A Special Feature

Interview with Michael Carroll, Independent Business Consultant, Part 1

By Marc Carson · Tuesday February 11, 2014

Michael Carroll (pictured above) is an independent business consultant based in Fort Bragg, California. Mike is a former Silicon Valley tech executive and biomedical engineer, and has been a friend and coach to me for almost five years now. I rely on Mike’s expert advice as I run my own web design business.

There are a lot of aspects involved in running a business, and it is extremely valuable to be able to discuss it all with Mike as we zoom out and try to get an idea of the big picture—the “where is this taking me” part. I wanted to get an idea of Mike’s big picture, and find out more about the life experiences that helped him become an effective business consultant. Mike agreed and we sat down for an interview that ended up lasting 50 minutes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Give me an idea of your background—where you grew up, your family, your parents.

I grew up in Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. I was the oldest of nine kids in a Catholic family of seven boys and two girls. My first of two sisters, the fifth child, showed up to Catholic school, and one of the nuns said, “you must be one of the Carroll boys.” [Laughter]

My mom was an artist who had her own business (a ceramics business) when she was 18, but then gave that up to be a mom. My dad was an engineer who got into NASA really early and spent most of his career working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His degree was in ceramic engineering, and his field was space materials. JPL did all the unmanned spacecraft—Voyager, Mariner—and he was their space materials expert. Any coating, any paint on any of the spacecraft was his responsibility.

And did he share a lot of that with you? You decided to become an engineer at some point—

Yeah, but I was going to be an electrical engineer, and I wasn’t very interested in what he was doing at the time. It actually kind of conspired against me, because if you lived in Altadena, Pasadena—all the good jobs were at JPL unless you wanted to work in the defense industry. So I had one summer job working for the EE department at Cal Tech during high school, and then I got a summer job at JPL in college, and then they told me, “you can’t work here because your father works here.” They have a no-nepotism policy, and I had gotten the job completely independent of him, so they had to make an exception. I worked two summers at JPL, on the Mariner Mars spacecraft, doing wiring, which was the most tedious job I’ve ever had.

Wow, so is that spacecraft you worked on still out in space somewhere?

Yeah. Although it’s not clear—usually they build two of those things, because it’s just as cheap to build two as one, so it’s not clear whether mine is in space or in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Which is kind of cool.

The next summer I worked at the Goldstone Tracking Station, the Deep Space Network, the big antennas. That’s in Barstow, out in the desert. We’d built a new antenna cone or something and we’d drive it out to test it.

Wow, very technical.

Well, I went to a technical high school, so I had four years of electronics in high school, including computer programming in…1967?

On punch cards, or what?

[Laughs] It was on punched paper tape.

On a big reel?

Yeah. You’d program it on a teletype machine. Have you seen a teletype machine? It’s like a typewriter with punch paper. Or, you could enter it [the program] manually. But we’d do it on paper tape. We also had a timeshare terminal—connected to…somewhere—that had FORTRAN and machine code.

We actually wrote a dating program. We called it an “elevator control program” because it’s matching, you know—you put in characters and it decides which floor it’s going to go to—it was all just variables, so who knew? [Laughter] And this is before anybody was doing anything with computers. There might be one computer in a whole city.

So I took four years of electronics in high school, then I went to UC Santa Barbara, for four years of Electrical Engineering school. That was my degree, but I did two years of independent studies in biomedical engineering. I was building medical devices.

Then as an engineer I worked for a company called Siemens, building medical linear accelerators, used in radiation treatment. They were interesting technologically because they involved low-level dosimetry and high-pulse power, you know…klystrons and magnetrons and everything in between—high-current bending magnets, and just about every kind of technology you could imagine…so it was a good experience that way, but the politics of a multi-national medical equipment company made it not much fun, so…

What kind of politics do you mean?

Well, you know, it’s a German company with a bunch of American engineers, so there’s only one right way to do things, and that’s the German way. [Laughs] And if you spoke German, were from Germany, and had a degree from Germany, you were enlightened. Otherwise, you were stupid.

It was actually good experience, but I got really tired of being an engineer. Even though I loved the technology, what was interesting to me was making the business work.

So I went to work in marketing for a test equipment company that was—fifteen people or something. I was there for nine years; I started off as an applications engineer and by the time I left in nine years, it was a $60-80 million-per-year company with divisions all over the world, and I was the Vice President of Marketing.

So what do you think made you tired of being an engineer?

Well, to me, the way things work is really interesting. But the way a business works was to me more interesting than the way an astable multivibrator worked.

Ah…a what?

An astable multivibrator. It’s an analog way of getting a square wave. But the point is, sitting for weeks on end behind a desk, drawing circuits, and trying them out—you might design something, and then two years later it would be in a product, and then three years later it would be shipped to a customer. The product cycle was long and not very satisfying. It took a long time to get a new product designed and built and out there, and in the meantime you’re just sitting behind a desk.

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…really early on, the president took a real interest in us and showed us how the business worked.

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You’ve told me before you’re not really a details person—do you think it had something to do with that?

