Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Everything I need to know about reporting I learned from Sandra and Kevin, Jennifer and Tim, Judy and Todd. They were my peers in my first newsroom, and then my reporters when I was bumped up to managing editor. We’d sit in the pit, as the open newsroom was called, and when I wasn’t talking to sources myself, I’d listen.
Sandra was all Southern charm. Jennifer was a huge flirt. Kevin was the smartest guy in town but never made anyone else feel dumb. Tim never left his desk from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and never took off his headset. I’d hear them work their sources, each in a unique way, and so figured out how to work them my way.
There’s a lot of talk about “authenticity” in business today, but this was a hands-on lesson. Whatever you’ve got, bring it. That’s how you get great stories, because people respond when you’re being yourself, and they’ll tell you juicy stuff. It was my first experience with the power of peers—or I should say, with the positive power of peers.
Peer groups for CEOs is the subject of this story, and the value of such groups is undeniable. The list of groups is long in the Twin Cities: The Collaborative, Young Entrepreneurs Organization, CEO Roundtable, Women Presidents Organization, Chief Executive Network, Inner Circle and on and on. Some have facilitators, some don’t. Some have strict agendas, some wing it. Some are large, some are meant to be small.
We talked to leaders in four organizations to give a sampling of what’s out there, why people join, and how to choose the right group for you. Although each group is different, they’d all agree on this point: no one understands what you’re going through better than a fellow CEO, and no one can teach you more than a person working it out, in real time, right alongside.
When three-peat entrepreneur David Harig set out to find a group of like-minded folks to join, he says he found two distinct camps, “neither of which I fit into.” One was the “who’s who crowd,” people whom he felt were already successful. “You can’t be a nobody from the bottom, and yet that’s usually where the best ideas come from,” he says.
The other option was “weekend boot camps, and that isn’t really a true sense of entrepreneurship either. It’s years and years” of work to build a business. “It’s a cadence.” Then he found Club Entrepreneur, which meets at the posh Minneapolis Club. “Club E really fit, because even though it’s this exclusive venue, anyone can go. Anybody can put their game face on and make something happen, literally every month,” he says.
Rick Brimacomb, the venture capitalist and master networker who founded the group six years ago, hosts a lunch once a month featuring a speaker and emphasizing “actionable information,” he says. He wants members to hear something at noon and put it in practice that same day. The cost is just $25 to cover lunch and parking and no additional fees.
At Sherpa Partners, the venture capital firm, in its heyday, Brimacomb and his partners had started informal CEO roundtables, where the leaders of Sherpa’s portfolio companies would get together and talk shop.
“It doesn’t make sense and it’s counterintuitive, but being an entrepreneur is lonely,” Brimacomb says. “You envision an entrepreneur having their fingers in a lot of things and being busy, and those are both true. But they also carry a lot of weight on their shoulders”—weight that can be lifted by sharing the burden.
Club E also hosts 20X20 sessions, where invited speakers tell their story to crowds that typically number about 150. Harig was one of those invited about 18 months ago, and he seized the moment to introduce Change Lane, his fourth company.
“My neighbor one night over beers said, ‘Why don’t they have an oil change service that comes to you, because they’re a pain in the ass.’ “ “I decided the way to attack it was, you can’t just get a van and start it. This has to be a massive brand,” Harig recalls.
“My wife and I invested all our money in the world’s most gorgeous napkin,” the prototype for a tricked-out glass semi that pulls up to a person’s house, zooms their car into the truck and changes their oil. Since that talk at Club E, Harig is closing on more than $3 million in Series A investment and is set to launch this September.
Will that happen to everyone who joins Club E, or any other peer group? There’s no guarantee, but it shows what can happen when you bring your game face.
Rick Brimacomb, Club Entrepreneur: 612.803.3169; ri**@*******mb.com; www.clube.com
Carl Moe didn’t coin the term Chief Revenue Officer or CRO, but he helped popularize it in his book, “Chief Revenue Officer: A B2B Success Guide.” Aliases, as he puts it, include CEO, president, owner, COO, EVP and so on. But they all share one thing: They are responsible for generating the revenue to fund the business, make a profit and grow the company.
In other words: Who’s going to get the money in the door? He wrote the book after his wife “fired” him from retirement, he says, and the idea caught on so now he’s facilitating CRO Roundtables first in Bloomington, and now adding Maple Grove and Oakdale, to teach the ideas.
Each group has 14 non-competing members who meet one morning month for 10 months, starting at 7:30 and concluding at 10:30. In July and December, when the group doesn’t meet, Moe conducts one-on-one reviews with members.
It costs $3,000 a year “all in,” he says, and his members know what they do is imperative. “If you’re running a business, in most decisions you make you have options. When it comes to revenue, there are no options.”
For initiation, members are asked to describe their company’s differentiating value, and they quickly learn to hone their message.
