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In November of 2021, Seth Morgan, Founder, and CEO of MLA Companies was interviewed by Stone Payton of Business RadioX Studios. Seth was featured on their show, Workplace Wisdom. Its focus is sharing insight, perspective, and best practices for creating the planet’s best workplaces. He discussed MLA’s purpose of Business Redeemed.
Stone: Could you give us a little bit of a primer, overview, mission, and purpose of MLA companies?
Seth: MLA started in 2006, and fractional CFO work is the center of our business. We do some mergers and acquisition work now, some back-office bookkeeping support. We still are primarily involved in fractional CFO support. That really looks like a mix of consulting and on-the-ground execution with our clients. Recently, we started to expand in different disciplines outside of finance, so some organizational development and process improvement, etc.
We describe our purpose as Business Redeemed, which I would summarize as this: We believe business is a force for good in the world, and we believe businesses are best led by people who see themselves s stewardships of that business. Our mission is to help those individuals be the best stewards they possibly can be.
It’s really the effort, creativity, innovation, and ingenuity that these stewards are bringing to the table on a daily basis that drives what we do. And that’s whether they are leads of departments or owners of companies. Our passion is to serve them.
Stone: It seems like an interesting dynamic to me. Not only are you courting and striving to serve the end-user client. But you also find yourself, I suspect, working to recruit, develop, retain the practitioners themselves, at least with this fractional CFO. Can you describe what It’s like being in two different environments and having to serve both?
Seth: Early on and in my career running MLA, my work looked like making sure that diapers got changed and food got put on the table. And as the company has grown, I’ve had to do what everybody does in business. That is really looking myself in the mirror and asking, “Am I trying to build an enterprise here, or am I just practicing a craft?” And I suspect some of your listeners are facing the same question. I made the decision to try to build an enterprise.
So a board has been put in place for working very hard at getting MLA ready to go beyond me. And that means thinking very carefully about our clients who are the best clients, how do we recruit them? And then exactly what you said, Stone, are people who are the best people and how do we recruit them?
I devote much of my time today to working to promote our brand, working obviously in business development. I still serve some clients from time to time, but absolutely then it’s thinking about who are the folks that we have at the leadership level, who are the folks that we have in the trenches?
And how do we continue to keep that fresh and exciting, not only for our current team but for our recruiting activities and then ultimately to serve our “why” to serve our purpose? How do we have the right people that will give the best advice to those stewards leading these organizations for good that we call businesses?