I’m sure it had a lot to do with that. At the next company I worked for, one of the interesting things to me was that really early on, the president took a real interest in us and showed us how the business worked. He took a couple of us who were new employees into his office, and said here’s how cash flow works, and here’s how profit works, and it was like this 45-minute “a ha” moment. I think he knew that the more you understand about how the business works, the better you’ll be no matter what your job is.

I worked there for nine years, then I was recruited into a startup—a real startup—where I was the VP of Marketing. It was a software company making design simulation software called Analog Design Tools. They were the first company to put a complete user-friendly front end on analog design.

What kind of systems did it run on?

It ran on anything with Unix, but in those days Sun workstations were the most accessible. Eventually we did a PC version.

How did you market it?

We had a direct sales force. I started off heading marketing and there was a different guy in charge of sales. I had a lot of international experience though, so I was actually in charge of marketing worldwide as well as sales outside the U.S. So in that job I was in Japan a lot, and in Europe a lot.

Is that where your interest in Japanese calligraphy kind of came from?

I was interested in Japanese culture in general—I got started with that when I was doing judo in high school. I did judo in high school and in college.

Wow. Were you ranked?

No, I just did it for exercise and fun. We had a pretty good team, and to this day I can tell anybody in judo who my instructor was at UCSB and [they know].

Who was your instructor?

It was Ken Ota. His son, who was the same age as me, was a nationally-ranked star at San Jose State.

I’m curious, because I took judo, too: Did you have a favorite judo hold, or lock, or throw?

It’s been a long time. [Laughs] But it was interesting because we learned not just judo but also aikido. Ken was a judo master, aikido master, and taught ballroom dance. [Laughs] Which is really interesting until you realize that aikido and ballroom dance are very similar.

That sort of got me interested in Japanese culture because you don’t just go in and put on a gi and do stuff. You have to get into the whole thing.

Makes sense. Now, how did you get from being VP of Marketing to what you are doing now—business consulting? Did you retire at some point?

No—I can tell you about retiring in a minute, but along the way I found that there were lots of things in my jobs that I really liked, and there were lots of things that I didn’t like and I was always looking for a greater proportion of things I really enjoyed doing.

I didn’t really like working in a city very much. I didn’t like the stress of working on one problem day after day for 60 hours a week without a break. That got to be tedious. But the interesting parts were what made things work with the organization, the people. Technology was the vehicle but it wasn’t my real interest.

Don’t put off anything that you really want to do

Two things happened along the way that kind of gave me a sense of urgency about doing something different. One is that I had met a woman when I was in college—her name was Christine—who was unbelievably gorgeous. And brilliant. She was in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB where you didn’t have to get grades. It was pass/not-pass. She was very smart. She was my age, but a year ahead of me at school. She was absolutely gorgeous and very talented artistically—one of these people who would walk into the room and everybody would gasp. It was almost like a scene from a movie where someone walks into a room and there’s a spotlight on them. That’s her entire life, that’s the way she was.

She came by that quite legitimately—her grandmother was Coco Chanel’s top model in Paris in the ’30s. Her grandfather was William Ferrari, who graduated from Yale with a double degree in Art and Architecture at 17. After doing his whole artist-in-Paris thing, and meeting his wife there, he went to Hollywood and was a Hollywood art director and artist and won an Oscar as the art director for Gaslight and [was nominated for an Academy Award for] How the West Was Won.

So she got everything. She got the looks, she got the intelligence, she got the artistic talent, and the rest of her siblings are really nice people but it was really unfair. [Laughs]

When I met [Christine], she was engaged to some guy who was off in Vietnam, and then my roommate kinda didn’t even pay attention to that and the two of them got together.

They got married, and then he died in a tragic accident when he was in graduate school. She and I had been friends along the way, and here was this good friend and we’re both lamenting this friend who had died—we got together and eventually got married.

It was a great relationship, because how often do you get to be married to somebody that you’re not only in love with but that has been your best friend for so many years? There’s no bull****. I mean, you really know this person. So it was really great.

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So, all of that was going for us, and then she got sick

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We had been married five years, and I was the hottest, youngest middle-manager at this test equipment company, and she was an environmentalist at the EPA—we both had fabulous jobs, we had bought our dream house on the waterfront in Alameda, we lived on the Oakland estuary, had a little boat—it was nothing fancy but it was perfect for us. We bought and shared a BMW, so I was driving a BMW, and my company had just been written up in BusinessWeek as the hottest company coming up. And then she decided she wanted to make her living as an artist, so she was going back to school again at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

So, all of that was going for us, and then she got sick, and spent two years fighting cancer, and then she died.

And it was tragic, and sad. But one of the things that I got out of it was, hey—don’t put off anything that you really want to do. Because who knows when you’re going to get a chance to do it.

Then, two years later, my father—who was only 55—who had his whole life said, “I’ve got plenty of time to do the things I want to do when I retire, I’ll just work now,”—he died. He got pancreatic cancer.

So it was a double lesson: Don’t put anything off.

This interview will continue tomorrow in Part 2.