Just Keep Going

Tim Ludwig: Mike, welcome to the show. There’s a lot I want to cover today and share about your journey, but I thought a good starting point would be with your parents. In discussion with me, you said that your mom was someone who never met a stranger and your dad instilled in you this really strong desire to build skills that would make you self-reliant. And I thought it’d be interesting to hear you say a little bit more about each of those things and maybe how they relate to your life.

Michael Curry: Well, Tim, first of all, it’s an honor and it’s awesome to be here. Thank you for having me. And I think starting this conversation off with my parents is very, very appropriate because the older that I get, the more I recognize the influence that both of them had on me and who I’ve become respectively, and in many ways, I’m a combination of those two people. So my mom is the most gregarious, outgoing, friendly person you’ll ever meet. And as I told you, Tim, she’s the type of woman that you will meet in a grocery store or in the line at the airport, and within a minute or two, you have now met your new best friend and she’s showing you pictures of her grandkids and is asking about your children and just that position or her frame of mind that strangers are friends that you haven’t made yet is something that I saw and it’s something that very much is kind of embedded into the DNA of who I am. And just given growing up in a neighborhood in College Park, Georgia, on the south side of the city, and then going for most of my schooling to a school on the north side in Buckhead and seeing different people from different backgrounds, from different walks of life, and on the surface having a lot of difference, my mom and seeing her navigate all of these worlds and communicate with anyone really taught me to, one, seek commonality when you’re looking to work with people and to be okay to go first and to kind of serve as a bridge. My dad was a very cerebral person. He passed away in 2005. But he was a very thoughtful and cerebral person. He was very much more of a quiet, kind of loner person, would love to sit in his little office and listen to records on his own or listen to audio books. But one of the things that he taught me growing up was self-reliance, particularly being his male child, was just a life skill that would alleviate and allay a lot of the fears and a lot of the angst that we all have growing up, whether it be kind of growing up with modest means or just growing up with the normal maturation process of being a teenager and trying to figure yourself out, learning to do things for yourself and be self-reliant was really important. And one of the things that he told me, it’s a quote that I still kind of carry with me to this day, is, if you drop me in a jungle with nothing but a pocketknife, I will figure my way out of it.

Tim Ludwig: I love that. What great models from each of them. And it’s funny, as you’re describing your mom and your dad, I was thinking that’s exactly like my marriage. My wife is super outgoing, very gregarious. I’m the guy that wants to close himself off and just read books all day. And I guess that probably prompted in me a curiosity to sort of double click on your mom and maybe you can help explain to me. My mother-in-law is also like that. She will talk to anybody, anywhere, become their best friend. She’s memorable to a degree that I’ve never seen with anybody else. What are the behavioral or tactical things that you’ve seen your mom do or that you do maybe even in mimicking her approach that makes her able to build friendships so easily like that? It’s harder for me as an introvert. And so, what’s the recipe book that you’ve seen her follow to do that?

Michael Curry: That’s a really good question, and it’s remarkable how much I parrot her as an adult and watching her. So, one, I’m a big Enneagram nerd now that I’ve gone down that rabbit hole and know my type, I know my mom’s type, my wife’s type, my sister’s type. So my mom is a two which is a helper. So I think by nature she has the Spidey sense of empathy. And so, what I have seen my mom do in public settings in striking up a conversation is deeply listen for the hook of commonality. So it could be a very surface conversation around, oh, we’re both headed to Florida. Well, oh, I’m going to see my aunt. She will ask probing questions, tell me more about that, and really show a genuine interest in the other person. The other thing that I’ve seen my mom do extremely well is she will walk into a room full of strangers with a huge smile. And when I look at her body language, my mom is a hugger. And so I am a hugger as well. And I think it is surprising to some people, and I think obviously kind of growing up in the South, there are also some cultural influences there. But I have seen my mom go into a room full of complete strangers, taking me to a tournament or some sort of event, and within a minute have a conversation with a person, and whether she hugs them or not, her body language is very opening. And so, her arms kind of present this is a space where you are welcome to connect with someone. I know we don’t know one another, but there’s a sense of safety.

Tim Ludwig: Moving on more back to your life story here, who was Mrs. Watley and what did she mean to you?

Michael Curry: So, Mrs. Watley is, I would say, one of the most important people in my life. And she was my kindergarten teacher at the first elementary school that I went to, L.O. Kimberley. What Mrs. Watley noticed in kindergarten was that I was very precocious and very curious. And so we would be given assignments, I would do the assignment, be done, and half the time the rest of the class was working on it. And she would let me go outside and gather worms or chase frogs or like work on a terrarium and put dirt and plants inside. And one day after school, she told my grandma that she wanted to meet my mom. And so for me, I thought I had done something wrong. But the conversation went in a completely different direction. And what Mrs. Watley told my mom was she said, we have to get Michael out of this school.

