Who Do You Call When No One Has the Answers?

First of all, Dan Caulfield would want you to know that he's OK now. The relocation from Chicago to southern California has gone better than hoped. His new business, the fifth he's started, is doing nicely. His wife is happy. Their two young boys are thriving. And the thing with Ross Perot, the little squabble -- it's all worked out. Caulfield would want you to know that he's feeling blessed these days. He'd want you to know he's thankful.

But he'd want you to know this, too: he might never have reached this point if it weren't for Todd Smart.

It's possible you already know something about relationships like the one Caulfield has with Smart. Not because you know either of them -- though they'll tell you their story in a moment -- but because, if you're lucky, you've seen such relationships yourself. If you're really lucky, you're part of one.

How to describe it? To Caulfield, Smart is a kind of business-ownership mentor, a perspective-providing peer (the two men are almost the same age and have experienced many of the same trials), a personal guide, a lifeline. Some describe such pairings as "one call" relationships, as in: What's the one call you would make (excluding your spouse) if you were in trouble? Caulfield would ring Smart. (And as it happens in this case, sometimes Smart would ring Caulfield.)

And by "trouble," we mean trouble of a particular kind, not purely business trouble. If you're a CEO whose company faces some sort of tactical problem, you probably know to turn to your lawyer, banker, key supplier, or board member, depending on the kind of advice required. The problems and questions that Caulfield and Smart discuss are bigger than that. They're personal. They have to do with balancing ambition with health, work with family, duty to others with responsibility to self. They're about how to grow as a CEO. They're about how to lead a good entrepreneurial life.

In other words, they're the sorts of questions most business owners scarcely have time to think about, let alone get help dealing with. Which is why the effect can be so powerful when real help is there to be had. "Lifeline," both Caulfield and Smart would say, is not too strong a term.

BORDER TROUBLE: "Problems with your love life, family life, stress level," says Dan Caulfield, "become the business's issues."

To research this article, Inc interviewed scores of CEOs who have such one-call relationships. We asked them whom they relied on and why, how often they met with their one-call mentor, and what advice they'd received.

The only pattern to the answers, it turns out, is that there is no pattern, apart from the consistent finding that business owners who have such a relationship are uniformly passionate about what it has meant to their lives -- and about the need for someone to provide that kind of help.

"CEOs don't really have anyone they can turn to," explains Atlanta pastor and author Ike Reighard, who has become the touchstone for numerous entrepreneurs. "Sometimes they're the most well-connected people and yet the loneliest you will ever meet. It's hard to have trusting relationships when people so often want something from you."

Nevertheless, the company builders we talked to did develop trusting relationships -- with a former colleague or an old teacher or a fellow member of a peer group or a customer who turned into a friend. (For an overview of the many kinds of people CEOs turn to for advice when the questions are personal as well as professional, see "Not Just Anybody.". For a look at one particularly unexpected but popular personal mentor -- management wiseman Peter Drucker -- see "The Uber Mentor.")

The pairings, and how they function, are as varied and idiosyncratic as the CEOs who rely on them. Ellen Aschendorf, who runs Egg Electric Inc., in New York City, leans on a fellow female CEO, a general contractor whom she met on a job 18 years ago. "She's in my industry; she's married with two children (I have three); she's about the same age. She's someone who can relate to my life. We speak several times a week," Aschendorf says. Randy Fields, cofounder of Mrs. Fields Cookies and now CEO of Park City Group, in Park City, Utah, turns to a former employee whom he now calls his "consigliere." Fields insists on getting in touch only when confronting a turning point or crisis, rather than on a regular basis. "If you force meetings on a periodic interval, you run the risk that it's just checking, it's not asking for critical advice," he says, which trivializes the relationship. "It degenerates into consulting."

But it's hard to picture the relationships described by Merrily Orsini or Cameron Burr or Irene Cohen, among many others, degenerating into consulting. Orsini, head of My Virtual Corp, in Louisville, has turned to her therapist as many as a dozen times a year since 1985 to help her sort out her personal life when it gets confused with the running of her growing company. Burr, of the Burr Group, in New Canaan, Conn., pointedly turns to his father -- People Express Airlines founder Don Burr -- instead of to a peer. "You want someone who's been around the block a few times, who has a more seasoned perspective on life issues," he says. Cohen, CEO of FlexCorpSystems, in New York City, differs from most business owners by passionately advocating many lifelines. She has built a network of her own and is also part of the Committee of 200, a group of female entrepreneurs. When she has a problem outside work, she takes it to a meeting of her Committee subgroup or calls the person in her network who's right for the question at hand.

Is it any surprise that no two one-call relationships are alike or that CEOs lean on their mentors in different ways?

Perhaps the shortest path to understanding the role that a one-call adviser can play in a CEO's life is to hear the parties in such a relationship try to explain it. Here, in their own words, are Dan Caulfield, 35, CEO of HQ Group, in Oceanside, Calif., and Todd Smart, 34, a business founder and currently marketing vice-president at Tabin Corp., in Chicago.