Michael Richman is a Professional EOS Implementer with EOS Worldwide, a company that helps entrepreneurial leadership teams gain clarity, traction, and results through a proven operating system. With a background as a fifth-generation entrepreneur, he brings decades of firsthand experience in building and scaling businesses. Before becoming an EOS Implementer, Michael owned and operated a second-generation multimillion-dollar custom manufacturing company, culminating in a successful exit. He holds a degree in communications from the University of Southern California (USC) and an MBA in small business entrepreneurship from California Lutheran University.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [1:58] Michael Richman shares his family’s unique business history involving Meyer Lansky
- [4:09] Why Michael’s father left the family business and started his own venture in California
- [8:39] How niching into commercial awnings helped the business scale nationally
- [10:37] Customer service lessons from working in a Jewish deli in Encino
- [15:10] Why securing Family Dollar was the turning point in earning respect
- [21:31] How joining EO led to discovering EOS and transforming his business
- [26:17] The emotional challenges of selling a longtime family business
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs face the challenge of running and growing a family business while balancing legacy, leadership, and long-term sustainability. Scaling can feel overwhelming, employees may resist change, and eventually, the emotional weight of selling a business becomes unavoidable. How do you create clarity, build respect, and prepare a company for both growth and transition?
Michael Richman shares how he navigated these challenges as a fifth-generation entrepreneur. By securing major accounts like Starbucks, Panda Express, and Family Dollar, Michael proved his value and helped expand his family’s custom manufacturing business nationwide. Later, he turned to the EO community and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to implement simple tools, such as scorecards, accountability charts, and people management systems — changes that unlocked growth, revealed hidden problems, and ultimately prepared the business for a successful exit.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Michael Richman, Professional EOS Implementer at EOS Worldwide, about transitioning a legacy business and scaling with systems. Michael discusses custom manufacturing, high-trust B2B partnerships, and how the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) changed his trajectory.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Michael Richman: LinkedIn | Website
- EOS Worldwide
- Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
Quotable Moments:
- “We jumped the fence at a Starbucks construction site and won a national client that lasted decades.”
- “I realized I was living in a vacuum, eating lunch with my dad every day and not growing as a leader.”
- “EOS turned the lights on in my business; it showed us what we weren’t seeing.”
- “You might think fabric fade isn’t a big deal, but to Panda Express, it’s brand consistency.”
- “My daughters want to play shortstop for the Yankees. That’s why I sold the family business.”
Action Steps:
- Define your niche clearly: Specializing allows you to scale with consistency and serve a distinct market more effectively.
- Measure what matters: Implementing EOS scorecards exposed blind spots in employee performance. Data-driven decisions remove guesswork and create accountability across your team.
- Adapt to your role on the bus: Knowing your strengths and those of your team helps everyone sit in the right seat and perform optimally.
- Join a peer group: Michael Richman’s transformation began when he joined EO and got honest feedback. Surrounding yourself with other business owners accelerates personal growth and strategic clarity.
- Be proactive in succession planning: Michael’s story of buying into and eventually selling the business highlights the importance of planning ownership transitions intentionally and with emotional readiness.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today, we’re talking with a seasoned serial entrepreneur who is going to share about business, entrepreneurship, and some of the highs and lows of being, believe it or not, a fifth-generation entrepreneur. His name is Michael Richman. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:17
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:34
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here, I am, the host of this show. And you know that every week we feature smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And we’ve had Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, lots of great episodes in the archives for you to check out.
And of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for any company or organization to launch or run a podcast?
We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. In fact, we invented what some are calling the Wix B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Co-Pilot. So if you want to learn more, you can go to our website, Rise25.com, or email our team at [email protected]. All right, I’m excited for today’s guest.
His name is Michael Richman. He is a professional EOS implementer with us worldwide. But as I mentioned, I am also a fifth generation entrepreneur. That may be a record. I don’t think I’ve had anyone that is a fifth generation entrepreneur before, so I’m really excited about it.
He’s had a number of different businesses over the years, including family businesses, before getting into doing EOS, and we also have Los Angeles in common. We were just chatting about that beforehand. But Michael, I want to hear some of these family stories. So first of all, was it your grandfather, your great grandfather?
Michael Richman: 01:56
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 01:56
So knew this gangster Meyer Lansky.