Tim Ludwig: What was the school like that she felt like you needed a change?

Michael Curry: So, I think the school was- it wasn’t a knock to the school. It was a recognition that the pace that the school went at as well as the resources that that particular school had were going to be limiting and limited. And what she wanted to make my mom aware of was I’m throwing everything I have at him without wrecking my class, but I really feel like your son has a gift or is talented. And I think that we need to find a school and find a program that is going to continue to challenge him and is going to help him take advantage of the gifts that he’s been blessed with. And so what Mrs. Watley did is that she set up a time for me to take a test to enter what at the time in the Atlanta Public Schools was called the Challenge Program, which was the program for the talented and gifted students. And so I took the test. I successfully took the test. And unbeknownst to me, the next school year, instead of going back to L.O. Kimberly with all of my friends, I was now waking up extra early and waiting on a school bus to take me halfway across town. Years later, I have probably seen Mrs. Watley ten times since I left L.O. Kimberly. And one of the most fun remembrances of Mrs. Watley was down the street from L.O. Kimberly was a school supply store that all of the teachers went to shop and buy things for their classrooms. And my mom was taking me there because we needed to buy a bunch of supplies for a science project that I was working on. And so we’re walking down the aisles and getting the poster board and the rubber cement and the letters and all the accoutrement. And my mom sees Mrs. Watley in this school supply store and just starts crying. And then Mrs. Watley starts crying. And my mom said, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for seeing the potential of my son. You have literally changed his life.

Tim Ludwig: It’s funny, hearing all of that, we have a lot of similarities in our background. So, for me, third grade was when I was put into the Gifted and Talented program through testing and I had a teacher there that was very supportive of me running as far and fast as I could academically. So, do the stuff in school. If you finish the assignment early, here’s a big box of math problems. See how far you can get. Presented it as a challenge. I remember another thing, we were making those little paper chains, you sort of fold them and connect them. And some people had five or six links, and me and a couple of buddies that were also sort of accelerated decided we wanted to fill the room with them. And when we had free time, she would let us do that. And then also at home, my parents, we didn’t have much money, but my parents figured out a way to get us a TRS-80 and then an early Apple computer. And like, I didn’t know how to use any of that stuff, but the opportunity- and there was a set of encyclopedias that they picked up used somewhere. There was always enrichment around me if I wanted to access it. My parents were both huge readers as well. And then the acquisition of knowledge did, similar for me, also create this notion that the world was a bigger place and that even though I didn’t have the means to pursue it, I could do it intellectually in my head through reading and stories and absorbing. But then my junior year in high school, and I know you have a similar experience, I won a scholarship through my mom’s work to be an exchange student in Spain. And all of a sudden now the world really got big in that moment. And it was sort of this virtuous cycle that like if I apply myself to learning and education and put myself out there and take these risks to do things like apply for the scholarship, that sometimes good things would happen and I would continue to move forward in my path.

Michael Curry: Your story resonates very strongly with me, and I think the one other point that I will share on this thread of education is I also grew up in a neighborhood where everyone in my neighborhood didn’t value education the way that my household did. And so I also got my dose of things like being a nerd or trying to talk white or who does he think he is going to the fancy school on the other side of town. And that was just kind of living in College Park and going to school in Buckhead and kind of navigating the duality of that experience. And then on the flip side, going to school in Buckhead, more so middle school than high school, people wanting me to live out the stereotype of what they thought people in College Park were. And so, kind of being this kid who listened to rap music but also listened to Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and was in the class reading like romantic poetry and was taking calculus and also was on the basketball team and learned how to rap a little bit. It was always kind of this mix and potpourri, but I say all of that to say that both of my parents were steadfast that there was absolutely nothing to be ashamed of by learning. And there was nothing noble about being ignorant or shunning education. I mean, that was crystal clear in my house that regardless of what anybody said around the neighborhood or at school, my dad would tell me, your only job is to go to school. So, like that is your job. And I go to do my job and I expect to do well. So your job is to go to school and to do well. So that means that we’re not going to shortchange ourselves. We’re not going to dumb ourselves down to fit in. We’re going to do our best. Our best is our best. And we’ll see what happens from there. But we’re not going to either play into stereotypes or discount the fact that education has been such an important and critical avenue for many people in this country to advance from humble beginnings. So, I did just want to make that point that…

Tim Ludwig: Oh, so powerful. Yeah, and there is clearly a steep and very positive trajectory to your early childhood, but there was also a really challenging year when you were 10, so probably second or third grade. There were, I think, three things that year. What a doozy. Like, bad news comes in threes, I think is the expression. What were the things that happened when you were 10?

