Scott Leese

Scott Leese is an Austin-based go-to-market advisor, six-time sales leader, three-time author, and co-host of What's Your Story? with Mike & Scott. He founded Scott Leese Consulting, The Surf & Sales Summit, and Milos Ventures. His firm currently states that he has advised more than 200 companies, been part of 12 companies with $1 billion-plus valuations, and 15 exits as an operator and sales advisor.

He grew up in Chico, a small Northern California city, in a household with no entrepreneurial theater. His father taught at Chico State; his mother was a nurse. He played every sport he could, then earned a two-sport scholarship to Dominican University in soccer and tennis, majoring in psychology and minoring in religious studies.

After undergrad he went to graduate school. He then became deathly ill and spent the better part of four years in the hospital. He has said he underwent nine surgeries, lost a major organ, battled opioid addiction, and lost everything he had built. Sales entered his life on the other side of that collapse. He was 27 — a late entry by industry standards — drawn to a profession where he could outwork and outperform and get paid for the scoreboard.

His operator pattern as a sales leader, six times, was to join an early-stage company with little or no revenue, figure out how to sell the product in the real market, codify the process into a playbook other people could run, hire and scale the team, drive the organization toward roughly $25 million in ARR — often in under three years — and leave so he could go back to the beginning and do it again. He has said he was never a corporate guy. Early-stage startups were the gym. Operator and early leadership context includes Reply! / OnePlanetOps, Main Street Hub, Outbound Engine, and Qualia, where he built sales capacity as the business scaled.

At Main Street Hub, the Austin platform that helped local businesses manage online presence and reviews, he was the key sales leader. GoDaddy acquired the company in 2018 for $125 million in cash plus up to $50 million in earnouts, a structure often cited as a roughly $175 million outcome.

He founded Scott Leese Consulting full time in October 2019 as a GTM consultancy for founding teams, covering strategy and messaging, sales playbooks, RevOps, recruiting and compensation, leadership coaching, and AI-enabled process design. Leadership at FiveStars has credited his direct, on-the-phones diagnostic style as part of the sales-efficiency story around the company's $317 million sale to SumUp. Brands frequently associated with his advisory work include Qualia, Salesloft, Gong, Lavender, Fundbox, Google, RigUp / WorkWise, Jasper, Outreach, HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Atmosphere, and ZenBusiness. He has appeared in expert networks such as PeakSpan Capital's roster for portfolio GTM work.

He is a three-time author. Addicted to the Process, endorsed by Jeffrey Gitomer, is a field manual for closing transactional sales with confidence and consistency. From Rep to Manager is a step-by-step guide for the jump into sales leadership. More Than a Number is a modern VP of Sales playbook. The trilogy maps the climb from rep to manager to VP.

In 2017 and 2018 he co-created Surf & Sales with collaborators including Richard Harris and Jeff Coleman, a deliberate alternative to standard sales conferences: serious GTM learning combined with actual surfing and community design. He co-hosts the Surf and Sales podcast and runs the Surf & Sales Summit. He has also been associated with GTM United community efforts and founded Milos Ventures as part of his founder portfolio.

With Mike Lindstrom he co-hosts What's Your Story? with Mike & Scott, produced by Highway 99 Media — in-studio conversations about the unglamorous middle of a life: injury, addiction, firing, divorce, and the rebuild. On the show he is the operator who will not let a guest hide behind vague inspiration. He lives in Austin, Texas, and has said Playa Grande, Costa Rica is where his heart lives.