For twenty years, Steve Caton kept meeting the same founder. Different city, different industry, same person: someone who had built a company that was working and had quietly become the only person who could close a deal. Being great at sales got them here. Eventually, their calendar became the ceiling on growth.

In this episode of the Sly Fox Podcast, Lindsay Sutula sits down with Steve Caton, founder and CEO of Altezza Solutions. After three decades leading sales for emerging-growth companies, Steve built Altezza to help founders get out of the sales seat while transferring the trust and knowledge they built there.

Steve and Lindsay unpack the founder-led sales trap: why selling is one of the most valuable classrooms a founder has and how to hand sales to someone else without disappearing from the process. Steve shares his own experience doing exactly that at Altezza and watching the pipeline double.

They also get into why hiring a salesperson too soon can set them up to fail. The offer has to be proven, the value clear, and the ideal client, messaging, and sales process defined. The real work is building a system that can keep closing deals without the founder at the center of every sales conversation.

About the Guest

Steve Caton is the founder and CEO of Altezza Solutions, where he embeds seasoned fractional sales professionals into founder-led companies. Before Altezza, he spent three decades leading sales for emerging-growth companies, including a decade at a Colorado software company that sold for over $70 million. He founded Altezza in 2020 after repeatedly seeing founders become the only people who could close. Altezza has since served more than 100 clients. Steve also hosts the Whiskey Is For Closers podcast.

Connect with Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scaton

Altezza Solutions: https://altezzasolutions.com

Key Takeaways

Founder-led sales eventually creates a ceiling. Selling gives founders firsthand knowledge of their buyers and offer. Staying the only person who can close limits how far the business can grow.

Build the foundation before hiring the salesperson. A proven offer, clear ideal client, strong messaging, documented sales process, and working CRM give the next seller something repeatable to step into.

Transfer trust without disappearing. The salesperson should lead while the founder stays close enough to share expertise and coach. Over time, the seller builds their own credibility and the founder can step further away.

A successful handoff changes the founder’s role. Steve saw his own pipeline double after handing sales to someone else. Eventually, Altezza’s biggest deal closed without Steve ever meeting the client. That freed him to focus on the rainmaking and relationships where he could have the greatest impact.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with founders and leaders from across B2B, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.

A company can invest a lot in its people and still watch the same problems keep coming back. The difficult conversation gets avoided. A decision gets reopened after the meeting. A high performer creates tension nobody wants to address. The CEO keeps getting pulled in to solve problems the team should be able to handle.

Julie Holunga calls those patterns part of the hidden cost of growth.

In this episode of the Sly Fox Podcast, Lindsay Sutula sits down with Julie, a Fractional Leadership & Culture Partner who helps professional services firms build stronger leadership habits into the way people actually work together.

Julie has spent years coaching and training leaders, and she kept seeing the same thing: people would leave a workshop energized, try something new for a few weeks, and eventually fall back into old habits. That experience led her to build the Trusted Leadership Operating System, six disciplines covering the everyday behaviors, decisions, meetings, communication, feedback, and candor that shape a company’s culture.

Julie and Lindsay talk about the gap between good intentions and actual impact, why leaders avoid difficult conversations until the cost gets much bigger, and how clear expectations help CEOs move from solving everyone’s problems to coaching their teams through them.

They also get into one of Julie’s simplest pieces of advice for leaders: pause. Give yourself enough time to understand your reaction, simplify what you actually need to say, and respond with intention.

About the Guest

Julie Holunga is a Fractional Leadership & Culture Partner who works with professional services firms to strengthen leadership communication, trust, and alignment in day-to-day work. She partners with senior leaders and teams to close the gap between leadership intent and impact—clarifying expectations for communication, feedback, and decision-making and embedding them into how teams actually operate. Clients describe Julie as a trusted, steady presence who helps leaders navigate difficult conversations and build confidence in moments that matter. Her work is grounded in the Trusted Leadership Operating System®, a practical framework for leading with clarity and credibility under real-world pressure.

Connect with Julie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieholunga/

Website: https://www.julieholunga.com/

Key Takeaways

Growth gets expensive when small problems keep compounding. Rework, unclear ownership, avoided conversations, and decisions that keep getting reopened can quietly cost a company time, people, clients, and opportunities. Julie describes them as small moments that can eventually become an avalanche.

Pay attention to the gap between intention and impact. A leader can have a perfectly good intention and create a very different experience for the person on the receiving end. Culture gets shaped by what people experience every day and by the behaviors leaders consistently allow.

Give people an operating system they can actually use. Julie built six disciplines around behaviors, meetings, communication, candor, feedback, and decisions so teams have shared expectations to return to when something goes sideways.

The goal is to become the coach people need less often. Julie knows the system is working when clients call her less. The same applies to CEOs: instead of stepping into every conflict, they can help their people handle it themselves and save their own attention for higher-value work.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with B2B leaders, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.

Every operating system for running a company better — EOS, Scaling Up, take your pick — assumes you already know what’s wrong. Bud Michael has used most of them, and recommends them. He also thinks that assumption is where most CEOs get stuck.

Bud has sat in the CEO seat five times, from pre-revenue startups to middle-market companies, with three exits and four decades in technology that started at Intel. He’s now Managing Director of Renaissance Management Services and a certified advisor in the TrueSpace Business Builder Program, working from a 5 Conditions Assessment that TrueSpace built with Gallup across 2,500 companies.

He opens somewhere unexpected: the loneliness. The board has expectations, and there are things you won’t say to them. From there he walks Lindsay through the founder trap — Ichak Adizes’ term for the biggest reason companies stall after the first couple million — and shows how it’s really a hiring loop powered by the founder’s own competence. Then the harder discipline: telling a high-value customer from a customer who will quietly cost you, and being willing to say no to the logo you’d love on your website.

Along the way: why businesses exist for human beings rather than other businesses, why scale is about profitability rather than revenue, and what it actually takes to get an outside view of your own company — which, as Bud puts it, requires an out-of-body experience, and it’s hard when it’s your body.

About the Guest

Bud has 45 years of experience in high technology for industry leading hardware, software and services companies. He has held executive level sales, marketing and general management positions with large, industry-leading product companies including Intel, Tandem Computer, Sequent Computers and KANA Software. Bud has been CEO at five privately funded technology and data services companies where he led the scaling of these businesses, selling three of these companies to strategic buyers. In addition to serving on the Boards of these five companies, Bud has been an independent Board representative for two privately held technology companies.

Bud is Managing Director at Renaissance Management Services, a management consulting firm that works with the CEOs of emerging mid-market businesses to help them scale. He is a certified advisor in the TrueSpace Business Builder Program.

Connect with Bud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/budmichael

Renaissance Management Services: https://renaissancemgtsvcs.com

Key Takeaways

The first thing that changes in the CEO seat is that you run out of people to talk to. Asked what five turns in the chair taught him, Bud didn’t go strategic. He went human.

The founder trap is a hiring loop, and it runs on your own competence. This is the biggest reason companies stall after the first million or two in revenue.

The call almost never starts with strategy. It starts with a chair you can’t fill.

Alignment starts with a human being, not a market. “Businesses don’t exist for other businesses; they exist for a human being.” That’s where Bud starts: why the company exists and who specifically it’s for.

A high-value customer is a partner. Growth doesn’t come from selling your ego. The high-value customer buys into your purpose first, costs less to keep, fits culturally, and refers others like themselves.

What a good advisor does is stay unencumbered by gravity. Bud is specific about who he won’t work with: CEOs who think they’re the sharpest knife in the drawer, and anyone whose board or investors pushed them into it.

About the Show

The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with founders and leaders from across B2B, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.