Welcome to my new Blog!

The Summary: Matt-Heelan.com is a blog dedicated to sharing my insights, experience, and expertise from a 20-year career spent working with entrepreneurs who started and grew small to medium-sized organizations. In terms of the size and scale of these organizations, they ranged from $1 million dollars to $16 million dollars with anywhere between 20–200 team members.

Background: When I began my career in 1995, I was quickly promoted to become a manager of other human beings. I was not promoted because of my natural leadership and management skills. I was promoted because the organization was experiencing explosive growth and the CEO needed people to help manage that growth. I was young and eager so I said yes to the opportunity.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone to teach, mentor, or coach me on how to be successful in this role. As is typical in most small businesses you have to just make it up as you go along. I decided that I would take the initiative and just teach myself how to be a manager. I began by reading everything that I could find out about management and leadership on the weekends and the following week I would take what I had learned and apply it in the real world. It didn’t go well at first.

Over the course of the next 20 years through trial and error, I began to improve and get better at leading organizations and managing people while I continued to be a “student of the game.” This brings us back to why…