When Mike Mosel, President of Optima Network Services, Inc., considers the fundamentals that make his business successful, he hears echoes of his father. In the retail world of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, before Wal-Mart and Target trampled the competition, Mike’s dad was a top-notch fixer for regional players Jamesway and Ames, rescuing struggling stores and opening others. This meant frequent moves for Mike’s family, with new schools and new friends, but it also exposed Mike to his father’s work—and remarkable talent—in the business world. His greatest skill, one that still echoes today through the management style Mike himself has crafted, was simplification.
“My father had a way of simplifying what makes a business successful,” Mike says. “He would distill a business model down to its fundamentals to see if they made sense. It’s pretty easy to watch the dollars in and dollars out, in terms of basic mechanics. At Optima today, I do the same thing. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutia. But my talent, like his, has always been seeing the bigger picture, and analyzing how the pieces fit together, both immediately and down the road. Sometimes that can be as simple as comparing our revenues to our costs, and sometimes it can be more than that.”
Growing up and seeing his father open new stores and turn around failing businesses, one after another, gave young Mike a macro-perspective on business. Witnessing a series of cross-sections that revealed individual stores at varying points in their lifecycles, including both successes and failures, contributed to Mike’s ability to see the big picture. These experiences together constituted an awakening—one of many—that would stick with him for life: the realization that the business world was his dream.
“When I was 11 or 12 years old,” Mike remembers, “I would go and work in my dad’s store. He would put me in the toy department or the sporting goods department and tell me to fix things up and get them in order. At that time I thought I wanted to be in retail business like him, and that idea later evolved into a larger dream of the business world.”
Eleven years old is an early age to develop a yearning for a future career in business, but by that age, Mike had developed a wisdom beyond his years. Two years earlier, his younger brother passed away after fighting a terminal illness, causing Mike to experience an entirely different kind of awakening.
“I had to mature fast to help care for my brother and even my parents,” he recalls. “I learned a lot about the dynamics within families. I learned a lot about doctors and health care, and it gave me a window to the way curve balls can come in life. I was only nine at the time, but I can see now the ways that I lived roles of support for my mom and dad. Because of my dad’s work schedule, I had to be there for my mom. And when she had another child, he was my brother, but I still felt a somewhat fatherly responsibility toward him.”
While moving around so much and seeing his father’s work instilled in Mike an appreciation for business fundamentals, rising to the unique challenges he faced after his brother’s death helped develop his other key ability: perceiving the complex dynamics of relationships among people and truly connecting with them. “Leadership demands empathy, and it requires an ability to really connect to people,” he remarks. “It’s natural for me to understand these relationships, and that makes me a better leader.”
The furnace of these trying times forged in Mike a great resourcefulness as well, which was strongly influenced by his mother’s industrial resilience. “She was a stay-at-home mom when I was younger, and she really taught me to make things work,” he remembers. “She taught me to be able to ask for help when help was truly needed, and to not be shy about it. She, too, taught me to see the whole playing field.”
The earliest awakening for Mike, however, would not be larger than life, like a dream to succeed in business, or as morally serious as truly connecting to another human being. It would come in the form of something far more mundane, and yet it would help drive the plot of Mike’s life nearly all the way to his entrepreneurial leap. It would be a game called golf. “I grew up playing golf with my father, starting at six years old,” he explains. “It was a way to connect with my father in a singular way. Growing up, I appreciated that he would bring me along to play, even though I was so young. This was my first real taste of adults, and of the value in connecting with people in business.”
Coupled with Mike’s first dream of business, in fact, was golf. From the beginning, Mike was a talented golfer, but while he played on his high school team and thought he could have competed at a higher level with the proper commitment and resources, the real draw for him was the business side. And later in college, when Mike encountered academic difficulty his junior year at George Mason University and had to take a semester off, the business of golf was there for him. “When I had the pleasure of a dean’s vacation in 1993, the spring of my junior year,” Mike explains, “I was either fortunate, or unfortunate, to work at the golf operations of Lansdowne, in Leesburg, Virginia.”
Mike worked at Lansdowne that spring, and then through the rest of his college career after returning to George Mason and graduating. His first job out of college, too, was as a golf pro. Golf was there for Mike, and Mike was passionate about the art and science of the game. It was a thread that had run through his whole life up to that point. It was a window into his father’s business relationships, and beyond that, a window into business itself. But Mike soon realized that he still had an important lesson to learn from golf: that, ultimately, it wasn’t going to be the thing that got him where he needed to be. Rather, he himself would be that thing.