Michael Curry: So Tim, it’s taken me many years to actually unpack this year because it’s a year that for a number of reasons I wanted to kind of tuck away and bury and not deal with, but it was a very formative year for me.

Tim Ludwig: I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that like there was a lot of trauma caused in that year.

Michael Curry: Yes. Yeah, it was a very, very traumatic year for me and a lot to handle as a 10 year old. And so, when I was 10 years old, the first of the trifecta was that my mother, myself, and my sister were carjacked at gunpoint leaving my aunt’s house after a family reunion event. So if you can imagine this large family gathering, and so we have a very large extended family in Atlanta, so when I say family reunion, this is with the t-shirts and the big pavilion at the park. That’s what a family reunion meant to me and my family. And so I was on the program because Atlanta was the host city, so I got to like go through the family history, so very much on a high. And then maybe two hours later, I thought that I was going to die. And so we were leaving my aunt’s apartment complex, and these two guys looked like they were going to cross the street right in front of the exit. And then one guy ran to the driver’s side door and stuck a gun in my mom’s window and said, open the doors. And so he ran around and jumped into the passenger side. The other person that he was with jumped in the backseat with me and my sister, and they told us to drive. And so maybe a half a mile down the road from my aunt’s house was an office park. And this is late in the evening, and they tell us to pull over into this office park, which is completely abandoned, very poorly lit. And I can remember my mom screaming, just take whatever you want, just please don’t harm my children. Just please don’t harm my children. And they took her purse and all of her belongings, and they told us to get out of the car. And they sped off and took off. This is around 11 PM on a Saturday. My sister, who’s four years younger than me, is completely shell-shocked. My mom is in tears and trembling. But that was an extremely traumatic experience for me and I had nightmares. The resolution of that story, which kind of continued the trauma, was the folks who held us up were caught. And my mom was so traumatized by the experience, she couldn’t bring herself to go to court or to identify them. And so maybe at 11 years old, so maybe a year later, after everything kind of proceeded through the court system, I have to raise my hand, look across the table from the two guys who held a gun to my mom’s head and point them out as the two people who in fact did carjack us and threaten to kill us. And I had nightmares for many, many years, wondering if they would escape prison or if they ever got out of prison and come looking for my family and looking to exact revenge. So that was the first of three traumatic episodes. The second traumatic…

Tim Ludwig: That’s heavy. No, no, that’s just, that’s really heavy alone. Thank you for sharing. As a 10-year-old, I don’t know how you could make sense of that and process that in a healthy way.

Michael Curry: And the year 10 continued to roll forward, and I go back to school and there was a guy who for whatever reason decides to pick on me and to bully me. And we rode the school bus together. My mom actually knew his parents, but he and I didn’t get along. He was a grade older than me. So we got into a tussle on the school bus, and he was bigger than me. He grabbed me by the neck, and he slammed my face into the side of the school bus. All I saw was just blood oozing down my shirt. And it was only after the school bus driver stopped the bus and broke everything up, did I realize that my two front teeth got knocked out. Luckily, they were baby teeth, but they were not loose or ready to come out. And so here I am, this 10-year-old with kind of snaggled teeth as a reminder of what this bully did to you. And so those two incidents in particular, the more I reflect, really shaped my view of confrontation and violence and the threat or potential for violence. Because the tone with which people were speaking in both of those situations and then subsequently what actually happened for many years, I think, has made me very reticent to go there for a natural fear of violence and real conflict. It’s something that I’ve worked on for many, many years as an adult. Obviously, every situation that I encounter as an adult aren’t as traumatic as those. But what we learn is a lot of things that we assume that we have grown past in our childhood, if we don’t give that 10 year old that space and the voice to share his experience and his pain and his fear and his anger, you can repress it and push it down but you don’t actually make peace with it so that you can move forward with life. The third thing, so again, trauma comes in threes apparently, is the same year that I was carjacked and that my two front teeth were knocked out by a bully, my house burned entirely to the ground as a result of a kitchen fire. And so, we went from a happy-go-lucky family to having to move in with my grandparents and experiencing my first Christmas at my grandparents’ house, to literally having no clothes. And so some of my classmates, some of whom I’m still in touch with to this day, they and their families donated clothes to me and my sister because we didn’t have any clothes to wear to school. And that experience of not having your home and not being able to be grounded in your space I think is another experience that probably until later in life I didn’t fully appreciate and reconcile. And it was probably just a month ago, Tim, in a conversation with my sister, that she connected the dots that all three of these happened when I was 10 years old and to give myself a little grace and to be a little self-reflective and ask, how could 10-year-old Michael have been even in any position to handle all of that? And so there is no way. And so I handled it the best way that I could. And one of those defense mechanisms for many years was to avoid conflict. So things don’t happen like getting carjacked or losing your teeth if you can find a way to make the peace of the situation. While there is some truth in that, you also lose quite a bit of yourself and your humanity by not being able to speak your truth and to establish healthy boundaries. But if you can really look at yourself honestly and lovingly, because I think the other thing that we tend to do is, like I said about my sister and giving me grace that that 10 year old did the best he could, is looking at myself honestly but not in a way that was intended to cause more harm to myself and to beat myself up and to kind of self-flagellate, but really to look and go I really haven’t made peace with all of the crap that happened to me at 10 years old. And I need to sit with some of that stuff. And I need to talk to my mom about some of these feelings that I had about the bully situation or the carjacking and just express it because it’s been there my whole life. I just hadn’t given it an opportunity to be seen, to be known by myself or others. But now that I have done that, it has given me a tremendous sense of peace to look at myself and to look at some of the things that I’ve endured growing up.

