Communication and Accountability: Interview with Mike Carpenter, CEO of XFactor.io
I recently went one on one with Mike Carpenter, CEO of XFactor.io.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Mike: My father and mother were both a profound influence on me. My father suffered from polio and was physically handicapped, but he never let his obstacles overcome him. His mentality stuck with me from an early age and soon became ingrained in my own mindset. This, along with my accepting mother, who taught me the need to give, really shaped who I am today.
Growing up with several learning disabilities, I struggled with not feeling smart. I had to find a way to be successful even when I couldn’t perform the work, so I developed ways to find hacks that gave me an edge. It came from developing a skill set and finding another path without accepting the one given and taught to me.
Once I got older, there came a point during my time as an accounting major when I realized that I could never sit behind a desk and stare at a balance sheet all day. It was a risk to turn down a “safe” job my senior year of college, but I felt destined to create something — to give in to my entrepreneurial spirit. Ultimately, I made the right decision and could still use the skills I gained in my accounting courses and apply them to my career.
It wasn’t until later that I realized I needed to constantly learn and evolve to stay successful. Instead of relying on the same methods repeatedly, I learned to periodically reinvent and alter my approach to problem-solving while continually growing my skills in the process. This realization led me to always plan for success rather than execute blindly, which shaped the rest of my career. That’s not to say I didn’t have challenges along the way.
At one point, I made the hard decision to let someone go at my company. They weren’t delivering on their sales quota, primarily due to some bad streaks of luck. I later realized that I should have kept that employee and could have turned around their bad luck by leading instead of managing them. Turns out, innumerable circumstances can affect how successful sales professionals are in their roles. Most of the time, a person’s success is predicated on whether they are set up for success. After learning from this mistake, I changed my leadership mentality completely.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Mike: To successfully scale a business, the organization needs to think about the use case for what they’re building, why they are building it, and who they are building it for. Years ago, I participated in a team exercise as part of a leadership event, where the organizers set up a competition with the task of building bikes. They split everyone up into six groups and gave us tools to build our bikes, and once each team was finished, they ranked us from first to last, indicating who had won and who lost. Afterward, the organizers asked us what we had learned, and all of our answers were about how we built their bikes efficiently, with the goal of winning the competition. We then learned that the bikes were for local kids who were waiting outside to pick up their new bikes, and everyone’s faces dropped. We knew these bikes weren’t made well enough for the kids to ride them– we just wanted to get them built. This exercise taught us that as business leaders, your user, the value you provide to them, and why you’re the one providing it—must be central to what you do.
Another critical element in scaling a business is planning. A big mistake that companies make is creating plans that are not useful. Developing a traditional annual operating plan is a 9-month process where the actual plan becomes obsolete in the first two months of the year. To successfully scale, your operating plan must constantly evolve based on a number of current factors.
Leaders must have an ever-evolving plan to succeed — you wouldn’t fly a plane with last week’s data. The path to success is driven by an always-on plan based on factual data. Without one, there’s no single direction to unify your teams, which causes misinformation, dissensions, delays, and lost revenue.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Mike: Uphold operational transparency on a day-to-day basis. A healthy company culture is at the center of any business success, and a big part of that is operational transparency. Shift company culture and leadership to align with processes and policies rooted in transparency. In order to do this, recognition should be controlled at an individual level. In other words, recognition for employees—that take successful or unsuccessful risk, initiative, and contribute with high integrity—should be the way individuals are celebrated publically. Promote a collective growth mentality, and train yourself to think of feedback as a two-way street enabling open lines of communication and accountability. Make a cohesive effort to have strong relationships built on trust by investing time into your teams, and lead with confidence. Only then will your business operate in a successful and sustainable environment.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Mike: This year we’ll likely see the utilization of AI/ML models become a necessary asset in informing business strategy for companies of all sizes. Specifically, we’ll see a rise in the implementation of these models to inform go-to-market (GTM) and annual operating plans (AOP), causing legacy methods of pulling metrics to phase out.
