Who you are?

As a Growth Catalyst I accelerate and deliver significant change and results to scale your business. A Growth catalyst is a hybrid of coaching, facilitating and development.

What do you do?

I help business owners scale their business, drive growth and profits by clarifying your common vision and focusing on developing your key leaders to achieve your most important goals more effectively.

We help organizations achieve a sustained competitive advantage concentrating on a “What Really Matters Most” focus through our Unique Strategic Development Process.  A “What Really Matters Most” focus generates organizational clarity, builds a results-based culture, and facilitates planning, execution, and leadership development as a way of life in transforming organizations from good to great. 

I help them get out of the insanity loop, successfully navigate change; unlock the potential of their human capital, equip them with high impact tools, great processes and systems that give definition to your structure.

Our platform creates an integrated management system that focuses on constant improvement through lifelong learning – developing yourself and your people to accelerate your results.

Our tools provide a universal and common language that increases interdependence, teamwork & productivity to build a results-based culture with less stress.

Why do you do what you do?

I believe everyone has a vast amount of untapped potential and my mission is to help them discover and unlock that potential to have a more successful business and meaningful life, and create more freedom. I am here to make a positive contribution to society.

For whom do you do it?

Our Ideal Clients are successful CEO’s and business owners who have sales of $5 million to $500 million, 25 to 500 employees, privately held, profitable, and in a growth mode making the transition from entrepreneurship to more professional management.

The “mind set”of the CEO is that they are lifelong learners, open to new ideas, have an ongoing personal development program, have a positive belief in the potential of human capital, and look at people as an asset rather than an expense. They believe their people are their competitive advantage. We want people who are up to big things and who are committed to making them happen.

I spend a lot of time up front to pick the right clients that are going to do the work. I have ongoing business with about 70% of my clients. No one has asked for their money back.

Transition from one level of growth to the next causes chaos, confusion, and tension.  Several corporate behaviors commonly referred to as the latest fad management programs are characteristic at this stage. They include the Treadmill Mentality, Insanity Loop Management, Rearview-Mirror Management, and Management by ESP, Bumper Car Management, Shinny Syndrome Management, and Midas Touch Management etc.

Clients’ Needs/ Challenges:

They are struck in their own habits.

Experiencing growing pains in several ways:

1. Changing Leadership Roles and Responsibilities: It’s a big shift for the leader to go from running a business to a leader building an organization.
2. No time to plan or think about the future – always putting out fires. They are frustrated with operational inertia that keeps them from producing the results they want.
3. Fragmented doing too many things at one time. Leaders lack of clarity, confusion about priorities and busy going in all different directions that keeps them stuck in the past.
4. Concerned about getting the right people on the bus (job match job fit to take the company from good to great.)
5. Sick and tired about not getting buy in to the goals, culture and future vision of moving from an entrepreneurial company to a professionally managed firm.
6. Struggling to unlock the productivity of the team to get everyone on the same page with vision, mission and goals.
7. Uncertain with the challenges of moving through the critical transition from one stage to the next stage in a company’s growth cycle.
8. Discouraged with getting everyone on the team to communicate and collaborate.
9. Concerned with your organization running you rather than you running your organization. Can’t see the forest for the trees.
10. Uncertain about how to improve how they attract, develop and retain good employees.
11. CEO’s are suffering from a lack of time to be leaders. Their time is filled up with managerial interruptions and distraction and clutter.

To what end or outcome?

Radical transparency is the idea of everyone knowing everything, can be a major driver of increased organizational performance. By making everyone’s performance visible, this helps to remove distractions and enables people to concentrate on what is important creating highly engaged employees. We develop leaders that are developing leaders who are growing the organization. We help our clients create a playbook for success.  

What role do you perform in making this happen?

As a growth catalyst I act as a facilitator of the process to make it happen. My work and lifelong learning convinced me that setting intentions and cultivating focus and then take massive action are essential ingredients for unleashing potential and creating greater results. I have researched the best companies with research-based assessments together with best practices and a Brain Trust of collaborators that can deliver the programs. The process is critical to drive the performance.

We equip our clients with the right tools, over 50 proprietary high impact tools and resources to simplify the complexity that develops with growth.

What value can you deliver?

 A platform for lifetime growth and achievement.

