What did Mike Millett found, lead, design and author?

Five verbs, five different tests

Founded. The entity would not exist without him and he was there at the start. It appears once: Mike Millett founded Digilu in 1999. The strongest verb here, and the easiest to disprove, which is why it is safe.

Led. He held the role accountable for an outcome other people also worked on. As VP of Marketing at Stratus Building Solutions he led the four-year repositioning that renamed the company Stratus Clean in April 2026. Led is a claim about a room rather than a file, so it is anchored to a title and dates, both inside the sentence.

Designed. He made the artifact himself: the Stratus Clean icon, the lettering and the taglines, drawn in Adobe Illustrator. The page carrying that credit says in the same paragraph that a professional designer refined the execution afterward.

Authored. The words are his and there is a document to open, at an address that is not this one: the Adaptive Brand Management foundations paper.

Contributed to. The result belongs to an organization. Number one on Entrepreneur’s Fastest-Growing Franchise list, four years running from 2023 to 2026, was won by Stratus Building Solutions while he was its VP of Marketing. Nobody wins a franchise ranking personally.

The two questions a verb has to survive

Would the other party write it this way?

Read the credit as the employer, the designer or the co-author would read it. If any of them would strike a word, that word is doing work the facts are not.

Does it survive being quoted alone?

A qualifier in a footnote or the next paragraph is dropped the first time the credit is quoted, so the qualifier sits inside the sentence it qualifies.

What the wording cannot do

It cannot control a retelling. A summary saying he rebranded a cleaning company has flattened four years of other people’s work into one person, and no wording prevents that.

Two of the five have no artifact. Designed and authored point at a thing: a file, a document, a byline. Founded points at a registration and a year. Led and contributed to point only at a title, so the weakest evidence sits under the two verbs a reader is most likely to doubt.

Naming the designer who refined the identity makes the credit smaller. It stays.

Related

The credits refused outright rather than reworded: what this site does not claim.

Four of the five verbs appear in one story on StratusClean.

For why none of these sentences are first person, see who writes this site.

Common questions about how credits are worded