Lead Smarter Podcast

Ben Mimmack runs Sulis Capital, an independent sponsor focused on the lower middle market. He buys businesses where the founder retains a meaningful minority stake and stays operationally engaged as a leader of leaders.

Which makes day one of any acquisition a relational problem before it's an operational one. In this conversation, Ben walks through why coming in with a “my way or the highway” mindset is the fastest way to torch the value of a business you just paid millions for. He talks about how trust gets built long before the deal closes, how to free a founder to do what they love and offload what drains them, and why the best deals rarely go to the highest bidder.

The bigger thread underneath all of it is what it takes to lead people who know more about their work than you do. That's a leadership discipline most of us never get formal practice in, and Ben has built an entire business around it.

If you're building toward a future where partners, capital, or a buyer become part of your story, the relational groundwork Ben describes is exactly the kind of work we help clients with at Unbottleneck.