Business builder and investor. 12+ businesses founded. Exited 5. 30+ years of experience. 200K+ readers.

Building beautiful businesses. I’ve spent the last 30 years leading, building, and growing my holding company. 

Entrepreneurship done right makes the world a better place.

My track record of success:
- Employ 600+ people
- Built 12+ businesses across multiple industries
- Audience in the hundreds of thousands
- Chili's & Subaru evangelist (unpaid)

Michael Girdley

You'll be ahead of 95% of people by just: 

• Answering emails/messages in complete sentences 
• Responding promptly 
• Consistently doing what you say you'll do 

The bar is so low.

Thoughts?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

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These awards recognize outstanding people under 40 years old who are rising stars in the business community. They are among the most important awards we bestow because they call attention to the fact that a community needs a constant stream of leaders coming up today to stay strong and relevant in the future.

2014 Man of the Year

The San Antonio Business Journal announces the winners of its 2015 40 Under 40 awards.
A select panel of judges consisting of past 40 Under 40 award recipients chose the 2015 winners from more than 110 nominees.

San Antonio Business Journal 40 under 40

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Legacy Geekdom Fund

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Hire With Near

Business builder and investor. 12+ businesses founded. Exited 5. 30+ years of experience. 300K+ readers. Helping US businesses hire amazing talent from LatAm.

A hill I’ll die on:

Unless you do regular 1-1s with your employees, you are not a great manager.

(No matter what you tell yourself.)

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company.

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people.

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

The rise of Din Tai Fung: The world's most successful restaurant?!

Most restaurant chains chase fast growth, franchising, and scale at all costs. Din Tai Fung did the opposite—and quietly built one of the most profitable restaurant businesses in the world.

What started as a struggling dumpling stall in Taiwan turned into a global empire generating over $600 million a year, with some locations doing more revenue than steakhouses selling $200 entrées. This video breaks down how obsessive quality control, product-led growth, and disciplined expansion allowed Din Tai Fung to dominate without advertising, franchising, or rushing growth.

We’ll explore how their refusal to cut corners, invest less in staff, or scale too fast created insane sales per restaurant, cult-like demand, and long-term durability—while competitors burned out. If you’re interested in business strategy, brand-building, or how slow growth can outperform hype-driven expansion, this story is a masterclass.

Follow for more deep dives on legendary businesses, strategy, and long-term winners.

Our approach to teaching our kids about passive income was to create the "Bank of Dad." 

I pay 3% interest per month. They are welcome to compound, too. 

10 years later, both boys are cheap as hell and make deposits almost every month. 

When they're 18, we stop the interest. We do it all on a google sheet.

What's your approach to this?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

We had a warehouse employee arrive on his first day with a fishing pole on his bicycle.  

We asked, “Why do you have a fishing pole?”  

He said, “In case this doesn’t work out, I’ll have something to do after lunch.”  

He never came back from lunch.

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

If you die, you’ll be glad you did this.

If a Subaru dealership anywhere in Texas ran its sales process like Tesla does, it'd get all of my business.

The whole "let's talk to the finance manager" and "oh, did we not tell you about the $500 undercoat earlier?" 

This is why I've always kept cars forever.

Thoughts?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

"Hire smart people. Leave them alone."

Terrible advice.

What's your take on this?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company.

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people.

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

My favorite Stupid Human personal finance trick:

I keep the balance in my checking account low.

So -- I feel broke and spend less.

It's dumb, but it works.

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company.

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people.

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

The rise and fall of Kodak: $30B to bankruptcy

At its peak, Eastman Kodak wasn’t just a camera brand—it was one of the most powerful corporations in America. They dominated film with massive profit margins, employed nearly 200,000 people, and even invented the world’s first digital camera. So how did a company that created the future of photography still end up bankrupt?

This video breaks down the true rise and fall of Kodak, from George Eastman’s revolutionary vision to the internal incentives, corporate structure, and fear of disruption that sealed Kodak’s fate. We also compare Kodak’s failure with Fujifilm, a rival that faced the same disruption—but survived by making brutal, long-term decisions.

If you want to understand business failure, the innovator’s dilemma, and why great companies collapse even when they see the threat coming, this is one of the most important case studies ever.

Follow for more breakdowns on business, investing, and long-term strategy.