Michael Richman: 01:59
Meyer Lansky. Actually. So my great grandfather owned a pool hall in the 1920s where the gangsters used to come. And my great grandmother worked in the pool hall. And one day, some one of the gangsters came in and said, I’m going to shoot this place up.
And my great grandmother said, okay, we’re out of this business. So they sold the pool hall, and my great grandfather’s cousin was a famous gangster, Meyer Lansky. And it was during the time of prohibition. And Meyer Lansky said, hey, we want to be able to get alcohol out and out into the community in a different way because it’s illegal to just sell alcohol. So he put my great grandfather into the milk business, and we used to take canisters of milk, and we would put alcohol into the canisters of milk and deliver those to speakeasies around New York City.
And after prohibition, it became a legitimate business. And it was legitimate during that time as well, because we also delivered milk to legitimate businesses. But my family was in the business until the mid 90s, distributing milk to bodegas markets in the Bronx, South Bronx.
John Corcoran: 03:07
When I was a kid, we got milk delivered first when I was living in suburban Massachusetts, where it was more of a thing, glass bottles and things like that. But then we moved to Not Too Far from you, Calabasas in Southern California, and we continued to do it. I think my mom found the one guy who continued to deliver milk, and we had a container on the front. She just loved the novelty of it. Like we didn’t even need to do it anymore.
But it was just so quaint and it was so cool. Like what? I guess once a week or something like these glass bottles would show up in a container outside your front door, and it was just kind of a fun thing to do.
Michael Richman: 03:41
Wouldn’t it be great if they were still milk delivery?
John Corcoran: 03:44
I honestly think that this guy, this one guy, it may be like 15 years ago, as recently as 15 years ago, my parents were still having it done. Maybe 20 years ago. It was like way beyond when anyone else was doing it. I mean, the guy must have had just like a few customers left and, you know, finally wrapped it up. So. All right. So that’s how your parents got into this. And so you have multiple generations who were in entrepreneurship who are entrepreneurs.
Michael Richman: 04:09
Yeah. And so actually, the way I got into my business that I owned and that I exited from is my father was working in the milk business, and he had all these cousins in the business and uncles and aunts. And he looked around and he said, I’m never going to be able to own this business with so many people and so many family members around. And my great uncle, who was running the business at the time, said to him, you’re right, you should go and start your own business. And so my father came to California and he met a lot of people, and he started telling them that he was looking for a business, and he was talking to an accountant.
And the accountant said, hey, I have these partners, these clients who are looking for a partner, and currently they have a commercial business, Hence, for the Academy Awards, big tents and they have a side business which is awnings, awnings for Mrs. Jones’s house and awnings for small restaurants and the dry cleaners and that type of thing. Would you be interested in this? So my dad went in there, worked for the company for a year, and ended up then purchasing and becoming partners with these two gentlemen. And what he realized was there wasn’t a real market to grow while doing awnings for Mrs. Jones’s house. So he tried to turn it around and make it a commercial business only, which is what he ended up doing. And so only awnings for restaurants, retail, big shopping centers, strip malls, those types of things.
John Corcoran: 05:40
So he did a couple of things that were challenging there. He moved from where he knew to a new place and then bought a new business, which was a part of a different business. And then and then also, I imagine these things happened over years, not all at once and then transitioned to a new market.
Michael Richman: 06:00
Exactly, exactly. And he was very successful doing that. And that really laid a great groundwork for what we ended up growing and building it into when I joined the company.
John Corcoran: 06:13
So you observed that what are your memories of being a kid, you know, and observing entrepreneurship, your parents and business or your grandparents in business? Did you observe this and think, oh, I want to be doing this one day? Did you observe it and think, oh man, that seems really stressful. I’m never going to do that.
Michael Richman: 06:31
I never, I never thought that I would join the family business. I thought I was going to play shortstop for the Yankees. But when I
John Corcoran: 06:38
But you grew up in LA. I was going to ask you about that. You’re a big Yankees fan. I am, but you grew up in LA. Why are you not a Dodgers fan?
Michael Richman: 06:44
I grew up when my dad was a big Yankees fan. So what were we rooting for? Yeah. What team were we rooting for? The Yankees.
Yeah. So it wasn’t. It wasn’t even a choice for me. So I always thought I was going to be playing shortstop for the Yankees, so I never thought that I would join the family business. But my dad used to take me on sales calls with him.