“I had invested so much of myself into training to be a golf pro, and in working my way up from $7.50 an hour to $9.50 an hour, I felt like I was getting somewhere,” Mike explains. “But the reality is, I wasn’t. It took several frustrating experiences and a few revelations of my expected earning potential, but I eventually awakened to the fact that this path was never going to align with what I wanted to do in life.”
With that, Mike was done with pursuing his life as a golf pro. But in looking for his next step, he saw that golf had one more gift to give him. A guest of a member at one of the golf clubs Mike had worked at was the VP of sales at an internet startup. It was the late 1990s by then, and dot-coms were exploding, full steam ahead. “I knew I had the right skills for it,” Mike says. “I could talk to people, connect with them, and sell. I interviewed, and I was in.” In his first year, Mike made his first $100,000. “This was amazing to me,” he affirms.
But it wasn’t enough. After transitioning through a few more positions in the industry, Mike was ready to move on to something not only bigger, but greater. “It was 2002,” he recalls. “I wasn’t married yet. In fact, I had just started dating my wife. And it was at that point that I thought, I gotta take a chance. What fruit will this tree bear?”
From his time in the dot-com world, experiencing both the boom and bust, Mike was equipped with more than a little wisdom regarding the promise of the Internet. There was great potential, but also great risk. Still, he could see that wireless and mobile technology would be a major driver in the coming years, and would quite possibly shape the decades ahead. Mike saw his opportunity there, and he had his greatest asset at the ready: fundamentals.
“I had seen it at the internet startup companies where I was selling,” Mike recalls. “It all came back to the fundamental question: how does this company make money? I had seen a single startup practically light $30 million in venture capital on fire in just sixteen months. I look back and think, wow, all that cash spent on dot-com related companies that really had no business plan at all. How were they going to make that money count? The fundamentals of business went awry.”
With the fundamentals of success at the forefront of his mind, Mike and his two equal-share partners founded Optima Network Services in 2004. “If you’re young and you have any thoughts of starting a business, then don’t wait,” he says, reflecting back on that experience. “If you’re going to start a business, go at it 100 percent. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as owning your own business on the side. When I hear people say, “Oh, I do real estate on the side,’ that says to me that they still need to take that final leap that’s really going to make or break it.”
Thankfully, Mike’s leap made it. He and his partners built a company that would capitalize on the information technology boom, but without dealing in information, per se. Rather, Optima’s products and services transmit information through infrastructure development that keeps it material and concrete.
“Optima is a wireless infrastructure company that is self-performing,” Mike says. “We build the wireless infrastructure for cell carriers, wireless network operators, and state and local governments. We are in the construction business in a way, building cell towers, and really any component of a network. For Verizon, AT&T, and the like, we put people in the field to build the towers and install components, and our project managers, coordinators, and technicians handle the rest.”
In a business like Mike’s, his mastery of the fundamentals was destined to shine. And after seven years of growth and success, when Optima was acquired in 2011 by MasTec, an infrastructure construction conglomerate, Mike’s big picture intuitions helped spur a greater strategic vision for Optima and other MasTec properties.
Through these successes, Mike is still learning about himself as a leader. His most recent awakening also serves as a message that he would pass along to any young person entering the business world today. “Through an experience at a personal development workshop, I learned that although I was leading, I always had a kind of governor on,” he concedes. “I was playing it safe. I would push to the very edge of safety and succeed, but I would never put myself in a situation where I could try my hardest and possibly fail. This lesson changed not only the way I lead in business, but the way I connect with my wife and the way I’m a father to my kids.”
Perhaps the most inspiring theme that permeates Mike’s success is the fact that the awakenings upon which it’s built are self-perpetuating. One awakening inevitably paves the way for another, creating a lifetime of transformation that keeps him continually evolving into a better leader, a better business figure, a better family man, and a better person. “I have a sticker on my computer monitor with the words, What are you going to create?” he says. “So many people these days are asking, what are people going to give me, or what am I entitled to? Instead, they should be concentrating on what they’re going to create, and what kind of real value they can bring to the world, and they should be fearless about chasing that. They should be fearless about making mistakes. I learned to overcome my fear of making mistakes, and it’s opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.”
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