Recent Clients – Is Your Industry Included?

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 businesses.

Some have been technology startups. Others have been manufacturers, healthcare companies, real-estate businesses, financial-services firms, retailers, media companies, professional-service businesses, nonprofits, restaurants, consumer-product companies, online businesses and organizations that do not fit neatly into any conventional category.

The differences matter. Every industry has its own economics, terminology, customers, competitive structure, regulatory environment and operating realities.

But after working closely enough with enough businesses, another reality becomes equally important: many supposedly unique business problems contain elements that have appeared before in entirely different settings.

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 range has repeatedly required me to bridge technical, financial, strategic, investor and implementation thinking.

Some client businesses are sufficiently proprietary that even identifying the industry could reveal too much about what they were building. The list below is therefore a representative sampling of the breadth of CEO RESOURCE LLC’s work rather than a complete census of every engagement.

CEO RESOURCE LLC has worked directly with startup and emerging companies and their CEOs in 49 of the 50 states and in more than 70 countries across six of the seven continents.

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.

This is not the kind of experience created by briefly selling a product to thousands of businesses and then moving on.

My work has typically involved working directly one-on-one with individual founders and CEOs — learning what they were trying to build, understanding their strategies, examining the inside workings of their businesses, crystallizing business models that were sometimes still fuzzy, pressure-testing assumptions, building plans, developing financial models, identifying missing pieces, helping solve problems and determining what needed to happen next.

Some engagements were relatively short. Others continued for months or years. Each exposed me to a different combination of people, markets, decisions, problems, tradeoffs and outcomes.

That is a very different kind of exposure to a company than simply observing it from the outside.

This is where my “connect the dots” metaphor begins.

When I use the word 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.

With every new company, I learned new things. But the larger value was not simply adding another isolated experience to the pile. Each new experience could be compared with and connected to experiences accumulated from earlier companies.

A financing problem in one industry might illuminate a pricing problem in another. A management conflict encountered years earlier might help explain a founder dispute today. A pivot that saved one company might suggest an entirely different opportunity in another business.

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

At first, experience helps you recognize individual recurring problems.

With a much larger experience base, you can begin recognizing combinations: the kinds of management weakness that often accompany unrealistic financial assumptions; the business-model problem that repeatedly hides behind a supposed fundraising problem; or the warning signs that a company is treating a symptom while the underlying cause remains untouched.

That does not mean every situation has been seen before. It means a new situation can be compared against a much larger range of prior situations before deciding what may actually be happening.

The industry and geographic record above demonstrates breadth. The Testimonials / Performance Evaluations page lets you read what many clients actually said after working with me.

The Profile page provides the operating, fundraising, securities, technology, software, real-estate and corporate history behind the experience base.

And the full Compound Knowledge™ page explains in much greater depth why I believe decades of varied experience can become substantially more useful when the lessons begin connecting with one another.

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

Former CEO RESOURCE LLC clients receive first consideration, and I selectively accept new startup engagements where I believe the fit is strong and my experience can create meaningful leverage.