One question, and a $25,000 business debt was gone.
As one client put it: “It’s these subtle things, though, that makes a really big impact.”
I have a physics degree. I trained as a chartered accountant at PwC and spent 11 years there. I learnt that what I thought was obvious to everyone… was often missed.
Now I own IGM Ventures, a consulting and coaching business. I train founders, CEOs and their teams to sell and negotiate well. I’ve trained and worked with over 404 people and coached across 5 continents.
Every conversation has at least two layers. Most teams only hear one (at best).
With AI, the future of work looks uncertain. So what still counts? Personal connection and persuasion. Anyone can learn them. And they’re about to matter even more than they do now.
I’m also the co-founder and CEO @ RISE311. It’s a premium plant-based supplement brand used by the likes of Bradley Cooper and Pedro Pascal (and yes… I’m involved in all its negotiations). ICAS, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, is the oldest accounting body in the world. It gave me two awards: 35 CAs under 35, and Top 100 Young CAs. And later, I joined its Members’ Board (where I continue to hold my seat).
Company: IGM
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Iain McMichael: Thanks for having me.
I’m Iain McMichael, founder of IGM Ventures, a sales and negotiation consultancy. I work with founders, CEOs and sales leaders, with businesses of all sizes: from smaller six figure consultancies, to seven figure small teams and larger businesses in the £100m revenue range. I’ve trained more than 404 professionals, at exec level on five continents.
Before that, I studied physics, then moved into consulting at PwC, where I qualified as a chartered accountant through ICAS. I now sit on the ICAS Members’ Board.
I’m also the co-founder and CEO of RISE311, a plant-based supplement brand used by Jake Gyllenhaal, Pedro Pascal, Alison Brie and Bradley Cooper. So I get to see a lot of complexity from 2 sides: B2B at IGM and B2C at RISE311.
Aside from my work, I’m a father to 2 (mostly) wonderful girls and spend as much time as I can with my family.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Iain McMichael: It’s not one moment. For me, it’s a thread that runs through my life (and not just in business).
I think for a lot of pursuits, a small number of principles (5–7) is the easiest way to think about levers and what can actually move you forward.
Simplicity then becomes more a life philosophy than a business method. It probably comes from my more contrarian nature: I question assumptions and it’s my default move in many situations.
Studying Physics definitely helped me develop this as well. The idea of being “As simple as possible, but no simpler” gets drummed into you and most lectures we were reminded of the focus on understanding and simplifying rather than overcomplicating. Stripping everything back to what matters appeals to how my mind works.
That doesn’t mean I’m immune to overcomplicating things. Far from it. Especially on new tasks, it’s easy to go complex. The difference is to force a focus on coming back to one question: what really shifts the needle or alters the result here?
And then I get a bit obsessive about getting better at just those things.
At IGM where I’m often working with different clients, I often discuss the concept of “the process behind the process”, as a key simplifying concept.
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Iain McMichael: Sure, so for me a central process every Executive board needs to consider (and other internal teams) is “the process behind the process”.
In essence, if you asked a leader to map their processes – they’d tend to jump straight into operations, sales cycles etc.
But I think that misses the key process. For me: how you find issues, get your team’s buy-in, assign ownership for fixing and review whether a fix worked. That process is actually the most critical. And because it’s so fundamental, it requires thought and time.
As an example, I worked with one client, a privately held business, who was stuck at about £20m a year for a number of years. As we started exploring the “process behind the process” for how they came up with initiatives and embedded them, we began to see that it wasn’t the quality of initiative they were launching that was the issue. It was around timing and trimming activity. As focus faded on initiatives, new shiny initiatives were kicked off. What they were seeing is what was working stopped. They saw this sort of slow undulating lack of growth over a protracted period of time.
As we got into their “process behind the process” and started to define that better, the Exec team realised they weren’t answering basic questions: what will success look like, how will we measure it or know, when should this be reviewed etc.
By having them design this rigour and working with them (overlaying concepts for KPIs like lead or lag indicators, will selected KPIs drive the right behaviour etc.), they were able to bust the cycles themselves.
Since we started working together, the business went from that £20m level to £50m in just 2 years. And they’re still growing.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Iain McMichael: To be clear, you can never know in advance if you’re going to oversimplify too much.
First you need to look at the outcomes being driven or the current results. Then work to identify the root cause. It’s a constant process of stripping away. And it’s never finished, always evolving.
You cannot do this work well from a spreadsheet. You have to go and see for yourself. The Japanese call it genchi genbutsu. Go and see the process, as it really runs, not as the slide says it runs. For me, that’s a big part of a leader’s job. It’s also exactly how I work with clients: go and look at everything as it is, then adjust from there.
When it comes to hurting quality or value, those concepts need to be well understood before we can define what hurting them looks like (and therefore how to avoid hurting them).
To strip away complexity, I use a good old-fashioned workshop with sticky notes (the default weapon of every consultant who has ever existed) to understand processes.
And then two challenges we’d directly ask of the room:
1. How can we simplify this further?
2. How are we using constraints to force creative thinking?
Big, unrealistic constraints can help to force step changes: “What if we had to run this with 10% of the team?” A 2019 review of 145 studies (Acar et al.) found constraints work best when people see them as a challenge, not as control.
Once we’ve got ideas it’s about trialling them after you’ve defined what success looks like, how we’ll measure it etc. Best to run in quarterly cycles as it’s shorter than a year (so you can iterate quicker) but allows for meaningful time on proposed solutions.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Iain McMichael: The biggest resistance is never logic, it’s the emotion in the room.
When you simplify something, the people who built the old way can feel attacked. They’ve spent time on this and it never feels good to have someone examine your work critically. So people fight to keep control (and their perceived status) longer than they reasonably should…even when the change would make their own lives better.
That’s just people (but those emotions are real and need to be dealt with, not fought with logic). Three key principles need to be your guiding light:
• Go in curious. Listen (and don’t be so certain about your own simplifications);
• Go back to the “process behind the process” (or one process to rule them all). Have them be involved in designing the optimisation process and ensure you make it about how the team finds and fixes issues (they decide it, so they’ll buy in); and
• Hand over ownership. Make the team responsible for proposing and embedding the optimisations themselves, so they feel good about where the process is going.
That last one matters most. In a 1947 study (Lewin), 3% of women who heard a lecture changed their behaviour, against 32% who self-generated reasons for a change. People commit to what they’ve spent time working out and problem solving for themselves.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Iain McMichael: Take action. Starting with going to see for yourself.
Map the process. In detail.
Then step away from it overnight and let your mind start to break it down.
That’s step one (always).
