Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sat down with Mike Newman, CEO of Returnity Innovations, to examine one of the most persistent traps in scaling leadership: the gap between the story a CEO tells about the company and what the company is actually doing day to day.
This episode is for CEOs who are still chasing the vision they sold to investors while their operations are quietly straining under the weight of growth they did not fully build for.
Key Takeaways
- CEOs who cannot fact-check their own elevator pitch against ground-level reality will struggle to sustain growth, no matter how compelling the vision sounds in a room.
- Scaling from 1 million to 10 million units in a single year required doing less, not more: narrowing product focus and customer type simplified the growth curve enough to execute it.
- Ego is a scaling liability. CEOs who identify where their skills actually produce results, and hand off the rest, scale faster than those who try to hold everything.
- Strategic thinking time does not happen by accident. It must be protected deliberately, even if that means going for a walk with no phone, no podcast, and no agenda.
- Newman’s assessment at Returnity: AI will enable supply chain complexity that most businesses cannot manage today, and CEOs who build toward that shift now will be better positioned when the window opens.
CEOs Get Trapped by the Stories They Tell About Their Own Companies
Newman has spent nearly a decade leading Returnity’s shift from single-use packaging to circular logistics systems. He has scaled the company from replacing roughly 1 million boxes to over 10 million in a single year for global retail partners. Before that, as VP of Marketing at ReCellular, he drove 300% growth and helped secure $15 million in capital. He has also founded a company, raised a Series A, and landed products in Walmart and Target.
His core insight from all of it: the vision that gets you funded and gets your team excited is not the same thing as the operational reality that keeps your company alive. And confusing the two is how scaling CEOs get stuck.
“I try and embrace giving myself the like bizarro world opposite upside down pitch,” Newman told Gow. “We’re about evolving the way retailers move goods within their operations in a way that’s more effective and efficient and sustainable. And that is true. But the counter vision is like, well, we’re kind of sales reps for the factory that makes our packaging. That’s also kind of true, right? That’s a very less romantic vision. But I think it’s important to embrace both sides.”
The CEO who cannot hold both versions of the story at once — the one that inspires and the one that is brutally accurate — will have a hard time sustaining the bigger vision.
Why CEOs Must Narrow Before They Grow
The same trait that makes someone a strong startup CEO — the appetite for risk, the love of new ideas, the instinct to move fast — becomes a liability when the company needs to grow with discipline.
Newman calls it “the chasing shiny objects kind of syndrome that typically exists for a lot of CEOs.” The entrepreneurial energy that got the company to product-market fit is exactly what prevents the CEO from building the systems needed to scale past it.
“You can get too enamored with your idea and not necessarily comfortable with the sort of day-to-day operations and sort of like team building that is ultimately necessary for realizing the brilliance that of course your idea represents,” Newman said. “You have to balance that with just building the infrastructure to enable the growth.”
At Returnity, this showed up in a counterintuitive decision during the company’s fastest growth period. Rather than expanding the product line and chasing adjacent customers, Newman narrowed both. Fewer product types. Fewer customer segments. The result was a simpler operational model that could scale without breaking.
“The success came from limiting who and what we were trying to sell and having enough confidence that we had an alignment to our market and an understanding of where the best opportunities were,” he said. “Even though we are scaling the number of units and revenue is growing quickly by taking out a lot of the complications, it made it an easier growth curve to manage.”
This is the decision most scaling CEOs resist. Narrowing feels like leaving money on the table. But spreading across too many product types and too many customer segments fragments execution. It forces the team to manage too many variables at once, and the infrastructure never gets strong enough to hold the weight.
The decision rule: when you are scaling volume, cut complexity first. Bet on fewer numbers with more confidence rather than putting chips on everything and hoping.
How CEOs Create the Space to Think Strategically When Urgent Problems Fill Every Hour
Every CEO says they want to be more strategic. Very few protect the time to actually do it.
The inbox fills. The Slack messages pile up. There are problems that feel urgent, and there are people who need answers. For a CEO running a lean operation, the pull toward the operational is almost impossible to resist.
Newman’s fix was simple and deliberate. He started going for walks, and he stopped filling them.
“I need to find a place where I can literally force myself to not be on a screen and not be engaging other content and give myself some head space alone where I am thinking more about what’s working and what’s not,” he said. “And that was what worked for me.”
This is not a productivity hack. It is a structural decision about where the CEO’s attention belongs. The moment you fill a walk with a podcast or a phone call, you have converted thinking time back into task time. The walk becomes another form of inbox management.
The other part of Newman’s answer was harder: ego. Knowing where your skills actually produce results, and being honest about where others will be more effective, is uncomfortable. But it is what creates the room.
“Ego is a powerful driver for a lot of people, definitely in the startup world. And taking ego out of it is an uncomfortable thing to have to do sometimes,” he said. “But that’s been really important for me. My ability to kind of differentiate from that and then lean in harder on what I’ve been uniquely maybe successful with has definitely been a benefit.”
The practical version of this: you stop doing the work that someone else could do, even when you are good at it. You protect time for the decisions only you can make. And you build an honest picture of where the business actually stands, not the elevator pitch version.
How CEOs Should Think About AI in Operations and in Their Markets
Newman’s approach to AI inside Returnity is straightforward: make it unavoidable.