He recalls one attendee whose company made barcode systems. “This individual said, ‘we are the word’s global premier maximized efficient hardware provider’…he droned on and on, and everybody in the audience went on screen-saver,” Moe says.
The man sat down and conceded he hadn’t done very well. When the group finished helping him, Moe says, “his 20-second infomercial was: We help global manufacturing companies eliminate lost inventory.” The message was simple and direct, and focused not on “what we do in my world,” meaning the salesperson’s, but rather, “what we do in the prospect’s world.”
Moe has much more to teach, including how to create a “bankable forecast,” and he enjoys the education. The common thread in his groups’ membership is “individuals that see their business as having additional opportunity, upside growth opportunity, and they’re there to organize the best way to expand, grow and ultimately harvest those opportunities,” he says.
Carl Moe, CRO Roundtable: 952.232.6720; cm**@********ss.com; www.croroundtable.com
CEOs who enjoy one-to-one coaching find it every month in Vistage, a group founded as TEC in 1957 that today has more than 17,000 members worldwide.
The coaching is delivered by each group’s chair to address whatever’s top of mind, and to hold members accountable.
Vistage groups also meet once a month for an all-day session with all the members, usually numbering 14 to 16, and often featuring a guest speaker and workshop.
And they have access through a web portal to white papers, legal documents and even a health network in times of crisis, among many other resources. The cost for the CEO group, the highest level, is about $14,000 for a year, with the price descending for a key executive group and a trusted adviser group.
“We look for people that are committed to growth, and with growth comes change and challenges,” says Don Kielley, who chairs a group of CEOs in the Twin Cities.
A former General Electric executive and the former CEO of Wilson Learning, Kielley has no problem taking calls day and night from his members. “We try to connect you with an experience, with someone who’s gone through this, and shorten the learning curve.”
He says just about anything can and does come up for discussion in a Vistage group, or in the one-on-one sessions, from divorce to drugs to acquisitions to boardroom battles. He relates one CEO whose board chairman insisted his son be put to work in the company—and the son was incompetent. The group helped walk him through his options.
“People are lonely at the top. They don’t have people they can turn to they can trust,” Kielley says. “Most of the people they talk to have something to sell them.” A Vistage group, he believes, can help CEOs get through “the dicey stuff. The simple stuff you can walk down the hall and get the answer.”
Don Kielley, Vistage International: 952.471.7064; do*********@**********ir.com; www.vistage.com
Bill Mills runs peer sessions called Executive Group, which meet each month for the business owner or hired CEO or president. “We build that around the million-dollar agenda,” he explains. “They have to bring a million-dollar problem that forces us into a strategic, conceptual discussion.”
But the work includes more than the person at the top. He also hosts a business academy once a month, inviting as many as 20 to 25 companies at a time to dig into topics in sessions he calls sales-busting or marketing-busting or strategy-busting. “We lead them through a classic strategic process and teach them the thinking skills or the questioning skills that they need to learn,” Mills says.
Why does he add the group approach? “They start to realize they can’t really do it alone,” he says about his CEOs. “You have to have a team.”
The peer groups have 10 to 12 members from non-competing industries, and it costs $9,900 a year for a gold membership. Companies that need more help can choose the platinum level for $16,500, which includes quarterly sessions led by Mills “to make sure they’re executing their strategy.”
Mills likens each monthly peer group meeting to a million-dollar case study, and he has plenty of success stories from his members. He recalls one member, Jim Becker of Becker Arena Products, who was complaining one day about the ridiculously low margins he got on servicing ice-arena products—a mere 3 percent—but he’d get 40 percent or more if he sold a used machine to someone.
The light bulb went on, helped by the group of CEOs, and today he’s started a website that’s the eBay of used ice resurfacing equipment. “A third of his bottom line is now from that business,” and the site only takes one person to run, Mills explains.
A “recovering structural engineer,” as he calls himself, Mills takes pleasure in helping CEOs get to those eureka moments, and bringing their entire teams along. “I have this funny view of the world that everything can be described with a formula,” he says.
Bill Mills, Executive Group: 763.477.5599; bi**@**************up.com; www.mnexecutivegroup.com
Cannabis-based products have been increasingly available in Minnesota over the last six years. The opportunities in that space became even more prominent last year when the state legislature voted to become the 23rd state to legalize adult recreational use of marijuana for Minnesotans over 21.
When Super Bowl LII was played at U.S. Bank Stadium in February 2018, Alex Tittle didn’t play a down on the field, but he had more than three-years of impact on the experience.
Unemployment in Minnesota sits below 3 percent. Labor market participation is high. Airport traffic counts across the country are approaching and even surpassing pre-pandemic levels, so consumers are still spending money. Consumer confidence, reportedly spurred by the strong labor market, also seems at least cautiously on the rise.