Tim Ludwig: Yeah, well, I think it’s reflective of the life you’re living now, which is one, to me at least from the outside, seems like one of abundance. I want to fast forward a little bit here. So just a quick summary sort of on the high school thing. You came in as a basketball player and a theater kid, left as an international baccalaureate academic all-star. There’s a trip to France in there where you got to live with a host family that I know is really impactful. And then off to Emory for college where you got introduced to investment banking and made that the first step in your career when you were out of college in London. And I thought the story that resonated with me here was you are not just right out of the gate a finely tuned high performing analyst. There was, I’m sure, cultural adaptation that you were going through but also professional adaptation. I’d love to have you share sort of the arc of your tenure as a banker in London.

Michael Curry: Happy to, Tim. So I’m starting to think that like I’m a late bloomer. So like in the relay race, it takes me a while to get going. But when I started my career in the European media and telecoms group of Morgan Stanley, I was not very good. And that’s objectively. And I think that there was, one, a lack of professional maturity. What I think you’ll find is that the analyst class in Europe tended to be older. So, I was joining as a fresh-faced 22-year-old who got permission to drink in the US at 21, and some of the people in my class were well into their 20s, some of them in their 30s, some people married already, some people with kids, and it was a very different ball game. I also joined the bank at a time when the world was just experiencing the dot-com bust. And so all of the banks had staffed up and bonuses were through the roof. And now there were murmurings that what goes up must come down. And so, I think the week that we joined my analyst class, they had announced a round of layoffs, and not just at Morgan Stanley but across the street. And so, this fresh-faced kid from Atlanta whose mom told him to smile and to open up his arms and to embrace was not met with that warm enthusiasm. And it was very difficult for me to find my way initially. And so I did what I knew to do best, which was kind of to put my head down and to work hard, but what I failed to recognize was the further that you get in business in this game, it’s not just about working hard, it’s about working smart and it’s also about building relationships. And so what I failed to recognize in my first year was spinning my wheels and kind of being a mile wide and an inch deep as it related to relationships on my team, it didn’t get me very far. And so in my first evaluation, I got my rating, which obviously influences your bonus. And on a scale of one to five, I was summarily a one. And I remember taking that bonus piece of paper home. And my roommate at the time, Rasana, who also worked at Morgan Stanley, he was an associate. And I remember just sitting on my bed and weeping because not only did I not do a great job here, I really felt like I let a lot of people down, a lot of people at home, particularly my parents who sacrificed a lot along the way to get me from Sarah Smith through Emory to this position at Morgan Stanley. And it took me a little while to get over that. But I am not a quitter, and I am not unaccustomed to being in situations where you have to do hard things. And so what I ended up doing was I ended up sitting down with the incoming evaluations director, the person that manages the whole process for all of the analysts and associates. And he and I sat down off-site, and I told him what I’m doing isn’t working. And so feel free to just give me your unvarnished, honest assessment of who I am, what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, and approaching my second year, what you think I should do differently. And he sat back in his chair. Dexter was his name, Dexter Goy. He sat back in his chair and he said, you should start firing people. And I said, what? Because as an analyst, you are the low person on the totem pole. And he said, this is what I mean. He said, I read your packet, and what stands out to me is nobody on this team has taken the time to get to know you and to invest in you. So what we need to do is we need to find a handful of people who are going to be your sponsors that are going to invest in you. Now in a return for said favor, you are going to work your ass off for those people, and anything they ask you to do, the answer is yes, and that’s our game plan. And so what we did is we went to two managing directors, a VP, two associates, and a senior analyst who was the rock star of the group, and that was my team. And what Dexter said was, I will do my best to triage really crappy stuff coming your way and kind of people who don’t want to see you progress giving you busy work. And I executed that plan for a year and a half. And it went from being no one wanting to work with me to my select group of people that I built relationships with only wanting to do projects with me because they knew that I would work my tail off, they knew that I was building confidence, that I would ask the right questions. And so I ended up turning that situation from a one out of five to getting promoted and being at the top of my class in my third year and having an opportunity to interview with private equity firms and all of these things. But I learned a lot about myself in that experience. And one of the things that I’ve learned is, one, if it’s easy, we don’t appreciate it. Two, I think there is a muscle that we all have to build being comfortable in the discomfort. Lots of new, exciting opportunities are new and exciting, but at the beginning you don’t know what you’re doing. And so many people choose not to take that leap of faith because of that uneasiness and that queasiness that comes with becoming a beginner again and being vulnerable and exposing yourself to feedback like you’re not very good. It doesn’t mean that you will have to remain not very good, but it also feels pretty good to find that comfort zone where everybody knows us for a certain thing and we’re good at it and that’s our nice, comfortable, kind of complacent zone. But one of the things I’ve learned more recently is there’s a concept of the zone of genius. And the enemy of the zone of genius is actually not the zone of incompetence. It’s the zone of excellence. It’s the things that we have gotten the gold stars for and we kind of like doing them, but we’ve built a reputation around those things. But the zone of genius, those are the things that we are truly and uniquely called to do. And we’ve touched that zone of genius every once and awhile. But oh, how scary would it be to really put both of your feet in that zone of genius and own these are the types of things that I was born to do. And given I’ve only dipped my toe over here, it’s what I’m called to do, but man, I may not be good at my zone of genius initially, but that’s where I’m supposed to be. And I just found in that experience at Morgan Stanley, not giving up, finding my sea legs and being comfortable being uncomfortable and moving forward, and also, vulnerability. I think that all of the people that I named my crew of merry band members, I told them all that I was a one out of five. And I told the senior analyst, Shojay, I didn’t know or I wasn’t properly trained how to build all the financial models that you can whip up. And she would sit with me at two o’clock in the morning after she did all of her stuff to show me how to do that. And so, I also think that there’s a lot of courage in being uncomfortable and raising your hand and saying, I could use some help.

