Asking for Help
A number of years ago, I heard that Donald Keough, the former COO of Coca Cola, said that the greatest determinant of success was a person’s willingness to ask for help. For most of us, however, asking for help is hard. It exposes our vulnerabilities and leaves us open to potential attack, something we have been evolutionarily conditioned to avoid as human beings. For entrepreneurial CEOs, it can be especially challenging. We slash our way through the jungle of new markets, hacking a trail and putting on a brave face for our teams while fending off threats from a multitude of competitors, both seen and unseen.
For just about every other role in the company, there are colleagues and peers that one can turn to for exchanging information, sharing hopes, fears and frustrations, and leaning on for intellectual and emotional support. Even the Board Directors can connect with one another to exchange views on the state of the company or the performance of the CEO. For CEOs who are experiencing challenges they have not faced before, or have doubts and concerns that s/he would like to bounce off someone else, that type of connection and relationship does not exist with other members of the team.
Options for CEOs
Asking for help makes us better leaders. But who does a CEO turn to? There are a number of options. The CEO can share their situation and talk through their issues with a spouse or partner. That might help from the perspective of emotional support, but it can also create other challenges. Even if the spouse or partner is very well versed in business and has seen similar situations before – which is often not the case – they will not be able to provide effective guidance on how to proceed. Furthermore, depending on the severity of the issue and its potential impact on the business, sharing the issue may even invoke additional anxiety that makes it even more challenging for the CEO to address the issue effectively.
There are business coaches and advisors. Ideally, a coach will be an experienced business executive who has gone through similar challenges in their career. In conversation, they can ask you questions about the issue that enable you to look at it in a new light, hopefully uncovering new solutions. That being said, a coach presents one perspective, and except in rare occasions, their experience may not be entirely relevant across your domain, type of company, stage or size of company.
And there are VCs. Most VCs will position themselves as your partner in the business, providing value addition in terms of pattern recognition, knowledge, connections, recruiting and other services that go above and beyond the commodity value of the capital that they provide to your company. There is data that suggests that the best VCs generate outsize returns. However, there is at least as much data that suggests that VC investing is a crapshoot, and that the returns as an asset class underperform the risk / reward ratio. If you happen to have the connections or traction to get the right VC on board, then the probability of your company achieving an outsized return may go up, depending how much you credit to causation vs correlation (of the already best-performing companies seeking out the best VCs). If you cannot get a top VC’s interest, or you simply don’t believe it is worth the investment of your equity in the relationship, then VC may not be the best route to maximize your outcome.
CEO Peer Groups
Yet another option to consider is a CEO Peer Group. Ideally, a CEO Peer Group will be composed of other CEOs who are going through very similar issues and will be able to both relate to your situation, and provide very relevant perspective from similar challenges they have gone through. Properly constituted, the CEO Peer Group will be a close-knit set of CEOs who are running companies of a similar type and at a similar stage to yours, and with whom you can establish an immediate affinity and level of trust.
There are numerous Peer Groups available to entrepreneurs and CEOs. Some of the better-known ones that immediately come to mind include Vistage / TEC, YPO and Peerscale, to name a few. Most of these are general in nature, with filters based on company size only, as outlined in the table below. However, if you are the CEO of a leading edge technology company, you may find that the nature of the other companies in your group is not entirely relevant to your reality. You will likely still derive a lot of value from the objective viewpoints and the relationships you form, but you won’t be getting the benefit of the much more on-target perspective of others who have gone, or are going, through the same kinds of challenges that you are.
On a personal note, I was a member of TEC when I was scaling my last company. The group had the best leader I could hope for, who remains a close personal friend, and included a number of very accomplished and successful CEOs as groupmates. However, as much as I valued the diversity of their backgrounds, the personal relationships we formed and being stimulated by new ideas and approaches to apply to my business, there was a world of difference between the nature of our businesses, and our respective growth rates and challenges. Ultimately, I could not help but feel that it would be more beneficial for my business if I were in a smaller and tighter group of CEOs, not bound by geographic proximity, who ran businesses more similar to mine.
It is worth noting that there are some peer groups that appear to cater more to tech CEOs. A couple that I came across include Startups.com and SaaStock. Both of these also provide access to a set of tools and content. In addition, you may have access to a CEO Peer Group through your VC or PE backer, incubator / accelerator or your city development office – as is the case with Invest Ottawa, for example. Indeed, some of the more forward-thinking VC and PE firms, such as First Round Capital and Vista Equity Partners for example, have long understood the value of community, mentor-mentee relationships, and peer groups and implemented them for sharing across their portfolio companies, and even the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) has implemented them for venture professionals.
Experimenting
From my experience as a serial founder/CEO, angel investor and advisor, I do see CEO Peer Groups as one of the most effective (and cost-effective, for that matter) means of helping you become a better leader and CEO. To that end, I started up a new CEO Peer Group for companies with the following parameters:
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High-growth tech
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Achieved product market fit
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Starting between $1M and $10M in revenue
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Looking to scale the business
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Group of 6
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1.5 hour standing call each month
I will be leading the sessions and we will be experimenting as a group with the structure and agenda to maximize the impact for the time investment. If you have experience with what has and has not worked for you with a CEO Peer Group, or if this sounds like something that might be of interest to you in scaling your business, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and set up a time to speak and exchange learnings.
My name is Alexander Rink. Drawing upon over 20 years of experience growing early-stage companies, my team and I help CEOs and Boards of Directors of companies from $1M to $25M in revenues identify and resolve strategic and organizational challenges to accelerate their company’s growth in a capital efficient manner.
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