Every so often, you run into a family where everyone does nothing all day but lives a big spending life.

"How did that happen?"

"Them? Their grandfather invented the seatbelt/disposable cup/toothpick/etc."

"Oh."

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

Here's how one of the most trusted brands in history destroyed itself — and what every business owner needs to learn from it.

The original TED was magic because of one thing: ruthless curation.
Richard Saul Wurman, the founder, ran it like a tyrant. He'd literally walk on stage mid-talk and cut off a speaker's tie with scissors if they weren't landing. If he didn't understand something personally, he'd interrupt and make you say it better.

The result? Pure gold, every time.

Then Chris Anderson took over and had a vision: share TED's ideas with the entire world. Admirable goal. But the execution killed the brand.

In 2009, they launched TEDx — a franchise model that let anyone, anywhere, run their own TED event. By the end, there were 44,000 events and 233,000 talks online.

Here's the problem. The internet in 2010 wasn't hungry for more content. It was drowning in it.

What people needed was someone to tell them what was actually worth their time. A trusted filter.

TED responded by becoming the opposite of that.

Quality collapsed fast. Without curation of the curators, TEDx stages started filling up with pseudoscience and fraud. Elizabeth Holmes pitched Theranos at a TEDx event. A comedian bluffed his way in dressed as a Roman gladiator and gave a completely made-up talk — the audience gave a standing ovation.

Nobody slowed down to say "wait, is this BS?" Because the brand trained them not to.

Meanwhile, the flagship conference became a $12,500-a-ticket networking event for billionaires. Then they waded into the culture wars. The whole thing turned into a politicized industry trade show.

The lesson isn't complicated:
Great ideas are rare. And there is enormous value in being the person — or brand — that finds them and says "trust me, this one's worth your time."
The moment TED stopped being a ruthless filter and started being a firehose, they destroyed the only thing that made them special. We're all operating in a world right now where there's more noise than anyone can process. The businesses that win are the ones that earn trust by being more selective, not less.

What brands have you seen make this exact mistake?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company.

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people.

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

I grew up eating Kraft Mac and Cheese almost every day. Today? I don't have a single box in my house. And that shift is exactly why Warren Buffett lost $3 billion.

In 1937, Kraft Mac and Cheese cost 19 cents a box and fed a family of four in 9 minutes. By WWII, you could get two boxes for one ration stamp — they moved 80 million boxes in 1943 alone. By the 2010s, Kraft owned 46% of the mac and cheese market. 350 million boxes a year. Then a Brazilian private equity firm called 3G Capital bought the business in 2013, teamed up with Berkshire Hathaway, and deployed their playbook: slash costs until margins soar.

They laid off 5,000 workers in 7 months. Closed plants. Hit 30% EBITDA margins — nearly 50% better than competitors. The stock hit $96. Wall Street loved them.

But here's the problem with cost-cutting: once you run out of fat, you start cutting muscle and bone.

They slashed $400 million from the annual advertising budget. Spent 0.36% of revenue on R&D while competitors spent over 1%. Innovation flatlined right as consumer tastes were changing fast.I stopped buying the blue box the day I read the ingredient label. Yellow dye #5, yellow dye #6, oleoresin. A food blogger got 350,000 people to sign a petition in 2016. Kraft quietly changed the formula — then spent zero dollars announcing it.

Meanwhile, Annie's Homegrown grew from $200M to $800M in sales. Goodles launched in 2021 with clean ingredients and grew 33x its first year. Kraft Mac and Cheese dropped from 46% market share to the high 30s. Eight straight quarters of declining sales. 

Warren Buffett went on national television and admitted he was wrong. $3 billion gone. 

The obvious lesson: don't cut your way to prosperity. 

The deeper one is harder. The world changed underneath Kraft — and they kept the recipe exactly the same.

Consumers wanted to know what they were eating. Millennials and Gen Z stopped buying things with chemicals they couldn't pronounce. And 3G was too busy celebrating their margins to notice. 

What other iconic brands do you see making this same mistake right now?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates and hire more staff for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

I'm wearing an 8-year-old pair of Lululemon shorts right now.

They're still perfect. Haven't bought a new pair since.

That's actually one of the things that's killing Lululemon.