Tim Ludwig: Oh, for sure. For sure. I think that zone of excellence can become its own sort of a cage also because you get the positive feedback from others that you’re really good at this, that reinforces the notion that you are really good at it. And then it becomes harder to put yourself in a position where that now self-identity gets challenged because you’re not good at something. Like you want to bask in the glory of being known as good at what you do. And so, if you step out of that and take a risk, you might fail. And then what does that say about yourself and the self-identity that you formed? So, it becomes really, really scary and an impediment to future growth. And sometimes until it’s too late. Then sometimes things just move past you. And what used to be excellent is no longer excellent, but you’ve lost the muscles, they’ve atrophied, to go out and continue to build that skillset or whatever it is you need to continue to be in a zone of excellence, I think.

Michael Curry: I agree. And I think it goes back to my dad’s analogy and something that I learned in a sales class of all places that I took in the past 10 years, which is your role is not your identity. What you do is not who you are. I think in a roundabout way, part of my dad’s lessons on self-reliance was a nod to don’t let your identity get so wrapped up in, oh, I go to Emory, or oh, I work at Morgan Stanley, or oh, I’m an entrepreneur. Because those things will come and go. And at the end of the day, they don’t define me as the person.

Tim Ludwig: Yeah, those are the clothes you’re wearing, they’re not who you are.

Michael Curry: Exactly, and to your point, if you conflate the two and you conflate the clothes with who you are, when someone says those clothes are out of fashion, it stings and can be very paralyzing to move forward because you’ve built an identity around this job or this role or this thing that other people want you to do instead of listening to your own inner voice.

Tim Ludwig: Yeah. Towards the end of your time in London, I know you got the news that your dad was ill and that he had cancer. And so, you came home, had a chance to say goodbye before he passed. And in the work leading up to today’s conversation, you talked about that changed everything for you and that in that moment you became the man of the family. And I was curious about that, like where did that expectation to be the man of the family come from? You’re 25 years old, I think, at the time, and why put that on your own shoulders?

