Todd Milner almost kept driving. It was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon in western Kansas, he had a two-hour drive home, and he was done. Something told him to pull a U-turn into one more hospital parking lot. That stop turned into a proposal, a signed deal, and a qualifying push into President's Club. Todd, now a business development manager at CBIZ and the founder of a new coaching practice called the M5 Movement, sat down with Sam to trace a 40-year sales career built on the same quiet idea: do the one more thing, and serve the person in front of you.
What You'll Hear
- How Todd's first job out of K-State in 1988 landed him in finance and insurance at car dealerships, and what that taught him about people
- Selling the first two Motorola flip phones in the country to the founders of Cerner back when brick phones and bag phones were the norm
- The Friday afternoon in western Kansas where one more cold stop became a President's Club deal
- A $3 million computer associates security sale signed on Christmas Eve in an ice storm, and the attorney general phone call that followed two weeks later
- Why Todd dislikes the word sales and prefers to frame his role as solving problems and supporting other people's wins
- What the Father's Club, C-Suite for Christ, and Five Capitals have in common in how Todd spends his evenings and weekends
- The five M's behind the M5 Movement coaching practice: mindset, mechanics, motivation, momentum, and mission
- Why a men's group that has met every Monday night since 2014 may be the most important thing he does all week
A small town start and a K-State degree that took five years
Todd grew up in a small town in central Kansas, graduating class of 62, total high school of 260. His parents split early, his mom worked three jobs, and by 11 or 12 he was largely running his own life alongside a younger brother. The community filled in the gaps. Grandparents on a nearby farm gave him work, structure, and a set of adult conversations that shaped how he carried himself later.
By 15 or 16 he did not have a career plan. He had one clear goal: get out of small town Kansas. K-State in the early 80s was the vehicle. He enrolled in computer science because PCs were suddenly everywhere, lasted one semester of punch cards and Cobol, and switched to a marketing and management degree inside the business college. It took him a little over five years to finish.
He is frank about his GPA. Below a 3.0 in 1988, your first post-graduation project was building a folder of rejection letters while classmates signed with Koch Industries and Cargill. What Todd had instead was a work history that stretched back to age 12 and a confidence that he could hustle. That is the version of himself that walked into his first real job.
Car dealerships, brick phones, and a quick lesson in relational sales
The first job was finance and insurance at car dealerships, placed through a national company that rotated new hires through the country. The training taught him more about people than any classroom had. He spent nearly two years in Wichita walking buyers through paperwork at the end of an eight-hour dealership day, in an era before digital signatures, online pricing, or any of the tools that now compress the process.
From there he jumped into an even newer industry. In the early 90s he joined McCaw Cellular One as a business development rep, working a zip code territory in Kansas City. This was bag phones, car phones, and brick phones. At one point his book of business included both the Chiefs and the Royals. Baseball players showed up with almost nothing after years in the minors. Football players walked in with multi-million dollar rookie contracts. Todd had to help both.
He also happened to sell the first two Motorola flip phones, called the MicroTAC, in the entire country. The buyers were Neil Patterson and Cliff Illig, the founders of Cerner, now part of Oracle. Todd still remembers the near-weekly calls about how bad the service was. What he learned from that territory was simple. The transactional mindset only gets you through one sale. The relational one gets you the next ten.
Healthcare, a Ford Taurus wagon, and the one more stop
After cellular, Todd moved into healthcare diagnostics with Abbott Laboratories. He covered central and western Kansas out of Wichita, putting 4,000 to 5,000 miles a month on a Ford Taurus station wagon with a gurney in the back full of equipment. His clients were hospitals, clinics, and labs in towns most people on a highway would drive straight through.
This is where his favorite story lives. A Friday at 3:30 in the afternoon, about two and a half hours from home, he was rolling past the edge of a small western Kansas town when something told him to turn around. He pulled into the hospital, asked for the lab director, and got waved back into a room where the lab director, the COO, and the CFO were wrapping up a meeting about replacing a wave of diagnostic equipment.