Here's the full story of how one of the most dominant brands in retail history started losing its edge — and the 4 lessons every business owner should steal from it:

1. Your founder's words are your brand. In 2013, Chip Wilson publicly suggested some women's bodies weren't right for Lululemon pants. During a see-through pants scandal. The $67M recall was recoverable. That comment wasn't. Women I know still won't shop there.

2. Chasing shiny objects is expensive. They spent $500M buying Mirror — a home fitness startup — betting people would keep working out at home post-COVID. When gyms reopened, nobody cared. They wrote off $443M. Almost the entire investment. Gone. They forgot their core business was making incredible clothing.

3. Even dominant brands go stale. Fashion shifted to loose, baggy fits. Lululemon's whole identity was tight athleisure. Younger, hipper brands like Alo and Vuori moved faster. By 2024, Lululemon publicly admitted a "lack of newness" was hurting sales.

4. A product too good can kill repeat purchases. When you've made clothes so durable people don't need new ones — and you've saturated your market — same-store sales fall. That's not a quality problem. That's a retention strategy problem.

The stock is down 50% in the past year. The market has voted.

Do you think they turn it around?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

Lululemon 4 Costly Mistakes

Walgreens' stock is down 90% from its highs. It's worth the same as it was 30 years ago. Here's the wild part: none of this was inevitable.

They rode two massive waves perfectly. Car culture. The healthcare spending explosion. For decades they put pharmacies at every major intersection and printed money.

When you find product-market fit that strong, it's almost impossible to screw up. And they didn't. Until they did.

Here's what actually killed them:

Pharmacy Benefit Managers inserted themselves between Walgreens and their margins. In 2012, Walgreens tried to call their bluff with Express Scripts. They lost 20-30% of their revenue overnight and had to capitulate. The crown jewel of their business was never really profitable again.

CVS saw the exact same threat and went vertical. They bought a PBM. Merged with Aetna. Built pricing power at every stage of the chain. Walgreens chose to stay a retailer. That decision made all the difference.

Then Amazon bought PillPack and made their entire real estate moat irrelevant.

The decisions that ended Walgreens were made years before anyone noticed. 

That's the part that should scare every business owner.

Swipe through the carousel for the lessons I think every business owner should take from this.

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. 

Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company.

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people.

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

How Walgreens Lost Almost Everything

Most of my entrepreneur friends have so much less liquid net worth than people imagine. 

They're rich, yeah, but it's all tied up in assets.

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

US companies are quietly ditching India, the Philippines, and Canada for SDR hiring. Here's why, and where they're all going instead.

India & The Philippines: The prices look great on paper. But you're dealing with inconsistent English, real cultural misalignment, and time zones that absolutely kill sales velocity. Your SDRs are offline when your prospects are most active. That's not a minor inconvenience. That's a pipeline killer.

Canada: Great English, solid talent. But you're only saving 10-15% versus a US hire. Is managing remote and foreign SDRs really worth that delta? Not so much.

So where's everyone actually going?

Latin America. And the migration has been massive. I personally have over 25 remote sales staff across my companies in LatAm.

And I know the migration has been huge because I own an offshore hiring agency, Hire With Near. I've seen firsthand the massive push in 2026 that companies are making to load up on SDR remote talent.

Here's what makes LatAm the sweet spot right now:

1. You triple your headcount. 3 LatAm SDRs for the cost of 1 US salary.

2. Zero time zone friction. They're working when your prospects are working. Simple.

3. Cultural alignment. Better than Eastern Europe, better than Southeast Asia. Not even close. Just think about who was on the Super Bowl halftime show.

4. Hunger. These are degreed professionals who genuinely value the opportunity. That shows up in their work. US companies outpay their local options by a lot.

Colombia in particular has quietly become the hotspot for Latin American sales talent.

I've seen countless companies test one or two LatAm SDRs and then come back to build entire departments.

If you haven't looked into LatAm remote talent yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

Campbell's bought Vlasic, loaded it with $500M in debt, paid themselves a fat dividend on the way out, and handed the keys to a first-time CEO in a turnaround situation.

Then that CEO cut a deal with Walmart — a gallon jar of pickles for $2.97 — to chase the growth numbers Wall Street demanded.

Customers loved it. Sales exploded. 240,000 gallons a week were flying off shelves.

