Putting a CEO Peer Group to Work for You

How non-competitive colleagues work to solve each other's toughest dilemmas

Once a month, Matt Stewart, co-owner of National Services Group, an Irvine, California holding company that owns three companies—two national commercial painting companies and one small real estate investment firm—gets together with a group of people outside his company and shares some of the most private details of his company's opportunities and challenges.

Matt is a member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization, an Alexandria, Virginia-based membership organization of CEOs, as well as the Orange County chapter's chairperson. He says that the organization has literally changed his company for the better, and he can attribute 2,000% growth to the strategies and mentoring he received from his peer CEOs.

CEO or peer advisory groups are becoming an increasingly common tool to help non-competitive small business owners voice and address their toughest challenges, while creating excellent networking opportunities, says Jeff Zindel, a partner in The Small Business Group, an Omaha, Nebraska consultancy specializing in growth strategies for small to mid-sized companies. Groups like the Entrepreneurs' Organization, Inner Circle, Women Presidents' Organization and a host of others have sprung up nationwide, all geared specifically to the needs of the entrepreneurial company's leader.

'As the old saying goes, it's lonely at the top,' says Zindel. 'These groups give company owners an opportunity to get insights from their peers; people who are dealing with the same challenges they are.'

Before you jump into such a group, Zindel says it's important to ask questions. First, because of the sensitive nature of some of the information being disclosed in the meetings, it's important that the organization not allow competing businesses to participate, as well as have policies about confidentiality regarding what is disclosed to members. In addition, he says, the mix of business owners is important, as well as their areas of expertise.

'You don't want to have a group of business owners who are less experienced than you,' he says. 'Ideally, you want mostly peers who are at the same level or higher because those are the ones who will teach you the most.' So ask questions about the average number of years the participants have been in their posts and whether any of them have also run other companies, he says.

Finally, says Stewart, if you decide to get involved in such a group, don't shortchange yourself by not participating. 'When people tell me ‘I don't have time,' my answer to that is ‘I don't understand how this doesn't become the number one focus of your time and how you could live without it,'' he says. 'And I am a guy with three business partners. If they don't have someone to bounce ideas off of, how do you not have time to go?'

For more information on the power of CEO peer groups, check out 'Critical Mass: The Explosive Power of CEO Peer Groups' by Richard Franzi et al.