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Karl Maier founded Abunden to help internal and external business advisors be even more effective in helping their clients to grow and succeed. Abunden is the third software company Karl has co-founded.

In his various roles over the past three decades, he has been part of the leadership team in six established companies which have at least doubled sales in two years. Leveraging his successes, Karl developed the Abunden Framework\\xa9 and led the development of the practical management tools in the Abunden Tools App. These online SaaS (Software as a Service) tools build the management structure for companies to grow and succeed.

Karl received both his MBA and BA from Rice University in Houston. has been the chairperson for the Rice University Business Network and the Houston District Export Council as well as a board member for TiE Houston.

Most passionate about

• I'm working to help make coaching better and using technology tools to do that.
• I\\u2019m working on tools to help coaches and business advisors be even better. I see the path forward as adding even more tools and technology to improve coaching and make it more of a 24/7 type of experience for people.

Karl\\u2019s career and story

• I started reading The Wall Street Journal and The Economics. I went to university and studied economics, got my MBA, and went into consulting. Over the years, I've been involved with information systems, computer systems. I've done finance, accounting, processes, many different things. Over the decades, I've put together what I\\u2019ve seen, the keys to growing companies. To me, it\\u2019s the most fundamental.
• Early in my career, I was part of a large consulting organization. I was part of a team doing projects. We grew from 23 people to over 350 people in about 30 months.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The customer is critical. One of my mentors said, many years ago, that nothing happens until you sell something. So, obviously, that starts with the customer.
• I think the principal is to talk to a number of different potential customers and really understand what their problem is. Can you solve it in a way that they're willing to pay for? That's the most fundamental part of starting a business, in my mind.
• Then you have the option to be Hands-on all the pieces of the company, but that limits your growth, or are you willing to transform and delegate it to other people to grow the company? I think that\\u2019s a very fundamental choice, one that I would encourage people to reflect on and decide which way they really want to go.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• My first software startup was during the dot-com boom. Everybody said, \\u201cTechnology is going to solve all the problems.\\u201d I think I got sucked into that and I really didn't understand my customers.
• I was ignoring how the products were actually bought and sold. In the end, the company failed because of that. So that's a lesson. We remember failures better than our wins, I think.

Biggest success with customers

• We had a service company in the health safety industry. I was part of the C-suite management team. And we really did build a team. There was great communication and connection. People respected each other. They worked hard and were able to really understand what our customer's problem was.
• High-value people were getting malaria and getting sick. We were able to come in and cut their malaria rate in half the first year and then half again the second year. So we clearly were solving their problem. We were able to come in and solve a problem, do it effectively.
• We were able to grow the company. We grew it in four years by a factor of seven.

Karl\\u2019s recommendation of a..."