The problem: they were barely breaking even on every jar. And Walmart now owned them. Over 30% of Vlasic's revenue ran through one buyer. When they tried to exit the deal, Walmart said: keep doing it or we pull you from every shelf in America.

They had no leverage. No margin. No way out.

To make it worse, a gallon jar of pickles lasts a family almost a year. So they weren't adding new sales — they were replacing all their profitable small-jar volume with a deal that made them nothing. 

They'd also spent 40 years convincing customers that Vlasic was a premium brand worth paying up for. The $2.97 gallon deal quietly told every one of those customers they'd been a sucker all along. Once that perception flips, it doesn't flip back.

And the brand they'd spent 40 years building as a premium product? 

Customers now thought it was cheap. That perception shift doesn't reverse.

Let's be real: this wasn't bad luck. The ending was visible on day one.

$500M in debt + wrong incentives + first-time CEO + Wall Street pressure = one outcome.

The lesson I keep coming back to: growth at any cost costs everything.

What's the biggest mistake you see companies make when chasing growth? Hit the comments.

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

Business Lessons The Vlasic Pickle Mistake

My first job was as a lifeguard at a pool here in San Antonio. I got fired. Learned some valuable lessons. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

My kids? They've tried to get jobs at that same kind of place. Employers look at them and say "you can only work after school" — and move on to the next applicant.

Here's what's happening to teenage summer jobs in America, and why every business owner should care.

In 1978, 72% of teenagers had a summer job. Today it's barely 35%. We've lost over half of America's working teenagers in just a few decades.

And it's not because kids are lazy. It's a lot more complicated than that.

Four forces killed the teenage job market:

1. Their grandparents took the jobs. In 1987, 11% of workers were over 65. Today it's 19% — 11 million more senior citizens in the workforce. Employers prefer them: they show up on time and don't have prom or soccer practice in the way.

2. Immigrant labor hit teens hardest. A 10% increase in immigrant labor participation knocked adult employment down ~1%. For teenagers, it hit 3 to 3.5 times harder. Those entry-level jobs got taken year-round.

3. Automation. Self-checkout replaced cashiers. 88% of cashier jobs are projected to be automated. Retail used to be the biggest employer of teen labor. That era is over.

4. The college industrial complex. In 1985, 10% of teenagers were in college prep summer programs. By 2014 it was nearly 50%. Parents decided McDonald's wouldn't get their kid into Harvard.

Here's the crazy part — admissions counselors say they'd rather see a kid who worked a real summer job than one whose parents paid for a fancy enrichment trip.

Now here's why this matters for us as business owners.

The kids who'd normally be building work ethic, learning to deal with difficult customers, handling responsibility — that whole experience is disappearing.

I see it already. 20-somethings with no concept of basic workplace norms. Mom occasionally tags along. This isn't a knock on them — they genuinely weren't given the chance to figure this out earlier.

This summer of 2026 is projected to be the worst teen job market ever recorded. We're betting that screens and enrichment programs will prepare the next generation better than actually working will. As someone who's hired hundreds of people?

I wouldn't take that bet.

What's your experience hiring younger workers these days?

—

By the way: I employ 70+ Latin Americans across my different businesses. Whole accounting and marketing teams, salespeople, plus the entire team at Hire With Near, my LatAm staffing company. 

It lets me afford more experienced candidates and hire more staff for the same budget. They also happen to be amazing employees and people. 

If you haven’t looked into LatAm yet, you can get a no-strings-attached consultation with my team, plus 5% off your first hire, right here: https://lnkd.in/gPM8Sz4S

The rise and fall of Juul: How the $38B company imploded

Juul was founded with a bold mission: help smokers quit cigarettes through harm reduction. 

What started as a Stanford design project quickly became one of the fastest-growing companies in history, capturing over 70% of the vaping market and reaching a $38 billion valuation. But behind the sleek design and explosive growth, something much darker was unfolding.

In this video, we break down the rise and fall of Juul, from its early innovation in nicotine delivery to the marketing decisions that hooked an entire generation of teenagers. As regulators, parents, and state governments caught on, Juul went from Silicon Valley darling to public enemy almost overnight—facing federal raids, massive lawsuits, and billions wiped off its valuation.

This is a story about incentives, ethics, and what happens when growth matters more than responsibility.

Follow for more deep dives into business failures, startup scandals, and the real lessons behind massive companies.

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