About Matt Krall
Executive Coach · Former President & COO · Co-Founder of Elevate You
For more than three decades, I worked inside fast-growing organizations where the challenge was rarely just growth.
It was helping people, teams, and systems keep up with it.
How do you grow without adding unnecessary complexity? How do you become more efficient without simply asking people to work harder? How do you create more ownership, more clarity, and better decisions as the organization gets bigger?
Those questions shaped my career as an operator.
Today, they shape my work as an executive coach and co-founder of Elevate You.
The 90 days that changed how I understood leadership
In 1999, Capital One asked me to stand up a new internet servicing center in Seattle.
Hire 250 people. Build the operation. Launch in 90 days. On the other side of the country.
I approached it the way I approached a lot of things at that point in my career: work harder, stay close to everything, solve problems quickly, and try to be the person with the answer when something went wrong.
Then a teammate named Jim pulled me aside.
He reminded me that I had built a strong team around me — and that they were capable of carrying more of the load if I would let them.
That was the moment. Not a strategy moment. An identity moment.
I had believed carrying more made me more valuable.
But the more I tried to carry, the less room I created for capable people around me to step forward.
The Seattle operation launched fully staffed. Within twelve months, it became the highest-performing site in the network.
But the lesson that stayed with me was bigger than the result:
Leadership is a transfer of energy.
What is happening inside us doesn't stay inside us.
It shows up in our decisions. Our conversations. Our presence. How tightly we hold on. How much room we create for others.
And eventually, in what the people around us begin to experience.
That realization followed me throughout the rest of my operating career.
Most performance problems aren't potential problems.
Years later, I found language that helped me better understand something I had been seeing repeatedly.
W. Timothy Gallwey described performance with a deceptively simple equation:
Performance = Potential − Interference
In business, we spend enormous amounts of time adding potential.
Strategy. Talent. Technology. Capital. Knowledge. Process. Opportunity.
All of those things matter.
But over the course of my career, I came to see that most of the biggest performance gains didn't come from adding more potential. They came from reducing the interference already sitting between capable people and the results they were capable of producing.
Sometimes that interference looks like over-control.
Sometimes it is avoidance, defensiveness, exhaustion, unclear communication, fear of getting it wrong, or waiting for permission.
None of those things make someone a bad person or a weak teammate.
They make us human.
The question is whether we can see the pattern clearly enough to choose something different when it matters.
Growth made that lesson harder to ignore.
I spent much of my career inside organizations experiencing significant growth.
During periods when I served in senior operating roles, company earnings grew approximately:
Approximate company earnings growth during the periods I served in senior operating roles.
Those numbers mattered.
But what interested me most was what made the growth possible — and sustainable.
We were not simply trying to get bigger.
We were trying to become clearer, faster, more efficient, and more capable as we grew.
Could decisions move faster as the organization became larger?
Could people take greater ownership rather than become more dependent on a few individuals?
Could we improve efficiency without simply asking people to work harder?
Could we build systems and behaviors capable of holding up when the pressure increased?
That reinforced something I kept seeing:
Knowing what to do and being able to do it when it matters are not the same thing.
Under pressure, people often return to what has been practiced deeply enough to become automatic.
That applies to organizations.
It applies to teams.
And it applies to each of us.
That is what eventually led me here.
Executive coaching was not a departure from my operating career.
It was a continuation of it.
After decades of being accountable for business results, I became increasingly interested in the part of performance we often spend the least time developing:
the human being responsible for producing them.
I don't coach people to feel differently.
I coach them to notice the moment, get curious about what may be shaping their response, choose how they actually want to show up, and practice that choice until it becomes more available when pressure returns.
Because insight matters.
But insight alone doesn't change what happens in the next difficult conversation, consequential decision, tense meeting, or moment when the old pattern is easier than the chosen response.
You don't execute under pressure on inspiration. You execute on what's been installed.
Today, I do that work through private executive coaching and as co-founder of Elevate You, where we work more broadly to help individuals and organizations build behavioral capacity that can hold when it matters.
Selected Experience
- PREMIER Bankcard — President
- Credit One Bank — Chief Operating Officer
- Corpay / FLEETCOR — Senior Vice President, Operations
- GE Retail Consumer Finance — Marketing Execution Leader
- Capital One — Group Manager
- Elevate You — Co-Founder
- University of Notre Dame — Graduate
- Based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Recognition
Matt was featured in LEADERS — Shaping Organizational Transformation in 2026, a USA Leaders publication recognizing executives driving organizational change.
Where to go from here
Interested in private executive coaching?
Explore how I work with senior executives and operators around the patterns that can get in the way when the stakes are real.
Want a place to begin?
The Identity Audit is a 15-minute guided exercise designed to help you get more specific about the person you want to become, the pattern that keeps showing up, and what that pattern may be costing.