Michael Curry: That’s a really good question. I think part of it was my upbringing. I think my relationship with my dad and my sister’s relationship with my dad were both great but very different. I would have many, many late-night conversations with my dad as a teenager on Saturdays when he would be in his little office and playing his music and talking about life and recommending books I should read. He was the person that told me always think for yourself, including things that I tell you. You should always reserve the right to think for yourself and come to your own conclusions and never outsource your thinking to anyone. But in those conversations as well, I do think kind of passing along his words of wisdom and kind of preparing me to be an adult male, it’s also worth noting that my dad never knew his dad. So he didn’t grow up with a father. And I think I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. I think the first time my dad actually saw his father was at his father’s funeral. And so, I think it was very important for my dad to take being a father extremely seriously and really wanted to instill values, wanted my sister to feel extremely loved and supported from a male figure to create an example at least of this is what healthy male love should feel like. For me, I think a lot of what he instilled in me is the honor in being responsible. My father was not a very materialistic person. And I think where he got his joy from was seeing my sister and I excel in school or my mom be able to purchase something nice for herself at the store. He really got his joy in creating the conditions for us to thrive. And one of the things that my dad told me point blank growing up was there will come a time when I will not be around, and I want you to be prepared to be a man on your own. And so, the expectation was not kind of a lightning bolt as my dad was getting sick. In many ways, it was something that I was being groomed for. But what I will say is the immediacy of that maturation I was not prepared for. So this is, my dad is the guy, your only job is school, so you get grades, and paying bills and all these other things fall out of your purview. You do well academically, you get the job at Morgan Stanley. My dad had cancer for months before he told me because he didn’t want to burden me with that news because he knew about the story arc that we just talked about of getting there and not starting off on the foot that I wanted to start off, but then kind of when I found out he knew that I was on the upward trajectory and things were going well. And I remember flying home, and at this point, my dad had lung cancer, it had spread to his spinal cord, which made its way to his brain, and so he was paralyzed and could not speak. And when I came into the hospital room, I touched his hand and I told him that I’m here. And as much as one can crack a smile when they’re paralyzed, he actually cracked a smile. And my mom burst out of the room and started crying. I didn’t know what was going on, and so I went to check on her, and she said, he hasn’t made a facial expression in probably a month. And right before I lost my dad, I held his hand and I said, I got it. I’m here and I got it. And I don’t know what people believe about karma or the universe, but I do believe that with whatever internal fortitude or energy my dad had, he was trying to hold on long enough to process that, and then the next day he was gone. And going back to this notion of taking pride in being responsible, I find something very honorable about that. And what I really would say is the biggest shift of kind of before my dad passed away and after is I think I’m filled with a much lower sense of selfishness, of the world and things being about me, and wanting to make sure that the people around me are okay. Now it is not my responsibility to live everybody’s life for them, and that’s not what I’m saying. But there is a pride to be able to, when you can, share the resources and good fortune with others. That’s not just money. So, what I would say I’m most proud of that transition is I helped my mom with probate. My mom was not very good with money. And for several years after church, our pastime was to go to Barnes & Noble and to grab a couple of personal finance books and to kind of help her come up to speed. And to now talk to my mom and to hear that she is sharing some of the lessons that I shared with her with my sister and my sister’s children, that is incredibly gratifying. And so being able to use these talents and gifts, not just for my benefit, but for the benefit of others, for me, that was what changed for me and being this adult man versus this 22, 23 year old who could make money and blow it on whatever he wanted to blow it on and not have to worry about others to somebody who not had to worry about others but saw it as something honorable and something to feel proud that people can rely on me, that people can count on me, that people know that I will be there in their time of need was really life-changing. It was also very hard. My dad was my superhero. He is but a mere mortal, but I learned so much from him, intellectually, but also how to be a good human. I mirror a lot of my relationship with my mom with the way that my dad and my grandmother, the same grandmother who was the teacher’s aide for Ms. Watley, the relationship that they had, which was of deep respect, but as they got older, there was a friendship. There was obviously a mother-son bond, but there was also two adults making it on this crazy planet who respect and love one another and appreciate one another. I’m just forever grateful for the opportunity to have had my dad, and I tell people the quote that I at least bring up 20 times a year is something that a former boss told me, John Crewmans, great guy. And as I decided, after my father passed away, to leave the UK, to move back home to Atlanta to be closer to family, he told me he respected my decision and to remember that most people go through life as if it is the dress rehearsal and they get to do it all over again. But don’t forget that this is the show. This is the show. So whatever it is you’re going to do, this is the show. And don’t lose sight of that fact, that this is it. This is the time we have on this planet.

Tim Ludwig: I think you’ve certainly done your dad honor and he left a great legacy in you without a doubt. And I thought all of that was really beautiful. I’m really grateful that you shared all that. I want to skip ahead again. So you did a couple other things professionally, went back to graduate school, got an MBA, heard about this crazy search fund thing where a couple of young guys could go out and buy a business and people would support their efforts to do that. And because that’s sort of my line of work as well and I think some of the audience is interested in the business side of things too, first on the personal side of that journey that you and your partner Keith had, what did you learn about yourself through that cycle of searching, operating, and ultimately selling? And maybe you can start with maybe just a quick explanation of what the business was and maybe sort of the tape readout on what the story was there.

