Mike Chu

Who is Mike Chu

Mike Chu is a business coach who has actually done the thing he coaches. He is a five-time seven-figure CEO based in Austin, and his pitch to the room is not theory. He built companies past a million dollars more than once, and now he helps other founders get there with less chaos and more of their own time back.

He grew up in New Jersey, the eldest son of two teachers, and won more than ten national karate titles before he was done competing. He went to George Washington University, graduating cum laude in 2006 with a degree in sports event management and marketing. None of that is a business pedigree, which is rather the point.

Champion Development

He is the founder and CEO of Champion Development, a coaching and support company for coaches, fitness professionals, and entrepreneurs. It has been named to the Inc. 5000, the list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country, which is a real outside signal on a coaching business rather than a self-awarded one.

The masterminds

Chu runs two programs under the company, Passion to Profits and 7 Figure CEO. Both are built for people who are good at their craft but stuck on the business side, and both are aimed at the same outcome: adding meaningful profit and actual time freedom, not just more top-line revenue that the founder never sees.

Where he came from

He started selling Cutco knives in college and stayed eleven years. That is the part worth pausing on. Direct sales is the least glamorous training there is and one of the most honest, because nobody buys out of politeness twice. He moved from selling into recruiting, training and running teams, made the company's Hall of Fame in 2013, and put more than $20 million of product out the door before leaving in 2014.

What he took from it was not sales technique. It was that he preferred developing people to selling anything.

People join organizations and join companies, but they quit people.

In 2016 he started the Health and Wealth Academy and took it past $200,000 a month inside eighteen months on organic growth alone. The number he is prouder of is retention: clients who stay three or four years in an industry where three or four months is normal. He beta-tested what became Passion to Profits on ten clients before selling it to anyone else. Champion Development followed in 2018.

The track record

The outside signal is the Inc. 5000, and he has not appeared on it once. Champion Development has made the list five years running, ranking 936th in 2021, then 548th nationally and 34th in the Southwest in 2022, 763rd in 2023, 1,012th in 2024 and 2,026th in 2025. That list measures growth rate, not size, and staying on it five years in a row is harder than landing on it once.

His own figures for the coaching side, which are his to claim rather than a third party's, put it at more than a thousand coaches helped to replace a full-time income and north of $100 million in client sales. He also still keeps a personal health coaching practice running alongside the business coaching, which most people at his level quietly drop.

People won't follow what you tell them to do. They'll follow what they see you do.

His pitch for why anyone hires a coach at all is the least romantic version available, which is probably why it lands.

Either you take ten years and try and figure it out on your own, or you could invest dollars to save time and figure that out.

His talk at the room

Mike sat down with Connor Cullip at the Network of Directors room in Austin on August 21, 2026, for an hour on growing a business without more leads: putting a real number on retention, fixing what already works, and clearing the belief that caps the number. It ended with a live coaching session for Matt Lupi of Simple Plan Austin, and it is on film. You can watch the full talk, read the writeup, and get the takeaways on his event page.

Watch his talk from the room