Robert Lee Goodman Profile

I am Robert Lee Goodman, MBA — founder, CEO, capital raiser, syndicator, investor-relations practitioner, startup mentor and Chief ImpleMentor™.

I have founded 49 companies and partnerships. Of those 49, 44 of my own companies and limited partnerships successfully raised outside investor capital. Those 44 raises totaled $120.1 million in today’s dollars from 1,342 investors.

That distinction matters: I am a 49X Founder, not a 44X Founder. Forty-four is the number of my companies and partnerships for which I successfully raised outside investor capital.

My companies have operated across real estate, securities, financial services, software, technology and other entrepreneurial activities. Along the way I built organizations ranging from a startup created around a hand-written software program to businesses employing hundreds of people and serving thousands of investors, customers and tenants.

For roughly the last three decades, CEO RESOURCE LLC has allowed me to apply that operating experience directly with thousands of startup and emerging companies and their CEOs in 49 states, more than 70 countries, across six continents and more than 200 industries.

After more than 4½ decades of building companies, raising capital, mentoring founders and advising startup and emerging-company CEOs, I am now semi-retired. I deliberately limit the amount of consulting work I accept rather than trying to rebuild a large consulting practice.

My primary professional focus today is Good-Man LLC and the Five Year Life™ publishing program. One reason is simple: books allow me to preserve and share far more of the Compound Knowledge™ accumulated across decades and many thousands of business and mentoring relationships than I could ever distribute one consulting engagement at a time.

I continue to make my Chief ImpleMentor™ Virtual Executive Service available selectively — particularly to former CEO RESOURCE LLC clients and to new startup companies where I believe the fit is strong and my experience can create meaningful leverage.

Of the 49 companies and partnerships I founded, 44 raised outside investor capital through successful private offerings. Those 44 capital raises totaled $120.1 million in today’s dollars from 1,342 investors.

That was not theoretical fundraising. I dealt directly with the offering process, investor questions, financial assumptions, deal structure, due diligence, securities-law realities, investor communications and the difficult process of persuading people to write checks for companies I was responsible for building.

Those successful investors were only one side of the learning curve. My fundraising efforts also involved directly approaching more than 20,000 prospective angel investors who ultimately said NO. Learning why investors reject an opportunity can be every bit as instructive as learning why 1,342 of them eventually said YES.

Additionally, I was the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Goodman Securities, Inc., a direct participation broker-dealer and member of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. (NASD) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.

That enormous volume of investor interaction taught me firsthand what causes an offering to rise above the noise, what creates credibility, which assumptions sophisticated investors challenge, what sends them running, and how badly prepared founders can destroy otherwise promising opportunities.

My current funding network includes approximately 6,000 angel investors, 4,500 venture capitalists, and 1,500 family offices — 12,000 people in total whom I personally know.

A startup does not become investable merely because it needs money. Before founders spend months pursuing capital, I want to know whether the business model, market assumptions, management team, financial logic, offering structure, investor story and implementation plan can survive intelligent scrutiny. Sometimes the fastest way to accelerate fundraising is to stop fundraising long enough to fix what investors are going to reject.

My undergraduate training in Engineering Physics, postgraduate work in Computer Science, and an MBA gave me three complementary lenses: technical systems, information systems, and business economics.

Earlier in my career, I worked in technical environments associated with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rockwell International during the Apollo-era space program. That technical background later proved particularly useful when technology companies became a large part of CEO RESOURCE LLC’s client base.

And, yes, I really was a rocket scientist!

Technical founders can talk to me in technical language, while I simultaneously think about business models, financial consequences, investor expectations, and implementation. One of my most useful roles has therefore become helping translate “tech speak” into “business speak” and “investor speak.”

For more than 15 years, much of my operating career centered on income-producing real estate and real-estate syndication. My organizations acquired, financed, syndicated, managed, refinanced and sold multifamily, self-storage, office, office-warehouse and related commercial assets.

Using the updated BLS CPI inflation calculation, those transactions represent approximately $355 million in today’s dollars.

Our organizations managed more than 45,000 rental units and approximately four million square feet of property for investors, lenders and government agencies. The self-storage operation grew to become the 7th-largest operator of self-storage facilities in the United States.

That experience covered the complete investment cycle: sourcing, underwriting, due diligence, negotiation, acquisition, financing, syndication, property management, investor communications, troubled assets, refinancing and disposition.

I founded Goodman Securities, Inc., a direct-participation broker-dealer and member of the National Association of Securities Dealers and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.

Although I am no longer in the securities business, that experience gave me a much deeper understanding of private offerings, investor communications, regulatory boundaries, fundraising process and the importance of making sure founders obtain appropriate securities counsel rather than treating capital raising casually.

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One of the great advantages of CEO RESOURCE LLC has been the sheer diversity of businesses I have been invited inside. My clients have ranged across technology, software, healthcare, biotechnology, financial services, real estate, manufacturing, professional services, consumer products, telecommunications, hospitality, education and hundreds of other industries.

More than 70% of my consulting clients historically have had a technology component even when the underlying industry itself was not traditionally considered “high tech.”

That diversity matters because solutions do not always come from within the same industry. Sometimes the lesson that helps solve today’s problem was learned years earlier in a business that appears completely unrelated.

In addition to founding and operating companies and consulting with startups, my professional work has included published authorship and expert-witness assignments involving areas where my operating, financial, startup and investment experience was relevant.

Today, much of that accumulated experience is being preserved through Five Year Life™. My three completed books approaching publication are Your Last Paycheck™, Reset Protocol™, and Reset Protocol™ Workbook. Interested readers can learn about receiving a complete prepublication manuscript through the Advance Reader Team program.

You will not get “get rich quick” hype. Building a company is hard work, and there are dragons galore.

You will not get empty motivational rhetoric in place of analysis. My bias is toward concrete questions, specific decisions, measurable actions and realistic implementation.

And you will not hire CEO RESOURCE LLC only to discover that your work has been outsourced to a junior consultant. When you hire me, you work directly with me.

Every consulting engagement begins with a prepaid 10-hour retainer. Standard Service is $2,500 for 10 hours. Priority and Top Priority scheduling are available when timing justifies faster access.

When a funded 10-hour block has been consumed, you decide whether to replenish another block or stop. There is no long-term obligation to continue.

Current queue mechanics and service priorities are explained on the Queue / Priority Service page, and funded engagements can be started from the Payment page.

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