More than 4½ decades of founding and operating companies, raising investor capital, building organizations, mentoring entrepreneurs and helping startup and emerging-company CEOs turn ideas, problems and opportunities into executable action.
“I Help Startups Start & Stay Started.”™
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 July 2026 purchasing-power 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.
Companies & Partnerships Founded
Successful Capital Raises
Raised — July 2026 Dollars
Investors
Real Estate Transactions — July 2026 Dollars
Rental Units Managed
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.
One way I am sharing that experience at scale is through my W³ Cubed™ Startup Action Plan Workbook — From Point A to Ready for Prime Time™. The complete Workbook is free, and its evolving working edition is a continually updated, 370+ page practical reference. Founders can go directly to the most urgent subject in its Table of Contents rather than read it from cover to cover.
I continue to make my Chief ImpleMentor™ Virtual Executive Services available selectively — particularly to former CEO RESOURCE LLC clients and to founders whose immediate challenges are a strong match for my experience. Under the current limited program, I am offering Founder Slots for up to a maximum of 100 entrepreneurs, and the program may close substantially sooner as my publishing commitments require. A Founder Slot applies to an accepted entrepreneur, not to an individual ten-hour retainer block.
My startup perspective comes from both sides of the table. I have been the founder who needed capital, the CEO responsible for deploying it, the executive accountable to investors, the syndicator structuring investments, the securities professional dealing with regulatory realities and the consultant helping other founders prepare themselves and their companies for outside scrutiny.
That is why my work naturally crosses strategy, capital formation, business modeling, financial projections, investor positioning, leadership, operations, implementation and the human realities of getting a company from its current Point A to its desired Point B.
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 July 2026 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.
Startup Growth & Execution
Concept validation, business-model development, market strategy, scaling, operational gap identification, actionable planning and execution.
Fundraising & Investor Readiness
Capital strategy, investor positioning, pitch preparation, fundraising readiness, private placements, investor communications and deal structuring.
Senior-Level Decision Support
Virtual CEO, COO and CXO perspective; leadership-gap filling; founder mentoring; strategic decision support; crisis management and turnarounds.
Business & Financial Modeling
Business plans, economic assumptions, financial projections, capital requirements, scenario analysis and pressure-testing business logic.
Implementation
Turning attractive plans into specific actions, responsibilities, resources, milestones, deadlines and accountability.
Dragon Slaying
Cash problems, management gaps, investor conflicts, broken assumptions, stalled execution, crisis situations and other obstacles demanding experienced attention.
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.”
I founded Good Software Corp. around business software, including Investor III for Real Estate Investment Analysis. The company grew from concept to more than 50 employees, and its products ultimately achieved more than 5,000 retail placements.
The company eventually went public through a reverse merger. That experience substantially expanded my operating knowledge of software development, product commercialization, retail distribution, staffing, capital requirements, public-company dynamics, and scaling a technology business.
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 July 2026 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.
A résumé lists experiences. What matters more to me is what happens when thousands upon thousands of experiences begin interacting with one another and making earlier experience more useful.
This is where my “connect the dots” metaphor becomes useful. In this context, a dot is not a client. It is an individual piece of real-world experience or information: a decision, problem, opportunity, investor reaction, pricing choice, negotiation, management conflict, customer response, mistake, successful tactic, failed tactic, pivot, personality, market condition or eventual outcome.
One client can therefore contribute hundreds or thousands of dots. Across thousands of companies and approximately 33,000 mentoring relationships, that creates an enormous accumulated network of experience.
The real value comes from connecting those dots. A lesson learned from a property acquisition may illuminate a software negotiation years later. An investor objection from one offering may expose why another company is not ready to raise capital. A leadership problem encountered a decade earlier may reveal a pattern inside an apparently unrelated startup today.
That continually expanding ability to recognize patterns, nuances, exceptions, hidden assumptions, second-order consequences and pivot opportunities is what I call Compound Knowledge™.
CEO RESOURCE LLC — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
More than three decades working directly with startup and emerging companies on strategy, business modeling, fundraising readiness, implementation, Virtual Executive support, problem solving, mentoring and dragon slaying.
