Recent Clients — Is Your Industry Included?

Thousands of startup and emerging-company CEOs. More than 200 industries. Clients in 49 states, more than 70 countries and six continents. This remarkable diversity of real-world business experience is one of the foundations of the Compound Knowledge™ behind W Cubed™ Founder Launch and the Chief ImpleMentor™ consulting methodology.

Every industry has its own rules, markets, economic realities and challenges. Yet many of the most consequential problems entrepreneurs encounter are variations of problems that have already appeared in entirely different businesses. Recognizing those recurring patterns, distinguishing them from genuinely unique circumstances and connecting lessons learned across industries can be enormously valuable when planning or operating a startup company.

Why Should This Experience Matter to Your Startup?

One of the great privileges of my consulting career has been the opportunity to work directly with bright entrepreneurs and CEOs building an extraordinary variety of companies. Some were technology startups. Others were manufacturers, healthcare organizations, real-estate businesses, financial-services firms, retailers, media companies, professional-service businesses, nonprofits, restaurants, consumer-product companies, internet businesses and organizations that did not fit neatly into any conventional category.

Each new company brought a different combination of personalities, markets, strategies, financial assumptions, customers, products, financing requirements, operating constraints and problems to be solved. The differences mattered, but so did the similarities that gradually emerged across industries that initially appeared to have little in common.

That is important to a W Cubed™ founder because building a startup company requires more than understanding the specific product or service being offered. It requires recognizing how hundreds of decisions interact, which assumptions are carrying the business model, who should be responsible for each important task and when each action must happen in relation to everything else.

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W Cubed™ — WHO + WHAT + WHEN

After more than four and a half decades of starting companies, raising capital and working directly with founders, I have accumulated an enormous reservoir of practical lessons about what helps startup businesses succeed, what causes them to struggle and what founders frequently overlook.

W Cubed™ Founder Launch is my effort to organize that experience into a coordinated execution methodology rather than allowing it to remain scattered among consulting files, client assignments, personal recollections and individual conversations.

The complete free Founder Launch includes 204 Action Items, 50 Milestones, nine coordinated Action Plans with Gantt charts and four Go/No-Go gates. It addresses the relationships among financial planning, staffing, marketing, operations, product development, legal matters, fundraising and other essential business functions.

The methodology is designed to help you identify WHO owns each important task, WHAT must be accomplished, WHEN the work belongs in the larger sequence, what it depends on and what evidence should establish that the result has actually been achieved.

GET THE COMPLETE W CUBED™ FOUNDER LAUNCH — FREE

More Than 200 Industries — And This Is Still Not the Complete List

Historically, more than 70% of my consulting clients have had a meaningful technology component even when their underlying business was not traditionally considered high-tech. That variety repeatedly required me to bridge technical, financial, strategic, investor, personnel and implementation considerations rather than viewing a business problem from only one perspective.

Some clients were developing proprietary technologies or pursuing strategies so distinctive that publicly identifying even the industry could disclose more than was appropriate. Others were engaged in ordinary-looking businesses that presented extraordinarily complex financial, organizational or operating challenges.

The following is a representative sampling of historical client industries and business activities, not a complete census of engagements. It illustrates the breadth of consulting experience accumulated over time.

Clients in 49 States — and More Than 70 Countries on Six Continents

CEO RESOURCE LLC has worked directly with startup and emerging companies and their CEOs in 49 of the 50 U.S. states and more than 70 countries across six of the seven continents. This geographic diversity has exposed me to a broad variety of business cultures, consumer markets, regulatory environments, financing practices and approaches to entrepreneurship.

International client locations have included China, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, India, the Cayman Islands, Italy, Costa Rica, Spain, Nigeria, Belgium, Sweden, Pakistan, Austria, the Russian Federation, Egypt, the Philippines, New Zealand, Argentina, Panama, Antigua, Ireland, Ghana, Malaysia, Switzerland, Guatemala, South Africa, Vietnam, Kenya and Afghanistan, among others.

One quirky gap remains in the historical U.S. client map: South Dakota. Antarctica remains unconquered as well.

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This Was Not Superficial Contact

The experience described on this page was not accumulated merely by selling products to thousands of companies or meeting founders briefly at conferences. My consulting work has typically involved working directly one-on-one with individual founders and CEOs, often becoming deeply familiar with their business models, strategies, finances, operating problems and future plans.

Assignments have involved crystallizing business ideas that were still being formed, examining their economics, developing financial models, reviewing financing possibilities, challenging assumptions, identifying missing management capabilities, helping solve operational problems and determining what should happen next.

Some relationships were relatively short; others continued for months or years, occasionally across multiple assignments. Each new engagement added experience not only concerning that company but also concerning how its circumstances compared with earlier companies, industries and problems.

That depth of involvement is what makes the industry breadth particularly meaningful. Understanding what happened inside a company, why particular decisions were made and what followed can provide insights that simply reading about a business from the outside does not.