“We literally just put a standing AI meeting on the calendar with no set agenda,” he told Gow. “AI is here. It’s going to have impact. I need everybody on the team to be spending time thinking about it and experimenting with it. We need to be forcing ourselves to have it be central to all of our work because it will be.”
The most differentiated asset Returnity is building toward that future is data. Working across multiple major retailers gives the company a cross-retailer view of how goods move through operations. No single retailer has that view. Aggregated, it becomes a dataset that AI can extract real insight from — and a competitive position that Returnity is accumulating before the market understands its value.
Newman himself spends more than half an hour a day reading AI newsletters. He is clear-eyed that he is not a technical expert. But he treats staying informed as a leadership obligation, not a personal interest.
On the market side, Newman sees AI changing the economics of supply chain complexity. Most retail operations still rely heavily on manual processes, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge stored in people’s heads. AI will automate the complexity those systems cannot manage.
“It’s going to allow businesses to run complexity and supply chain that they can’t effectively accomplish today,” Newman said. “Complexity is an opportunity and a risk. Figuring out where and how those lines are going to get drawn is something we’re trying to spend a lot of time on.”
“Our experience is working with lots of different retailers and seeing all those interplays occur across a variety of retailers and then aggregating that together. It’s already been very interesting even before AI started to become part of the conversation,” Newman said.
The CEO question here is not “what is AI going to do to us?” It is “what capability are we building right now that will matter when AI changes how our market works?”
The Framework: What Mike Newman’s Scaling Decisions Actually Teach
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Fact-check your own elevator pitch | Hold the inspiring version and the ground-level reality version of your company story simultaneously. When they diverge, the ground-level version tells you what to fix. | Newman runs the “bizarro world opposite upside down pitch” on Returnity to surface the unglamorous operational truth alongside the investor narrative — the discipline that keeps vision drift from delaying operational fixes. |
| Narrow to scale | When scaling volume, cut product and customer complexity first. Fewer variables means stronger execution infrastructure. | Returnity scaled from 1M to 10M units in a single year by limiting who and what it sold to, not by expanding. |
| Know your actual skill edge | Identify where your work produces results others cannot replicate. Hand off everything else. Holding onto work because of ego fragments your attention and slows the team. | Newman’s honest audit of where his skills produced results — and where they did not — allowed him to lead Returnity, Packaging Reality, and a board seat simultaneously without fragmenting his attention across work others could do. |
| Protect empty time | Block time with no screen, no content, no calls. Strategic thinking requires genuine head space, not repurposed commutes. | Newman’s daily walks with no podcast and no phone calls are how he identified the narrowing decision that drove Returnity’s single-year unit leap — strategic clarity that required protected time to surface. |
| Build toward AI’s impact before it arrives | Identify what capability your company is uniquely building now that will matter when AI reshapes your market. Don’t wait for clarity to start building. | Newman put a standing AI meeting on the calendar with no agenda to force team engagement, while identifying Returnity’s cross-retailer operational data as the differentiated asset AI will eventually unlock. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You can get too enamored with your idea and not necessarily comfortable with the sort of day-to-day operations and sort of like team building that is ultimately necessary for realizing the brilliance that of course your idea represents.” — Mike Newman, CEO, Returnity Innovations
- “The success came from limiting who and what we were trying to sell and having enough confidence that we had an alignment to our market and an understanding of where the best opportunities were.” — Mike Newman, CEO, Returnity Innovations
- “Ego is a powerful driver for a lot of people, definitely in the startup world. And taking ego out of it is an uncomfortable thing to have to do sometimes.” — Mike Newman, CEO, Returnity Innovations
- “It’s going to allow businesses to run complexity and supply chain that they can’t effectively accomplish today. Complexity is an opportunity and a risk. Figuring out where and how those lines are going to get drawn is something we’re trying to spend a lot of time on.” — Mike Newman, CEO, Returnity Innovations
- “I need everybody on the team to be spending time thinking about it and experimenting with it. And we need to be talking about it. Like we need to be forcing ourselves to have it be central to all of our work because it will be.” — Mike Newman, CEO, Returnity Innovations
Frequently Asked Questions
When does a CEO’s focus on vision start to hurt the company’s ability to scale?
Vision becomes a liability when it replaces honest assessment of ground-level reality. Mike Newman, CEO of Returnity Innovations, argues that CEOs who cannot hold both the inspiring pitch and the unglamorous operational truth at once will struggle to sustain growth. The signal: if you find it uncomfortable to articulate the least romantic version of what your company actually does today, your vision has drifted too far from execution.
What should a scaling CEO do first when they feel stuck in day-to-day operations and cannot think strategically?
The first step is creating genuine head space, not repurposing existing time. Newman’s practice at Returnity is daily walks with no phone calls and no podcasts: time reserved entirely for thinking about what is working and what is not. Separately, he recommends an honest audit of where your skills produce results others cannot replicate, and handing off work that someone else could do, even if you are capable of doing it. Ego is the obstacle. Removing it creates the room.
How should a CEO approach AI when they are not a technical expert and the impact on their industry is still unclear?
Newman’s answer at Returnity: make engagement non-negotiable before the path is clear. He put a standing AI meeting on the calendar with no set agenda, requiring the whole team to think and experiment continuously. He spends over thirty minutes a day reading AI coverage. His strategic bet is on the cross-retailer operational data Returnity has accumulated, which he expects AI to turn into a differentiated asset as supply chain complexity increases. The decision is not to wait for clarity. It is to build the capability that will matter when clarity arrives.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
