The implicit understanding among Alliance members is that, in exchange for their willingness to share their own experience and knowledge, they gain access to the extraordinary collective wisdom of the Alliance community of CEOs. Our members do amazing things and we’ve been collecting some of these lessons in case studies that preserve and highlight the wealth of knowledge in our membership. We also interview our members from time to time on matters of interest, and you’ll find their thoughts here as well.
Beginning With the End in Mind: Doing a Check Up on Your Change in Control Provisions in CEO Contracts
Imagine that your company is seeking to merge or be acquired only to discover that the “change in control” provisions in your compensation agreements are scaring away potential suitors. Internal inconsistencies within your agreements (employment agreements, change in control agreements, severance plans, equity incentive plans, supplemental executive retirement plans, etc.) create substantial financial liabilities that you may not uncover until it is too late. Such unanticipated consequences can adversely impact or kill your deal.
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Forum Categories:
M&A
Thinking Downturn – Or Up?
Alex Dodd (Group 272) sees nothing wrong with the economy – at least on the surface. When he walks down the street from the offices of M Squared Consulting, Inc. in San Francisco, where he serves as president and CEO, the retail stores look full. So do the restaurants. It’s when he talks to business owners that he uncovers the real story: Everywhere he goes, sales are generally down 20 percent.
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Forum Categories:
Strategy & Planning
Choosing Relationships over Meteoric Growth
Summary: Two female business partners are offered a huge piece of business by a key client. Although initially excited, they think long and hard about the pros and cons of saying yes. Read how the decision went and what they ultimately decided.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Strategy & Planning
Values Based Organizations
Summary: CEOs are too tolerant of executives that aren’t top performers and that don’t behave according to the values that the organization holds dear. CEO Jim Pouliot of CSAA talks to the Alliance about his experiences cleaning up executive teams. This essay explores why CEOs continually struggle with this issue, and what they can do about it.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Creating and Owning a Category
Summary: This CEO has a system for finding new market categories and taking commanding market share leadership. He's done it over and over again, and he tells us how in this essay.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Leadership
| Strategy & Planning
Leaping Ahead: Courage or Discipline?
Summary: Read how taking leaps with your business can pay huge dividends. By having the courage and discipline to put innovative business ideas into action, the owner gained huge competitive advantages. The concept is laid out, as well as important steps to get started.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Strategy & Planning
Indispensible Tech Tools for CEOs
Summary: Personal technology has revolutionized how CEOs stay organized, informed, and on top of their businesses. Several CEOs explain what works for them.
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Forum Categories:
Technology
Business Temptation
Summary: Thriving business gets customer requests to jump into a new business. After resisting, they go for it with excellent success. When is it wise to start another business?
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Leadership
| Strategy & Planning
A Branding Lesson: The Four Cornerstones
Summary: Branding is about creating relationships. By building multiple relationships with a client, the CEO discovered new opportunities to grow his business. Four ideals behind successful branding are explained.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Strategy & Planning
Get In Their Faces!
Summary: Face-to-face prospecting creates strong and profitable business relationships. Without cold-calling skills, a CEO forms strong client bonds by using persistence, discipline and focus. The advantages of this technique are examined and explained.
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Forum Categories:
Sales
Don't Let Success Destroy your Culture
Summary: This firm's success brought in so much business that it wasn't as much fun as it used to, and that endangered the quality of the work being performed. The CEO identified a customer in particular that was causing most of the problems and resigned the account, allowing her culture of fun and originality to survive.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Board Benefits
Summary: An entrepreneurial couple brought in outside board members to help bring in key accounts and to aid in their decision making. They diluted ownership’s vote to 50%, but the payoffs far outweigh the lack of freedom. Important pros and cons are discussed, as well as some guidelines for adding outside board members.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
Selling through Education
Summary: If your prospects don’t understand your value proposition, educate them. The company developed conferences to reinforce its solutions and position itself as a knowledge leader, which leads to higher sales. Learn the keys to creating a great educational setting.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Operations
| Sales
The Overly Optimistic Entrepreneur
Summary: Optimism is a natural part of entrepreneurship, but it can go too far. A bad string of luck nearly sinks the CEO’s dreams before persistence starts to pay off.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Leadership
Shifting Gears from Startup to Scaled Enterprise
Summary: Every successful startup goes from an entrepreneurial stage to a professional enterprise. Learn how the entrepreneur also successfully made the crossing point without hitting the wall.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
| Operations
Closing the Feedback Loop
Summary: Customer feedback is an important part of every successful company. After scaling up his business, a CEO struggles with his company’s feedback system before closing the loop and improving response rates. Effective processes for handling feedback are examined.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
| Sales
A Door to High Caliber People
Summary: Getting involved in non-profits opens doors and is good for business. Multiple benefits are reached when the CEO joins the board of a local charity. The right ways to go about getting involved in charity work are examined.
