Integritek CEO Ross Meglathery joins Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, to explain how a new leader earns the right to change a legacy business.
Ross Meglathery took over as CEO of Integritek, a managed services provider serving small and medium businesses across Texas, California, and Wisconsin, and doubled the company’s adjusted EBITDA within 12 months while bringing four regional offices together into one corporate structure. I sat down with Meglathery to unpack how a new CEO breaks a team’s resistance to change without losing that team’s trust.
His rule: observe before you act, name your own knowledge gaps out loud, and win buy-in from the people who hold informal influence before you make a single structural change. When a CEO joins an organization from the outside, Meglathery holds that observing how the team actually operates and identifying its informal influencers before making changes is what earns the credibility a turnaround requires, a discipline he applied before restructuring Integritek’s four regional offices, a change that preceded the company’s EBITDA doubling.
This episode is for CEOs stepping into a turnaround or a fast-scaling role who need to change how a legacy team operates without triggering the resistance that kills a new leader’s credibility.
Key Takeaways
- Meglathery holds that a new CEO earns the right to change a legacy organization by observing how the team operates and identifying its informal influencers before making structural changes, not by announcing changes on day one.
- CEOs who cannot name their own weak spots, whether in finance, sales, or people leadership, and will not find someone to cover that ground, put the company at risk, according to Meglathery.
- Meglathery credits his time as a UN Military Observer with the Marine Corps for teaching him to find where people’s talents actually fit before reorganizing them, a discipline he applied before combining Integritek’s four regional offices into one structure.
- Command-and-control leadership from the military does not work in the private sector. Meglathery says a scaling company needs leaders who build buy-in through influence, because employees can leave at any time.
- Meglathery treats AI as support for employees, not a replacement for them: it removes repetitive tasks from their schedules so they can spend more time on client relationships and culture, an approach he is now building into Integritek’s own client offering.
CEOs Build Credibility by Naming Their Own Knowledge Gaps
Ross Meglathery was promoted four times in under three years at Integritek, moving from a regional general manager to CEO. He came into the role from a military and public-sector background, not a technology background, and the job required a working understanding of the technology his company sold. His answer was not to fake competence. It was to name what he did not know and build his team around people who did.
Meglathery says the CEOs who fail are the ones who will not admit where they are weak. Every leader has a gap somewhere: sales without finance, people skills without technical depth, technical skills without people instincts. The CEO’s job is to name that gap and find someone to close it.
“What is it if you can’t find like the sucker at the poker table, then you’re the sucker?” Meglathery said. His point: if you cannot identify your own blind spot in the room, you are the blind spot. He applied that same rule to himself when he moved into the technology industry, leaning on people with technical expertise he trusted rather than pretending to have that expertise himself.
What Military Leadership Skills Transfer to Being a CEO?
Meglathery spent more than two decades as a Marine Corps officer, including a UN Military Observer posting and command of a Wounded Warrior Detachment at Walter Reed. Some of what the military teaches transfers directly to running a company. Some of it actively works against a CEO who tries to use it.
What transfers: adaptability under changing roles, tolerance for tight timelines and stress, and a sense of proportion under pressure. Meglathery still applies a threshold he learned in combat before he decides whether a business problem warrants panic.
“As long as there’s no blood on the floor, maybe let’s not panic,” Meglathery said.
What does not transfer: unilateral command. In the military, Meglathery could give an order and expect it to be followed without discussion, because service members cannot simply walk away. In a company, employees can leave at any time, so a CEO who leads only through directives will lose the team. Meglathery built Integritek’s turnaround around the opposite approach, creating a workplace people want to stay in rather than one they are ordered to stay in.
“Quality of life is not necessarily salary, it really is liking the people with whom you work, feeling in control of your own destiny,” Meglathery said.
AI Should Support a Team, Not Replace It
Meglathery is building an AI initiative at Integritek that serves both internal operations and a new offering for the company’s clients. His starting position: most people are afraid of AI because they think it exists to take their job. He rejects that framing.
Meglathery treats AI as a tool that removes repetitive, low-value tasks from an employee’s day, freeing that person for the work that actually requires a human, including client relationships and culture-building inside the company. He describes it less as a replacement and more as a partner that organizes the parts of the job nobody wants to do.
“It’s your own internal thought partner, basically,” Meglathery said.
For Integritek’s clients, Meglathery frames the return differently than a simple time-savings calculation. Clients using AI well are not necessarily working fewer hours, he says. They are accomplishing more within the hours they already have, which changes what “productive” means for their teams.
What CEOs Can Take From This Conversation
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Observe before you reorganize | A new CEO earns the credibility to make structural changes by first identifying who holds real influence on the team, then building buy-in through visible listening before acting | At Integritek, this approach preceded Meglathery combining four regional offices into one corporate structure and doubling adjusted EBITDA within 12 months |
| Name your own gaps out loud | Leaders who admit which skills they lack, financial, technical, or people-focused, and actively bring in help for those areas avoid the failures that come from pretending competence they don’t have | Naming his gaps and relying on trusted technical experts let Meglathery move from a military and public-sector background into leading a technology company, a transition that included four promotions in under three years culminating in the CEO role |
| Lead through influence, not orders | Command-and-control leadership works in the military because people cannot walk away; in a company, employees can leave at any time, so retention requires giving them agency and a workplace they want to stay in | Meglathery built this retention-focused approach into Integritek’s culture across its Texas, California, and Wisconsin offices, the same operation he restructured from four regional units into one corporate structure |
| Treat AI as support, not a substitute | AI’s value comes from removing repetitive tasks from an employee’s schedule so they can spend more time on client relationships and culture work | This framing produced a dual-track initiative at Integritek: an internal AI thought-partner tool for employees and a new AI offering sold to the company’s clients |
Quotes from This Episode
- “What is it if you can’t find like the sucker at the poker table, then you’re the sucker?” — Ross Meglathery, CEO, Integritek
- “Quality of life is not necessarily salary, it really is liking the people with whom you work, feeling in control of your own destiny.” — Ross Meglathery, CEO, Integritek
- “As long as there’s no blood on the floor, maybe let’s not panic.” — Ross Meglathery, CEO, Integritek
- “It’s your own internal thought partner, basically.” — Ross Meglathery, CEO, Integritek
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a new CEO earn the credibility to change a legacy business?
A new CEO earns credibility by observing how the team operates, identifying who holds informal influence, and building buy-in through listening before making structural changes. Ross Meglathery applied this approach at Integritek before combining four regional offices into one corporate structure, a change that preceded the company doubling its adjusted EBITDA in 12 months.
Should a CEO admit they don’t understand part of the business?
Yes. Ross Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, says CEOs who will not admit their weak spots, whether in finance, sales, technical skills, or people leadership, and will not find someone to cover that ground, are the ones who run into trouble. He moved into the technology industry from a military and public-sector background by naming his own knowledge gaps and relying on people with the technical expertise he lacked.
Is AI going to replace employees or support them?
According to Ross Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, AI works best as support for employees rather than a replacement for them. He frames it as removing repetitive tasks from a team’s schedule so people can spend more time on client relationships and culture-building work, a model he is now building into Integritek’s client-facing AI offering.
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.