Compound Knowledge™ — Connecting the Dots

This is where my “connect the dots” metaphor begins. When I refer to a dot, I mean 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 is therefore not one dot. A single engagement may create hundreds or thousands of them. Every new assignment introduces additional information that may be compared with what happened in earlier businesses, and sometimes the most useful insight arises from recognizing a connection between situations that initially appear unrelated.

A financing problem in one industry may illuminate a pricing problem in another. A management conflict encountered many years earlier may provide perspective on a founder dispute today. A company that suffered because of premature hiring may suggest questions worth asking before a completely different business expands its management team.

When thousands of clients and approximately 33,000 mentoring relationships have each contributed experiences, the range of potentially useful connections becomes enormous. That expanding reservoir of remembered patterns, exceptions, nuances, questions and possibilities is what I call Compound Knowledge™.

EXPLORE COMPOUND KNOWLEDGE™

Eventually, You Begin to Recognize Patterns of Patterns

At first, experience helps you recognize individual recurring problems. As the experience base grows, it becomes possible to recognize combinations: the kinds of management weakness that often accompany unrealistic financial assumptions, the business-model problems concealed by what appears to be a fundraising problem, or the warning signs that a company is treating symptoms while the underlying cause remains unresolved.

Those interconnections are especially important in startups because the consequences of an incorrect assumption may spread across the entire company. A projected revenue ramp determines not only expected sales but also cash requirements, recruiting plans, product capacity, financing needs, marketing spending and the amount of time available before additional capital is needed.

W Cubed™ is designed to help founders see these relationships rather than treating every department, financial schedule and action item as an isolated assignment.

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AI Arsenal™ — Turning Startup Knowledge Into Working Deliverables

W Cubed™ provides the framework for identifying and coordinating the work a startup needs to accomplish. AI Arsenal™ Lite complements that framework with 50 guided AI workflows intended to help entrepreneurs produce practical documents, financial analyses, spreadsheets, scorecards, business plans and action plans using information about their own companies.

The purpose is to reduce the amount of expensive human professional time spent on routine first-pass production work. A founder can use AI to organize information, prepare preliminary analyses, explore scenarios and identify missing facts, then focus human judgment where it is most valuable: evaluating whether the important assumptions are correct and whether the proposed decisions make sense.

AI-generated work must still be checked carefully, and a comprehensive-looking document does not guarantee that its conclusions are sound. The value of the combination comes from using structured methodology, AI production assistance and experienced judgment for the different jobs each is best suited to perform.

DISCOVER AI ARSENAL™ LITE — 50 GUIDED WORKFLOWS

Client Diversity Is Only One Part of the Evidence

The industry and geographic history on this page illustrates the breadth of my consulting experience. The Testimonials / Performance Evaluations page provides another perspective by allowing visitors to read what clients actually said after working with me.

My Professional Profile describes the operating, fundraising, securities, technology, real-estate and corporate experience underlying this work.

The Compound Knowledge™ page explains in much greater depth why accumulated experience can become increasingly useful as connections form among the lessons learned from many companies and industries. These resources describe historical experience and do not guarantee results for a new founder.

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My Consulting Availability Is Intentionally Limited

After more than four and a half decades of building companies, raising capital, mentoring founders and advising startup and emerging-company CEOs, I am semi-retired. My primary professional focus is now the Five Year Life™ publishing program and preserving as much of the Compound Knowledge™ I have accumulated as possible through books, methodologies and other resources.

I have made available a limited allocation of no more than 100 ten-hour consulting retainer blocks through the current W Cubed™ founder initiative. Former CEO RESOURCE LLC clients receive first consideration, and I selectively accept new startup engagements when my experience appears well matched to the circumstances.

The standard consulting retainer is $2,500 for ten hours, with Priority and Top Priority scheduling options described separately. The most useful work often involves challenging high-consequence driving assumptions, examining financial models, reviewing Go/No-Go decisions and identifying risks that a founder may not have recognized. Acceptance and scheduling remain subject to availability and the applicable engagement terms.

You Do Not Have to Hire Me to Benefit From What I Have Learned

That is one of the principal reasons I created W Cubed™ Founder Launch. I cannot personally mentor every entrepreneur who might benefit from the lessons I have accumulated, but I can organize and share those lessons in a way that allows founders to begin using them independently.

The complete W Cubed™ methodology is free. Start there, develop your own action plans and critical assumptions, and consider AI Arsenal™ Lite when you want assistance turning that planning work into company-specific deliverables. If you eventually reach a decision where decades of accumulated executive judgment would be worth purchasing, the consulting option remains available within my limited schedule.

START WITH W CUBED™ — COMPLETE + FREE

Best wishes for stellar success,

Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
CEO & Chief ImpleMentor™
CEO RESOURCE LLC

ChiefImpleMentor.com