Two weeks later he had a signed proposal. It was one of the largest equipment deals he booked that year. It pushed him into President's Club and eventually into a promotion. His takeaway is the line he now repeats to his own kids. When you think you are done, when you are tired, when you just do not feel like doing the one more thing, do it anyway. More times than not, the one more thing is where the reward is hiding.
A Christmas Eve ice storm, a $3 million deal, and a call from the New York AG
Todd left Abbott for a regional vice president role at Computer Associates around the turn of the millennium. The company asked him to open a Tulsa office and clean up a dormant oil and gas account that had bought a pile of software years earlier and never turned it on. Todd set a meeting expecting a one-on-one. Instead he walked into a boardroom with the CIO and eight VPs and directors who spent the entire session firing hard questions at him.
He took notes, answered what he could, and promised honest answers on the rest within a week or two. Three weeks later he was back with those answers, and the account started buying. It snowballed into what he says became one of the largest security deals in Computer Associates history, roughly $3 million, against a quota that was about half that. The paperwork got signed on December 31 in an ice storm, with a 90-day-new rep driving four wheel drive across the state to deliver it.
Two weeks later the New York attorney general's office called. A group of Computer Associates executives was being prosecuted for recognizing revenue on deals that had been booked but not shipped. Todd's deal was one of them. He was told to fly to New York for a deposition, called a lawyer, confirmed he was a witness and not a target, and drove to the airport. On the way, the AG's office called back. The executives had pled out. Several ended up in orange jumpsuits. Todd drove home.
Father's Club, C-Suite for Christ, and the M5 Movement
Today Todd's paid role is business development manager for CBIZ in the Kansas City market, working with CFOs, COOs, and CIOs on tax, audit, accounting, advisory, benefits, and insurance. He says the widget is interchangeable. The job is still the same one he learned in a station wagon. Figure out the other side's win and help them get there.
Outside of CBIZ, he runs three parallel missions. Father's Club is the organization he joined in 2018 that now has more than 40 chapters across the Midwest getting dads engaged in their kids' schools. He served eight years on the board and led mental wellness workshops for dads. C-Suite for Christ is newer, launched in March, where he is the Kansas City market president helping executives lead more boldly from their faith.
The third piece is his coaching practice. Todd earned a coaching certification through Five Capitals and built his own framework on top of it called the M5 Movement. The five M's are mindset, mechanics, motivation, momentum, and mission. His argument is that corporate America has largely walked away from developing emerging leaders with real time and attention, leaving a quarterly webinar in place of actual coaching. Todd wants to fill that gap one person at a time, and he wants to do it as his next career, not just a retirement project.
Why a coach and a tribe are not optional
The conversation lands on something Todd says men are particularly bad at. Community. He has met every Monday night since 2014 with the same group of 17 guys. Football interrupts the schedule during Chiefs games. Life interrupts it too, births, deaths, cancer, teenagers, divorces, job losses. The trust, transparency, and accountability inside that group is something he says most men simply do not build, and most of the world does not know how to build anymore.
He draws a direct line from that tribe to his coaching work. His regret is that he did not engage a coach in his early 30s or 40s, even a light cadence of once a quarter. He compares it to physical health. We do not wait for an ER visit to go to the doctor. We book a checkup. Mental and emotional health deserves the same rhythm, and so does leadership.
Sam pushes on the intentionality point. People say they do not have time, when what they really mean is the thing is not on their priority list. Todd's response is that this is exactly what a coach helps you sort out. Not because the coach has the answers, but because the conversation forces you to decide what actually deserves your hours. His two giants on that front are his grandfather, who taught him how to shake a hand and shoot a gun and look an adult in the eye, and his grandmother, who built the tree house and took him to church. The pithy line he keeps coming back to is one he copied into his email signature years ago. Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business, how you leave others feeling becomes your trademark.
About Todd Milner
Todd Milner is a Kansas City business development manager at CBIZ, where he works with CFOs, COOs, and CIOs on tax, audit, accounting, advisory, benefits, and insurance. Outside of CBIZ he serves as Kansas City market president for C-Suite for Christ, spent eight years on the board of Father's Club, and runs a coaching practice called the M5 Movement built on a Five Capitals certification. He is a K-State graduate and a single dad to three adult children.