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This show is a proof to me that my insistence on doing podcasts without written questions in hand or a script is the right way.

I agreed to this show - a talk with Michael Crowl, ceo of $4 billion Austin Texas based UFCU - because I’d heard he had been developing an interesting strategic plan.

At many credit unions there are strategic plans but often they aren’t interesting and often, too, nobody pays any attention gto them anyway.

Supposedly UFCU and Crowl, who has been at UFCU for 20 years and has been CEO since September 2022, were different.

Indeed they are.

But pretty quickly we veered off the plan and dove into how this guy had risen to the CEO job at a very big credit union. He grew up in government housing. He worked his way through the University of Houston. Then he went into investment banking, earned a good score and then - he went into teaching math at a high school.

A few years later he happened into a job at UFCU and fell in love with what a credit union is and could be for its members.

In the show I even ask the hardest question to throw at a CEO - when did you decide you wanted to be CEO and how did you get there? And Cowl gives a simple but honest answer.

I ask an even harder question: is this your last job?

It’s a great show - and I had no idea it would turn out this way. But that’s the magic of doing this work this way.

Listen up.

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