It’s also clear that technology leaders across industries will be subject to market share shifts as a result of the macroeconomic times. When macroeconomics creates the need for fundamental economic reform, two paths are created- one where companies that have financial and or model issues are forced to correct and/or disappear, and another where companies that are successful leverage the opportunity to weed the garden.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Mike: Communication and accountability. Technology executives are expected to leverage a variety of skills, but cultivating effective communication is crucial. Especially when budgets are tight, and the allocation of funds can provoke tension across departments, it’s essential to clearly communicate what’s going on. Additionally, leaders should work to communicate regularly about how particular decisions align with overarching business goals. For example, all employees, regardless of their background or familiarity with technology, should have a basic level of understanding of how the technologies work, ways in which it will impact their role, and the progress being made to incorporate them into the business.
Leaders must also create a culture where everybody is holding themselves more accountable than they’re holding their peers. This means leaders actively fighting against the “CYA'' mentality and the value of personal recognition being less than finding value in the overall mission and success of the business. Having an established goal also helps teams determine their “why” and stay motivated and connected to what their business does. This sort of culture has a variety of benefits, from employee retention to public perception.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Mike: For any leaders, or aspiring leaders, I’d work on these four things:
Mentality: It’s a combination of remaining true to yourself and not letting yourself be bullied, while still being receptive to the opinions, ideas, and criticism of others.
Working with the right people: You always want to ensure that the people around you are aligned with your core values. You don’t have to agree on everything, but you should agree on the important things.
Creating work-life balance: Being able to focus on the other important things in your life will make you a smarter and more well-rounded person.
How you start: If you start with light and positivity and make that your end goal, the in-between stuff is easy. If you focus on the bookends, where you started and where you want to end up, the right decisions will come to you — that doesn’t mean you won’t make tough decisions, but they will be easier to make.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Mike: 1. Lead from the front by helping teams recognize and focus on their strengths and assess potential gaps — and try to never micromanage. Fear-based leadership can never create lasting success or maintain a strong company culture. It’s on leaders like myself to empower our employees and help them celebrate their unique abilities.
2. Networking is essential for entrepreneurs and is responsible for the success of most startups. Focus on being effective in your networking strategy — invest time and effort into building and maintaining those relationships.
3. Be constantly learning and evolving. There’s no use in relying on the same strategies — learn to evolve every 90 or so days to stay on top of the game, reinventing yourself and altering problem-solving to continually grow your skills. This approach also helps with always planning for success rather than executing blindly.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Mike: 1. In order for enterprises to build their operations plans for growth and scale, they must constantly evolve. In other words, sales and marketing teams will need to shift from annual to always. Organizations that are able to pivot GTM strategies with agility are in the best position to continuously meet and exceed business goals, regardless of changing internal and external conditions.
2. Companies need unification not separation. A lack of unification creates friction, which in turn impacts alignment and transparency—both of which are required for creating successful GTM plans and a winning culture. There’s a clear difference between unified and disjointed companies, and the difference shows in growth numbers, revenue, and layoffs.
3. Establish consistent, accurate, and reliable sources of data. Many companies are keen on introducing AI, but it’s important to understand that the outcomes of automated workflows are only as successful as the data that informs them. Without data that enables teams to adjust in real time, the process will not be as effective.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Mike: As it relates to salesmanship the best advice I received is: you’re not a salesman you’re an educator and if you don’t believe in what you’re selling don’t sell it.
More generally, one of the best things my mentor told me was not to accept win-lose deals. You want to lead with kindness and integrity, so you should never accept a deal where you win and someone else loses. Since starting my own company, I’ve tried to ensure that this is part of our own core value system.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Mike: The traditional approach to AOP and GTM activities will no longer suffice for enterprises in today's constantly evolving technology landscape. Most startups rely heavily on product-led growth, and for the majority of founders, go-to-market (GTM) is an afterthought. This, more often than not, freezes momentum and can be detrimental to the business because leaders are unable to innovate a product around a GTM strategy.
With this, founders should adopt a market-led strategy versus a technology-led strategy. Using data-driven insight for intelligent business planning can mean the difference between success and failure. With intelligent value analysis models and dynamic market data, companies can ensure they are meeting consumer needs by tracking business impact though insights, analytics, comparisons, and trends. A market-led strategy is the way of the future, and it’s best to implement sooner rather than later.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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