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Forum Categories:
Ethics
| Leadership
Recruiting through Mutual Respect
Summary: Sometimes the best teammates are the ones that worked before. A CEO digs through past connections to forge a “dream team” of talent. The challenges and benefits are examined.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
Synchronizing Brand Image with Deliverables
Summary: Successful companies do not survive on brand alone. A CEO comes into a struggling company and rebuilds its brand by rebuilding the value proposition, and then delivers. The importance of building and maintaining brand is examined.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Strategy & Planning
Brainstorm vs. Budget
Summary: A feature-rich product is designed, but after months of development work, it is discovered that it cannot be built. Key features are dropped so that it can finally go into production.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
| Strategy & Planning
Identifying New Business Ideas Take Discipline
Summary: Great business ideas don’t happen by accident. The CEO and his business partner spent months brainstorming, creating, and dismissing many ideas before connecting with one. The process of generating great ideas is explained.
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Forum Categories:
Strategy & Planning
From Service to Process to Product
Summary: Sometimes we sell more than a product or service. By learning his clients’ businesses and modifying his own company’s offerings, the CEO creates more value for everybody.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Sales
| Strategy & Planning
Learning from Pure Innovation
Summary: Innovation leads to powerful results. A CEO fosters a rich culture of innovation by getting the most out of his top team.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Vision Vector
Summary: CEOs of startups must work very differently than CEOs of firms that have made their place in the market. They must be hands-on with prospective customers and with all the key decisions, from sales to marketing to engineering/product development, in order to keep the business on a straight vector towards its vision.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
Generalities about China
Summary: CEO travels to China for the first time and sees the richness and complexity in the business environment there. With an excellent guide and clear objectives, he came back with four key lessons.
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Forum Categories:
International Business
It is Never Forever
Summary: Planning for succession is a difficult topic, but an essential one. Clarifying the line between dependency and leadership is critical, and much of the work of succession is reducing dependency on the CEO.
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Forum Categories:
Exiting
| Leadership
| Strategy & Planning
Managing Young Employees Yields Insights for All
Summary: Showing genuine concern for your employees is good for business. The founders buy a troubled business with young, troubled employees, and turn it around by deeply engaging and tapping the potential in each employee.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Re-Framing Price Increases Leads to Stepped-Up Profits
Summary: A CEO in an old-line, low-margin business finds a way to re-frame his pricing model to get his team and his customers to accept it. He modified his sales incentive package to better target the results he was looking for.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Sales
The Courage to Fire
Summary: An incoming CEO fires the most senior technical expert because he won’t embrace the new values that must take hold for the firm to survive. The bold move works without significant damage.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
| Operations
Betting on His Core Competency
Summary: Keeping its area of core competency strong is just what Sensory Inc. did, and sales have more than tripled as a result. Every company must pay rapt attention to how and when it invests in its core competency.
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Forum Categories:
Strategy & Planning
The Need for Speed
Summary: Quick decisive action enables the firm to grab a nice piece of business before anybody else has the chance to compete. The speed at which your business and your team move is a critical element of competition, today more than ever. What does it take to make speed a competitive edge?
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Forum Categories:
Operations
| Sales
Decision Making Illnesses
Summary: The process of making good decisions is critical. Some firms/teams are bad at decision making, and the results can be ugly. Four decision making illnesses are discussed along with some suggestions about improvement.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| M&A
Every Business Needs a Common Enemy
Summary: Identifying a competitor or two as an “enemy” to beat is a powerful leadership tool that CEOs should use to galvanize business improvement at every level.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
| Sales
Growing through Referrals
Summary: Referrals are the least expensive way to bring in new business. An employee benefits company amazes their clients with incredible service, and for the past 18 years grows only through referrals, diverting all its marketing spending into operations.
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Forum Categories:
Operations
| Sales
Intelligent Off-Shoring
Summary: A company finds an excellent way of managing off-shoring, taking advantage of the positives while avoiding the pitfalls. Blending the efforts of on-shoring with off-shoring and a commitment to close management are key.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| International Business
| Operations
The Story Matters
Summary: Keeping your lender updated about your business is critical, especially when your financial performance is less than stellar. Understand how banks view loans, some signs that a bank is worried about you, and when to take action.
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Forum Categories:
Finance
Selling on Benefits
Summary: A software firm was hurting its sales by telling every prospect about all the features of its powerful software. Instead, they now ask questions first to understand their prospect, then present only the aspects of the software that solve the client’s problem.
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Forum Categories:
Sales
Don’t Take Money from Strangers
Summary: CEOs often don’t do enough research on private equity investors offering money. The result is that they bring into the ownership group powerful people with different agendas and styles, and thus, lots of conflict. A number of key checkpoints are delineated.
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Forum Categories:
Finance
Forged by Fire
Summary: A semiconductor equipment manufacturer was in deep trouble, and replaced its founder with a new CEO, Dave Dutton. He created a new leadership culture amidst the transition chaos. The new top team prospered as did the company.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
Forming Productive Friendships in Asia
Summary: A seasoned global executive intentionally cultivates the friendship of a company president in Asia and pulls down the big order. When problems crop up, the President relies on the friendship to save his job and his lifestyle. The Asian custom of entering friendships for profit is explained.