Business owners can grow the business with less stress and build an organization that will be valuable in the future without their daily direct involvement. We help them build a road map to the future. They will certainly be able to take more time off and enjoy their family and their lives much more.

Our Strategic Development Process™is unique in its ability to utilize proven assessments, planning tools, Total Leader® development process – into one consistent and sustainable implementation model for continuous improvement. I provide a wide range of tools designed to simplify the complexity of all aspects of business. These tools provide a unique way of simplifying processes of all kinds.

Our process and systems provide a universal and common language that increases interdependence, teamwork, productivity and engagement.We work with small groups to accelerate a shift in thinking and action and maintain a continuous improvement dynamic.   

What difference do you offer that others don’t?

Our process has allowed hundreds of business leaders from a variety of industries to increase confidence, motivation and performance at every level of their organization. 

Many companies focus on training. Training is what we do with our dogs at home. Development is what we do with our people. We can only thrive in a world where we are tapping into the potential of all of our people.

With the advent of AI and robotics it is extremely critical that we develop total leaders at every level, engaging their hearts and minds with a commitment to lifelong improvement.

AU brings together a diverse brain trust of professional associates with hundreds of years of experience which will help you simplify the complexity of your business. We will help your team tap into your imagination to increase your self-sufficiency and confidence to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, through our unique process.

MICHAEL’S CLIENTS DESCRIBE HIM USING WORDS LIKE:

High energy level – Highly motivated – Down-to-earth – Expert in the field – Authentic

Integrative Structures

We offer four unique, integrated structures named The Results Business Management Platform, The Strategic Planning & Implementation Program, The Strategic Results Accelerator Program and The Quantum Leap Mastermind Program. These structures provide a simple step-by-step process which allows our clients to transfer success theory into practical “how to” knowledge. The system simplifies complexity, builds teamwork, creates self-sufficiency, confidence & motivation to achieve shared goals & break through to new levels of success.

Evolutionary System

We are a continuous-learning organization. Through executive retreats, personal and organizational plans of action, strategic planning / goal setting conferences we form long-term partnerships that help clients to think outside the box and continuously evolve to higher levels of growth and success.

Michael’s Personal History

Michael is passionate about facilitating learning and human development to create a world where unlimited achievement is available by tapping into your true potential for greatness. Michael is a leading authority on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness; he addresses thousands of people each year on the subjects of leadership, strategy and personal and professional development. Through this process of self-mastery we create a world that works for all of us. The cost of doing nothing far exceeds the cost on investing in yourself and your company.  

From the pinnacle of success through the depths of adversity to the life of significance, Michael has a story to tell and lessons to teach.  He knows what it’s like to be tossed about by life, to take control and to succeed. Michael is a highly motivated, energetic, and entertaining speaker and trainer who uses his personal experience and training to motivate audiences from coast to coast.  Michael is passionate about his message and delivers the tools and strategies to help his audience take their lives and their businesses to the next level and attain some balance and meaning in their lives.

Michael began his career in the family sporting goods business where he started as a stock boy and moved through the system to managing the business. After 25 years in the business to business model he knows firsthand what the challenges and frustrations are in the competitive market place.  At the same time, he knows what it’s like not to have a family life when you over commit to the business.  Michael has truly learned the importance of having meaningful values and priorities in your life to achieve success and significance. 

All progress in our lives requires that we go against some kind of “gravitational” system.  In other words, we are held in place by-the gravitational system of our own ideas, beliefs, attitudes and feelings and all of the habits that have formed around how we look at the world. ” Nothing new, different, or better happens in this world that does not go against gravity.                                                        

We are certainly not for everyone and I would welcome a conversation anyone who would really like to make the transition from the daily operational pull that holds us in place. Nobody achieves anything worthwhile without a high level of coaching.

Since our company started attending programs by Michael Gidlewski, our revenues have doubled in just one year’s time. Michael is a tremendous asset to our organization. Thank you!

Carter Trudel
GMI Insurance Services

When you’re in a highly competitive industry such as ours, you need all the advantages you can muster. Michael helped us see opportunities we were blind to by working with us to establish ourselves as the leader in the our service area. We are more than pleased and grateful.

Laura DeFillipo, President

DeFillipo’s Service Company