world is that there are all the mistakes I’ve probably made so there’s not much that my clients can screw up that I haven’t already screwed up. I can hopefully help them make different mistakes. I’m an operating guy so I can come at this coaching consulting thing from a senior’s perspective as opposed to a psyche community. I got an undergrad in psych, but I’ve made all of those mistakes. I had been in their moccasins and felt their pain and know it’s lonely at the top, so I get where they’re coming from.
I was going through your book before the show and you have experience with Kinko’s and some rather large store. Let’s talk a little bit of the backstory or background of you and Kinko’s.
I stumbled into Kinko’s on a college long family connection, ran a store, then ran more and more stores. I eventually ended up on the board there and had 7,000 people working for me. This was during the growth years of Kinko’s and we just had an absolute blast. Building that company was so fun and I was there for twenty years. It was just a riot. In fact, one of your friends, Larry Hay, used to work for me when I was at Kinko’s, but I had a division office here. We eventually rolled that thing up and sold it to a private equity firm. I stayed for three years after that and ran a couple of other smaller organizations. That’s the short story.
You were working for Kinko’s and for those that don’t know, it’s an office supply event, correct?
FedEx eventually bought them. They killed the name but it has been FedEx Office, which you would probably know them as now, that’s...