Michael Curry: Sure. So the business initially was Krueger-Gilbert Health Physics, which is a medical physics consulting business. The way that I would explain that to my grandma is essentially the business does outsourced compliance and safety testing of imaging equipment. So we have very highly skilled technical professionals that go out to hospitals and imaging centers to make sure that when you get an x-ray or an MRI or a CT that you are being scanned by a piece of equipment that is safe and also the technician who is running that equipment is operating in an environment that meets radiation safety standards. I have told people that searching for and running a business, there have to be easier ways to make money than that because there’s a lot that goes into that. But the thing that I learned most, and I tell people this, is if you want to spend several years learning about yourself and testing yourself and challenging yourself to become a better person and better leader, then I would say this is a path that you should consider. I would argue that the rewards that I’ve gotten from taking this path, the personal rewards actually significantly outweigh the financial ones. Prior to doing a search and running the company as CEO where for many years my role was chief sales officer and then it morphed when we started doing programmatic acquisitions to being our head of M&A which are all very outward facing sales roles, I didn’t know that I would be very good at that. I should have known because my mom doesn’t know any strangers, but my level of interest in perfecting that and becoming a student of that was there. So, I probably have more sales books on this bookshelf that I’m looking at than I could ever read in a lifetime. I learned that, interestingly enough, this path that I’ve gone down of self reflection was sparked by my first 360 review from my board of directors. And one of the pieces of feedback was, I feel like Michael is telling me what he wants to hear or what I want to hear and not what he’s truly thinking. And that work led to me doing the Enneagram work and discovering that I’m a type nine and doing further work to understand where does that people pleaser come from and, put another way, where does that conflict avoidance come from? And lo and behold, there may be some things in my past that may have contributed to not wanting to rock the boat or create situations where it can get tense or people can get loud. So I learned that. I also learned that I really get a lot of joy accomplishing things with a team. And I know people in investment banking will say we’re a team, and it’s like, yes, but no. What I mean is in an operating business, a team that has a specific goal and objective where each person has a different set of talents and skills, and everyone has to come together and bring their A game to move something forward, that is a really exciting and fulfilling piece of work for me. That’s something that really gets me energized. The other thing that I found out about myself is coaching or mentoring is something that I derive a lot of joy out of. I found that making myself available to prospective searchers, current searchers, current CEOs is rewarding in and of itself for me. But also inside of the company, I would say the most rewarding times I can remember were coaching somebody through a situation or giving someone an opportunity and being their cheerleader and then kind of being that proud parent to see them once the training wheels have completely fallen off and to see the expression on someone’s face when they accomplish more than they thought that they could and that I got to play a small role in that is incredibly, incredibly fulfilling. I would say I also realized that, when Keith and I bought the company in 2014, we didn’t really look at the spreadsheet. So I would say what I realized is I’d like to believe that I was heavily motivated by money, but it turns out that I am motivated by accomplishing goals. I’ve chosen to play a game that if you are successful and you and your team accomplish goals, there are financial rewards in excess of other chosen paths. But what I’ve realized on this journey is what I’m doing every day and who I get to do it with matter more to me than what the outcome could potentially be. Because those are the people that I’ve chosen to spend life with. A very large chunk of my adult professional career was spent in the foxhole with Keith. And that experience above most others will leave an impression on my spirit and love that I have for him because not only did we accomplish a thing and we got a great return for investors, but the day to day ups and downs, starting off not being very good again – again, I’m a late bloomer – and figuring it out and creating what we hope to be another good outcome when the offspring of KGHP, which is now Apex Physics Partners, which we’re both still involved in at a board level, performs well. But the last thing that I will say, Tim, is, and this goes back to the little kid from College Park, who if you had told him that I’d be doing this podcast with you talking about going to France and working at Morgan Stanley and doing a search fund and being a CEO, he would have told you that he was nuts. I think the big thing I learned about taking this plunge in the search fund space is, it’s a quote from the Matrix when he goes to see the Oracle and he talks to the little boy, and the little boy says, there is no spoon. And what I realized is because I lived a lot of my life out of fear, I believed that a lot of the things that I have accomplished were out of the cards for me, but I continue to press forward. But I leave this experience of the search fund, of acquiring, operating, successfully exiting a company with skills that nobody can take away from me. And I feel like if you drop me in the woods with a pocket knife, I will find a way through the jungle. And I had to see that and experience it for myself to really know that as my truth. And now I know that I am a person whose life path is kind of this triangle of learning, investing, and teaching. So I will always be a lifelong learner. I want to invest my dollars as well as my energy in people and projects that I believe in. And then I think kind of the ultimate give back is finding a way to share these learnings, these hard won learnings and being able to teach others is kind of the circle of development that I’m choosing to go down and the only way to really maximize all three is to continue to set my sights on doing hard things that I haven’t done before because that’s where I learn, I get to invest in other people and then coming out on the other end, hopefully some of the nuggets that I gained on this previous adventure, I can share with others who may be deciding to embark on something similar.