Goodman Group, Inc. — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
Diversified operating and investment activities spanning commercial real estate, debt instruments, technology, financial services, syndication and other entrepreneurial ventures.
Good Software Corp. — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
Business-software company that developed Investor III for Real Estate Investment Analysis, grew to more than 50 employees and 5,000+ retail placements, and ultimately became publicly traded through a reverse merger.
Good Financial Corp. — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
Focused on analyzing, purchasing and collecting distressed and discounted loans acquired from financial institutions and government-related resolution entities.
Goodman Securities, Inc. — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
Direct-participation broker-dealer and member of NASD and SIPC supporting securities offerings, investment activities and syndication.
Good Asset Management, Inc. — Founder, CEO & Chairman.
Real-estate management and brokerage activities encompassing approximately four million square feet and nearly 45,000 commercial and residential rental units for investors, lenders and government agencies.
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.
A résumé tells you what someone says he has done. The much larger test is the breadth of companies that trusted him with their problems and what those clients said after working with him. That is why I retain both the detailed Recent Clients record and the extensive Testimonials / Performance Evaluations accumulated across decades.
Together with the Compound Knowledge™ explanation, those pages provide a much fuller picture of both the breadth and the accumulated depth behind the Chief ImpleMentor™ service.
MBA — Pepperdine University
Presidential & Key Executive Program.
Postgraduate Studies — University of Tennessee
Computer Science.
Bachelor of Science — University of Tennessee
Engineering Physics.
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.
Because my priority is publishing rather than rebuilding a large consulting practice, I am offering Founder Slots for up to a maximum of 100 entrepreneurs. That is an upper limit, not a commitment to accept 100 people; I may close the program much earlier. Former CEO RESOURCE LLC clients receive first consideration. An inquiry, free Workbook download or AI Arsenal™ reservation does not hold a consulting Slot.
An accepted new engagement begins with a prepaid ten-hour retainer. The Standard rate is only $250 per hour, or only $2,500 for ten hours. Priority costs $3,750 and Top Priority costs $5,000 for the same ten hours; those higher tiers buy scheduling precedence, not different advice or better judgment. The number of Founder Slots counts accepted entrepreneurs, not ten-hour retainer blocks.
When the first ten hours are used, the entrepreneur may stop or request an additional complete block, subject to approval, terms and availability. An additional block for the same accepted entrepreneur does not consume another Founder Slot. Each engagement requires individual acceptance and a signed Statement of Work before payment and consulting work. Prices and terms can change at any time without notice, subject to accepted agreements and applicable law.
The practical details appear on the Queue / Priority Service page, and the current terms and service levels appear on the Founder Slots / Payment page. These pages describe how to request an engagement; visiting them does not mean a Slot has been accepted or that payment should be made before a Statement of Work is signed.
My W³ Cubed™ Startup Action Plan Workbook — From Point A to Ready for Prime Time™ is a free, hands-on founder resource built around Who? What? When? Its evolving 370+ page working edition contains 216 Action Items, 52 Milestones, nine coordinated Action Plans with Gantt charts, four Go/No-Go Gates and 27 Field Notes. Begin with the Table of Contents, find your most urgent problem and work from there. The currently distributed edition may differ from the evolving working manuscript.
AI Arsenal™ Lite is a separate, optional and unreleased companion being developed around 50 certified founder workflows using Show → Explain → Interview → Deliver. Advance reservations are available without a deposit or purchase obligation; a reservation is not an immediate download. AI Arsenal™ Professional, including its planned configurable Excel Founder Control Center™ and Action Plan system, is also unreleased. Neither companion replaces independent human judgment or automatically validates the driving assumptions in a founder’s plans.
If nearly five decades of operating, fundraising, consulting and mentoring experience could help you see your current opportunity or stumbling block differently, tell me what you are trying to accomplish and what is standing in the way.
Best wishes for stellar success,
Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
CEO & Chief ImpleMentor™
CEO RESOURCE LLC