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Michael Erath

Founder of Next Level Growth, Author of Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations
Michael Erath
Background

About Michael Erath

Organizational DesignBusiness CoachingLeadership TeamsScaling OperationsHiring StandardsProfitability

Michael Erath is the founder of Next Level Growth, a team of successful entrepreneurs turned business guides, and the author of RISE: The Reincarnation of an Entrepreneur and Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations. In his late 20s and early 30s he took his family's $8 million manufacturing business and built it into a $45 million global enterprise. In 2009, the housing market crash and a fraudulent business partner wiped it out. He started over, and today he coaches CEOs and leadership teams on how to scale with clarity instead of chaos.

Erath is a three-time Inc. 5000 CEO and a battle-tested business coach who works with leaders on breaking through plateaus, eliminating chaos, and building companies that run with precision. His Five Obsessions Framework came out of patterns he observed across high-performing organizations and championship sports franchises: great people, inspiring purpose, optimized playbooks, a culture of performance, and growing profits and cash flow. The work is practical — defining what greatness looks like in every role, building measurement systems, and making the hard people conversations happen sooner rather than later.

On The Daily Mastermind, Michael sat down with George Wright III for a conversation on what separates elite organizations from merely good ones. They covered why every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, how playbooks free people rather than constrain them, why profit is not a byproduct of doing everything else right, and the poker-player discipline of folding a bad hand fast. Erath also unpacked the marginal value of A players and the shift from "how do I do this?" to "who should do this?"

Featured Conversation

Michael on The Daily Mastermind Podcast

Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations with Michael Erath
Jul 1, 2025
Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations with Michael Erath
Michael Erath built and lost a $45M business, then rebuilt to coach CEOs. Learn his five obsessions that drive elite organizations to scale with clarity.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE →
Key Insights

Key takeaways from Michael

01
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
Erath credits Paul Batalden with the line that shaped his coaching. Most mediocre results trace back to a system built by default rather than by design. Until you examine the system producing an outcome, you cannot change the outcome.
02
Playbooks exist to free people, not to constrain them.
Erath quotes Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp: you systemize the predictable in order to humanize everything else. When team members know the steps cold, they stop thinking about process and spend their creativity on the customer.
03
Most friction between managers and employees is an expectations problem.
A culture of performance is about clarity, not punishment. Set clear expectations, measurements, and goals that people agree to at hire. Erath finds roughly four in five identified underperformers improve once a real coaching system exists.
04
Profit is not a byproduct of doing everything else right.
Erath calls that framing intellectually lazy. Pricing strategy, cash conversion cycles, and financial literacy across the team all require deliberate focus. Profit is the fuel that goes back into the engine and lets you put more of your purpose into the world.
05
A players are effectively free because of the value they bring.
Leaders fixate on the marginal cost of upgrading from a B player to an A player and miss the marginal value. You hire them on interest-free financing paid monthly. Build clear ramp plans so you know within 90 days whether the investment is working.
Find Michael

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