Tim Ludwig: Yeah. With KGHP and now Apex, what were maybe one or two of the crucible moments that you and the business went through to get to the successful outcome that you had?

Michael Curry: Oh, how much time do you have? How much time do you have? Well, I think there were significant trust issues with the sellers and how they communicated the transaction, which led to a lot of mistrust. So we didn’t step into the business with as much positive goodwill as we would have hoped. And so we spent a lot of time doing hand-to-hand combat. So, this is not a hundred day plan, value creation, pulling levers, all the things that people want to do. The one thing you learn is that these businesses are comprised of people. They’re not coin operated. And particularly if you buy a service business, you may have bought some contracts and some nice computers and maybe some desks, but you have to actually roll up your sleeves and build the trust with the team and show them that, one, you’re in it for the long haul, that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do, and that you’re going to earn their trust over time. So coming out of the gate with kind of a trust deficit was really tough, and it took us several years to overcome before people would really say, okay, Mike and Keith, we don’t understand all of these crazy things you want to do, but we’re with you, and we won’t row against you, and we won’t sit on the boat with our arms folded and be kind of dead weight. We’ll actually pick up oars and row with you. And then, secondly, it was a challenge to grow the business, and this is why I caution would-be searchers to resist the urge to make oversimplifying assumptions like, oh, they didn’t invest in sales and marketing, and I bet I can hire somebody, and we can double growth in the first 12 months. Growing and selling are very hard, and I don’t think people give the people that do that their just due and the respect. And so, like all exuberant searchers, we put the hockey stick growth in the sim, which we did not hit, and we really struggled to figure out how to grow that business. And we had a board meeting where there was a very come to Jesus moment for me in particular where my role at the company was at risk. And we had continued to kind of hack away at organic revenue and the board kind of put a line in the sand and said this is the target that you have to hit, or we have to have a conversation around whether or not this is a fit and if we need to go in a different direction. And that was very scary, but I think, in retrospect, now we’re all friends on the other side, but I don’t think that I gave the board the reaction that they were looking for. And I think it’s because, now that I reflect on this conversation, I’ve been through a lot, and so from the Morgan Stanley one out of five to what I went through when I was 10 years old and a whole lot in between, so the threat of being fired is in the bottom quartile of hard shit that I’ve had to go through in my life. And so, I took it as a challenge, and it took me back to that place of I am comfortable in discomfort, and I know who I am, I know what I am, and I’m going to get after it, I’m going to do the best I can, and the chips are going to fall where they may. And I exceeded the target. The target was $210,000 of recurring revenue. I still remember the 210, and I share that with my former board members at search fund events. But that was also one of those galvanizing moments where you really figure out what you’re made of. And I am better and stronger for having gone through that experience. We had a number of, as you well know, Tim, people issues come with running services businesses, but I would say really overcoming the stiff opposition to these two new guys running the company and not having a lot of trust, and then for me personally, really having kind of that bullseye on my back to deliver on the organic revenue and what that took in terms of going to sales training and getting in my car at 7 o’clock in the morning and coming back, driving from Baltimore to Chesapeake, Virginia, in the day and popping in the hospitals and everything in between to do what it takes to move the thing forward.

Tim Ludwig: Just to sort of maybe close all this out, what’s one thing you hope others take away from listening to this?

Michael Curry: I would say comfort is not your friend. That is not to say go to bars and get in fistfights because you need a little action. That is not what I’m recommending. But what I do want to leave with people is all of my significant learnings, significant relationships, and memories that as an old man sitting on the rocking chair talking with my buddies about the old days came from doing something that was hard or, even if it wasn’t doing something that was hard, living through something that was hard and building the strength and the courage and the resilience that comes with doing hard things and living through hard times with your head held high and with courage is what I would like to leave people with. And maybe if there’s a 1B, we all have lots of self-limiting beliefs, but the further that I’ve progressed in life and met some amazing people, yourself included, I have to remind myself that they are just people. And if they are just people with their own fears, insecurities, doubts, stuff, issues, trauma, I have just as much right to believe that I can put my one foot in front of the other and pursue that which I want to pursue. I have just as much right. So, do not believe the self-talk that someone else deserves the life that you want or to pursue something that’s hard. That is within your purview. It’s your choice. And lots of what you believe to be true, there is no spoon. I’m a living testament.

Tim Ludwig: Amen. Very well said. Well, thank you, Mike. You and Keith are in the midst of your next transition with Lullwater. And that’s a perfect stopping point because it’ll give us an excuse hopefully a few years down the road to come back and revisit this and see where the next step in this journey is taking you. But for today, thank you so much. This was incredible.

Michael Curry: Thank you, Tim. I really appreciate it.