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Forum Categories:
International Business
| Leadership
Avoiding Costly Surprises When Going Global
Summary: A firm signs leases overseas and discovers some nasty surprises that cost it big bucks. Some simple but key steps are discussed to avoid being surprised by local rules, laws and practices.
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Forum Categories:
International Business
| Operations
Sharing the Dream of Success Brings Top Talent for Less
Summary: Engineer turned entrepreneur bootstraps his company, but can’t afford the talent he needs. Through careful sharing of equity, he builds a great team who bring results amazingly fast.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Strategy & Planning
Leadership with Other People’s Money
Summary: Building a business with other people’s money certainly isn’t any easier than bootstrapping. It takes the right connections, hard work, an understanding family, and a solid opportunity. Hear the details of Paul White’s story.
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Forum Categories:
Finance
| Leadership
Management by Getting Your Hands Dirty
Summary: A manager is fired, and the CEO steps into the role. The CEO fixes critical problems and builds new systems. A well-run department is passed on to a new manager.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
Stop Consultants Running Amok
Summary: A consultant provides great value and mentors the President, who being grateful, grants a three year contract, but then regrets it. Clients must always remain in control of consultants.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Taking Training Seriously
Summary: A retail chain has incredible training program, which instills corporate values in new hires and teaches product knowledge as well as systems and customer interface protocols. After the initial training, they weave training into the company’s routine.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
| Operations
Great People Doing the Right Things
Summary: A very fast growing firm has eleven good years running. Credited is an excellent top team that can finish each other’s sentences and leaves the CEO free to follow his instincts about the future. Learn how he built and maintained this team.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
Communication Skills Count
Summary: After seeing a presentation at the Alliance of CEOs by Chuck Smith, CEO of SBC West, it became crystal clear how powerful great communication skills can be. The audience was engaged and entertained. Read some of the key speaking techniques he used and how they can make any CEO a better communicator.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
From Brand to Icon
Summary: Most decisions in our world stem from emotion. Jewelry firm Lori Bonn Design turned its founder into a public personality – an icon, as part of its branding strategy and as a result, hit it big on TV. Take branding to the next level.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Sales
Compensation Systems: Giving and Getting
Summary: Read about an executive compensation system that really worked. By generously sharing the bottom line, the owner quadrupled his take home. The concept is laid out, and critical elements to successful implementation are detailed.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
Not all Clients are for You
Summary: A new architectural firm discovers that some clients just aren’t for them, and don’t contribute to profits. Based on their strategic objectives, they develop of prospect profiling system to avoid likely problem clients and focus on business that is most useful for growing the firm.
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Forum Categories:
Marketing
| Operations
| Sales
Planning for Passion
Summary: As part of a going public strategy, the founder brings in a new CEO, but it doesn’t work well. After two years, the founder steps back in, but the passion is gone. A new replacement is successful. Explore issues surrounding maintaining a founder’s passion over time.
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Forum Categories:
Exiting
| Leadership
Cut Customer Costs Instead of Prices
Summary: Low-tech concrete meets high-tech logistics when RMC Pacific Materials acts to save their customers money through integration and technology, rather than price cutting. The result: industry leadership and a choice contract: The new Oakland –San Francisco Bay Bridge.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Operations
Face to Face with Your Important Clients & Customers
Summary: It’s easy for to get wrapped up in all sorts of organizational issues and drift apart from our clients and customers. This story highlights how Gene Miller, Chairman and CEO of a major law firm, invests time with his key clients, and the benefits to all CEOs if they do likewise.
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Forum Categories:
Leadership
| Sales
Purist to Populist
Summary: Great business ideas are often borne by finding the mainstream’s interest in little-known products and services and making them more popular. Serial entrepreneur Rob Wrubel has a track record of doing just that, although it didn’t happen overnight.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Marketing
| Strategy & Planning
Sailing Beyond the Small Business Mindset
Summary: A small business struggles along staying small for many years. Its owners grow tired of the struggle and recommit to building a bigger and healthier business. Key signs of being stuck in the small business mindset are identified, and steps that can be taken to get your business to the next level.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Strategy & Planning
The Pain Doctor
Summary: Tom Engdahl is the pain doctor of business. He looks for pain in an industry then develops the cure. He’s done it over and over again, each time with a business success and a liquidation event.
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Forum Categories:
Entrepreneurship
| Strategy & Planning
Showcasing Your People
Summary: Your customers want to know that your firm can satisfy their needs. At K/P Corp, it’s the people on staff that deliver, with the help of equipment. When Rich Barbee was appointed CEO he found that the equipment was being marketed, not the people. That was fixed, with excellent results.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Marketing
In Charge but Not In Control
Summary: New CEO steps in ready to ramp up, but discovers serious product problems and has to re-engineer and refinance to save the firm. Read how to avoid these kinds of surprises.
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Forum Categories:
Human Resources
| Leadership
| Operations
It’s No Longer Product vs. Service
Summary: A software developer is confident that he understands making products and selling them over and over again. But when customers ask him to start a new business -- providing a service of paperwork processing for clients, he hesitates because it’s a service. Can this product-driven firm succeed in low-tech services?
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Forum Categories:
Strategy & Planning
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