Michael J. Kadair Jr.
Michael J. Kadair Jr. was born in New Orleans, raised across Louisiana, and built his career in Ohio with stints on the West Coast along the way. He came into the financial services and mortgage business in 1994 and has been in it ever since, not in theory but in practice, not from the sidelines but from the floor.
By the time he was 33, Mike had become a Regional Vice President at the nation's largest mortgage lender. One of the youngest in the company to hold that role. He did not get there by being the loudest in the room or the most polished on the phone. He got there by being real with people when the easier thing would have been to perform.
REAL Sells is not the book Mike was trained to write. It is the book he lived. Every framework in these pages came from a real conversation, a real mistake, or a real moment where something clicked that no training program had ever explained. The gazebo. The custodian. The silence on the John call. Those stories are his because they happened to him, and they shaped how he has shown up in every meaningful professional relationship since.
Mike is a sales leader, a speaker, a coach, and a mentor. He works with individual producers and sales organizations who are ready to trade tactics for a philosophy that actually compounds over time. He speaks on stages about what it means to stay human in a profession that keeps trying to automate the human out of the equation.
He is also a husband and a father. Those two roles are listed last here, but they are first in his life. The values that built his career are the same ones he brings home. That is not something he figured out easily. It is something he worked at, the same way he worked at everything else in this book. One honest choice at a time.
- · Based in the Northeast US
- · Speaks nationally
- · Dad, mentor, coffee snob
- · Fly-fishing on Sundays
Two minutes on why he wrote the book.
A short intro straight from Mike — who this work is for, what he believes about selling, and the moment that made him sit down and write it all out.
A philosophy earned in the field, not written in a classroom.
Mike still remembers the moment he realized the industry was drifting. A regional VP, three states away, was managing his team by email — rolling out targets and pep talks he could have sent to any name on any spreadsheet. The reps who mattered noticed first. The customers noticed second. The numbers noticed third.
That was the beginning of what became REAL Sells. Not a slogan. A working theory, tested against thirty years of financial services sales — from the phones, to the leaderboard, to leading teams through every hiring boom and market crash the industry could throw at him.
He kept finding the same pattern. The sellers who treated people like people — who followed up when there was nothing to gain, who said “this isn’t right for you” when it wasn’t — built careers that compounded. The ones who chased the trick of the quarter cycled through the industry and out of it.
Mike learned the philosophy first from his father, a lifelong salesman who told him, early and often, that the money followed the work and the work was the relationship — never the other way around. That sentence outlasted every sales program Mike ever sat through.
Today he writes, speaks, trains, and coaches full time. His audience is the sales professional who has always sold this way and now feels slightly guilty about it — as if being human is a productivity leak. His message is that they’ve been right the whole time, and the era is finally about to prove it.
REAL Sells is the book. The training, the coaching, and the keynotes are how the philosophy walks into a room and stays there.
Three decades, one thesis.
- 1994
First day on the phones
Financial services, entry-level. Learns fast that scripts close nothing.
- 1999
Top of the leaderboard
Builds a book by refusing to hang up on people who weren't ready — and calling back when they were.
- 2006
First team to lead
Turns a middle-of-the-pack team into a top quartile by coaching one seller at a time.
- 2015
The framework crystallizes
After a decade of leading teams, names what the top reps have in common: Relatable, Empathetic, Authentic, Loyal.
- 2022
Goes independent
Leaves corporate to write, speak, and train full time.
- 2026
REAL Sells hits the shelf
The book. The case. The manual for staying human in the AI era.
A short credo, thirty years in the writing.
- Sales is one of the most human jobs there is — treat it that way.
- The money follows the work. The work is the relationship.
- Automation is a tool, not a strategy.
- The best follow-up is the one everyone else skips.
- “This isn’t right for you” is the most trust-building sentence in the profession.
- You cannot fake being real — but you can practice it on purpose.
"It's not about the income. It's about the outcome of the people I influence."
Mike’s father sold with that sentence pinned to the front of his mind for forty years. Mike sold with it for thirty more. And the framework in REAL Sells is, in the end, that sentence extended into a method — Relatable, Empathetic, Authentic, Loyal — so the next generation of sellers doesn’t have to relearn it the slow way.
The people who read the book, who sit in the training, who work with Mike one-on-one — they leave with the same conviction he’s carried his whole career: sales, done right, is one of the most human jobs there is.
Years in financial services sales
Salespeople trained and coached
One philosophy. A lifetime in the making.