Purpose and Focus
We’re here because we truly understand and want to help you on your CEO journey – the extreme highs and gut-wrenching lows, the pitfalls, key patterns you need to recognize, a thirst for solutions to your hardest challenges and a strong desire to be the best you can be. We know that succeeding as an investor-backed, high-tech, high-growth CEO is uniquely stressful. Not only can it be lonely at the top, but it can be hard to find trusted unvarnished advice and empathy since the interests of your investors, board and team members and other stakeholders – who are genuinely trying to be helpful – might not be strictly aligned with yours. Therefore, a trusted independent peer sounding board, where you can go really deep on the nuances of your issues, is a necessary part of your advisory circle.
Our High-Growth CEO Forums(R) are a proven way to solve this problem. We share state-of-the art best practices and every CEO gets pragmatic individualized advice on their toughest CEO problems and opportunities. We call these “Member Challenges.” It’s incredibly rewarding and exhilarating for those CEOs who commit to learn and improve. Every CEO in our Peer Forums signs a strict confidentiality agreement protecting all the information they share. Therefore, the content in this blog series will be anonymized nuggets from the real growth problems we work together to solve. To paraphrase the Hamilton song we’re going to take you “inside the room where it happens.”
Some Topics
In future blogs, we’ll share learnings, ideas, tips to apply, extracted and synthesized from our High-Growth CEO forums. The learning draws on over 20 years capturing top-of-mind challenges and solutions from some of the most capable, driven, high-growth CEOs working to build and scale incredible companies. Here are five typical topics CEOs have chosen to discuss in detail with their trusted peers:
- What are the best strategies & techniques to build a great Board relationship: setting expectations, avoiding surprises and pitfalls, scenario-planning, framing issues correctly to have a valuable dialogue, building mutual trust and transparency?
- How to hire and retain great, engaged, passionate employees — especially in this entirely new work paradigm?
- How do I evolve my team? Do I need a …CMO? A new CTO? A really strategic VP of Product? What about co-founders? Is it time to pull the trigger on a COO to leverage me or is that not addressing my real problem operating the company? When, Why and How?
- How to work through imposter syndrome? How to know what to change about my CEO role and when?
- Fundraising advice in the current post-froth climate? How to avoid energy-sucking traps? Should I get a Secondary? Help me think through my ideal investor profile?
We trust this will be helpful on your CEO journey and invite your comments and thoughts!