Susan Peterson had the latter in mind when she recently set up a formal board of advisers comprising 12 of her clients. "I was scared to death that they wouldn't accept my invitation," she recalls. As it turned out, everyone invited agreed, even before she described the free training session she was prepared to offer as a come-on. (Susan Peterson Productions Inc., based in Washington, D.C., offers training in presentation skills.) The group meets regularly to critique aspects of her operations, such as her marketing package. "One of the best things I did is not chair the group," says Peterson.
In many cases, finding shoulders to cry on is as easy as making a phone call to a local chapter of an entrepreneurs' group like the Executive Committee (TEC) or Young Presidents' Organization and blocking out the time to attend. Oh, and actually attending.
Steve Ashton, CEO of Ashton Photo Co., a Salem, Oreg., photo-image printer, has been a TEC chapter member for years. "More than anything else, the meetings are a reality check. Other members give you a variety of perspectives. It's brutally candid," he says. The sessions have helped members resolve prickly problems, such as how to dismiss a reliable employee whom the company has outgrown.
One-on-one mentoring partnerships take the networking concept one layer deeper. Some entrepreneurs' organizations can help set up such partnerings: the Women's Business Development Center in Chicago, for example, recently launched a program to pair 15 neophyte woman company builders with owners of businesses that were at least five years old. In one case, the protégé -- a retailer -- has learned how to implement product markdowns.
3. A confessor
Shoulders to Lean On, Part II
Confession time. It's all very well to seek out networks that can help ease some of the company's woes, but what about you? Don't expect your board to start dissecting your sense of self.
For most, personal feedback arrives through a one-on-one relationship. Perhaps it's with a caring spouse or a religious leader or a counselor or an old college professor. It could be between the CEO and a trusted business associate or close friend. It could be as informal and cathartic as an unloading of all your woes in one fiery monologue. No matter: everybody's better off for having someone else's ear to bend.
4. One night a week to learn
Living and Learning
There's an engaging scene in the 1991 movie Frankie and Johnny in which ex-con-turned-short-order-cook Johnny, played by Al Pacino, is sweet-talking doleful waitress Frankie -- Michelle Pfeiffer. Kidding her about the value of self-improvement, he describes how he uses a dictionary every day to learn the meaning of a new word.
Unerringly, the movie ends with Johnny's toothbrush stacked next to Frankie's. Self-Improvement Guy makes good, Hollywood-style.
The silver screen -- indeed, much of our popular culture -- pulsates with messages celebrating self-renewal. Susan Powter promises a new body. Stephen Covey promises a new mind, without the mind-set. But there's really not a lot of learning going on. Lots of repair, lots of psychic and physical overhaul, all right. But not a lot of deliberate, targeted intellectual growth of the kind that keeps company builders out in front.
Think you'll do better selling your product into post-NAFTA Mexico if your Spanish is beyond the grade-school level? Figure you'll have a better handle on cash flow if you take that night course in accounting? We're not talking here about a multiyear enslavement to a night-school M.B.A. program.
Proud company owners, of course, don't have time for the kind of learning that's on tap (and often all but mandated) for Fortune 500 executives. But by spending so much time personally fighting daily fires, entrepreneurs miss out on the restorative calm of a classroom and the sense of regeneration that make the act of learning so pleasurable. And they aren't about to dent an image of control by risking anything so human as a mistake. More ominously, they risk blunting the company's edge at the very time when new technologies and new global trading patterns cry out for mastery of new skills.
John O'Neil, president of the California School of Professional Psychology, in San Francisco, and author of The Paradox of Success: When Winning at Work Means Losing at Life (Tarcher/Putnam, 1993), asks business leaders, "What are you going to learn for yourself?" For too many entrepreneurial CEOs, the answer, at least to date, is "nothing much."
5. A two-week hike
Getting a Life
There's nothing like an encounter with a bear to put things in perspective. Watching the black bear -- smelling the bear -- nuzzling the camping pack a short stone's throw away, Michael Marvin found it especially easy to forget the worries of his working week.
Marvin doesn't seem to mind those reality jolts. Actually, you could say he invites them. Last year the chairman of MapInfo Corp., a maker of mapping software in Troy, N.Y., took two weeks to go backpacking across the Alaskan tundra. Not much to see up there; not many trees. But lots of grizzly droppings.
Now, not every founder of a small company takes vacations with bear bells. Not every founder takes vacations, period. For many founders (if not most), the tug of the business is overpowering; these people know for a fact that the company will crumble three days -- make that two days -- after they leave for Fiji. Their compromise? They go to Hawaii instead, because more hotels there have modem jacks.
Taking two weeks out to do something as becalming as backpacking in Alaska seems unutterably insane in an era when fortunes can be won or lost in the twinkling of an electronic network.
But that's not the way Marvin sees it. For him, the physical and mental time-out isn't simply a necessary recharging of the psychic batteries. It's an opportunity to do something he finds deeply satisfying in itself, and to restore those parts of himself that are good husband, trusted companion, and avid outdoorsman.