One specific memory that I remember about, and this is a lesson that I take about being aggressive, is Starbucks was just coming to Los Angeles and was just coming to California, and they were building a Starbucks, and it was near our house, and the Starbucks was fenced off. And my dad looked at this and said, this chain might be a chain that we can go after for business. And I don’t remember my age, but I couldn’t have been that old. And I remember him and I jumped the fence because it was a Saturday or Sunday and looked for the name of the general contractor and the architect and found that and ended up. My dad ended up cold calling them, and Starbucks became a long term client that was still a client the day we sold the business, we did every Starbucks in California, Alabama, Florida and Hawaii.
John Corcoran: 07:50
Wow. Wow. And all because you jumped that fence.
Michael Richman: 07:53
All because you jumped that fence.
John Corcoran: 07:54
It’s funny because now I have kids. You have kids. And sometimes if I do something that’s a little bit, you know, over the rules or outside of boundaries or against the law, I kind of think like, should I be doing this? But then you go tell this story about how this had this massive impact on you. Oh, yeah. That you guys trespassed. You hop over the fence and it has this massive impact on you for the rest of your life.
Michael Richman: 08:15
Huge. Yeah, this was before the internet, before you could just look up who’s the general contractor for Starbucks. You had to find it out somewhere, somehow.
John Corcoran: 08:24
Right? Right. So awning is such a specific niche to go after, you know, one, one very specific thing. It’s one of those businesses that you don’t always think about, but probably for that reason, maybe has less competition.
Michael Richman: 08:39
Yeah, it was a specific niche. And then we even tried to niche it down even more. We became the go to awning company for national restaurant chains, national retailers. We wanted to make their life easy. So one of my customers was Panda Express and we did every Panda Express in the entire nation.
And what I learned from working with Panda Express is that they have so many things that they’re worried about on a daily basis: the stoves, the ovens, the air conditioner, the toilets, all of these are things that they have to worry about constantly. Awnings is something they have to worry about every three years or four years. And so they wanted a vendor that didn’t have to think about it. They wanted a vendor where they could say, awnings, that’s taken care of. Let me focus on making sure that, you know, the cooktops working so we could make our orange, our famous orange chicken.
Right. And so we tried to become that vendor, which we were very successful in doing, that vendor that Panda Express said, we don’t have to worry. This awning company is going to take care of it. And that’s who we became.
John Corcoran: 09:42
And so and because I’m thinking like, how is it economical for them? Like if they have a location in Brooklyn that needs a new awning, they’re hiring a company out of Southern California. They got to fly out there and measure it. Or I mean, how does that work out?
Michael Richman: 09:55
So we would work with local people. So there are local people there who would measure the awning. We’d make it, ship it off to them and they’d install it for us. Or sometimes it was more economical for us to put our people on the airplane and send them out there to do it. It would just depend. But it would also allow them to know that there’s a certain quality standard to all their units. Yeah, that was really important as well.
John Corcoran: 10:18
By the way, I jumped over this, but I love to ask people about what they were like as a kid. And, you know, any lemonade stands, things like that that they did. And you worked at a Jewish deli in Encino and learned a lot about human nature and customer service from that experience. So tell me a little bit about that.
Michael Richman: 10:37
Yeah. I mean, there’s as, as, as a child of older Jewish people, there’s nothing more difficult than working in a Jewish deli and hearing complaints all day. Your food’s not hot enough. Yeah. You put a tomato on my sandwich and you weren’t supposed to.
And so you learn what it’s like to take care of the customer and make the customer happy. And that was one of the core values of our company, our awning company. But that was a lesson that I took to heart that, okay, I might think the matzo ball soup is warm. They don’t think the matzo ball soup is warm. I could debate them over and over again, or I could just take the matzo ball soup back, warm the matzo ball soup, and make sure that the matzo ball soup is to a temperature that they like and that that’s important and that’s something that’s important to them.
And that would make them so happy, the customers that keep coming back and we’d have regular customers. John Wooden, for instance, was in there every single week, the famous UCLA coach John Wooden. And so we had clients like that and Pete Rose and Wilt Chamberlain would come in and we had these people in our restaurant because we were in the restaurant because we took care of it. And it felt like a family. I call it our restaurant. I didn’t own it. I worked there, but it felt like this was home. Yeah, we made them. The customers feel that way.