When CEOs Meet, Things Can Take a Surprising Turn

An article by the Baltimore Business  Journal's Margie Freaney

As its name implies, the Chief Executive Officers Club is designed to be exclusive, with membership restricted to the leaders of businesses that do more than $2 million in annual sales. Executives must be invited to join—the membership list is confidential—and they must pay $1,200 dues annually ($6,500 lifetime), plus a $500 initiation fee.

So what goes on at these meetings, anyway? For one thing, they’re four hours long—from 10 am to 2 pm on a weekday—though that includes lunch at the Center Club and usually a speaker.

And everything runs right on schedule, perhaps because the founder, Douglas Strouse, has a Ph.D. in organizational management.

The real "meat" of the meeting, according to Strouse, is a roundtable discussion, where members break into groups to talk about selected topics. The sessions are designed to prompt members to share problems and solutions frankly.

That was Strouse’s reason for founding the Baltimore chapter. It’s only a year old, but with 47 members, it already has leaped into second place among the dozen CEO Clubs in the country (New York is the largest).

"When you’re running a company, you often don’t have anyone to talk to, anyone to share information with," says Strouse, 44, co-owner of Betz & Strouse Inc., a litigation services company headquartered in Baltimore.

"The message is, it’s OK to be at the top. You don’t have to be alone," he says.

This month’s roundtables are about hiring top-level executives, using public relations strategies to boost sales, and delegating tasks. During the session on hiring, several participants admit they’ve made mistakes that cost them thousands of dollars.

Later on in the women’s restroom, an even franker talk takes place. A CEO tells how she resolved serious internal problems, including embezzlement and sabotage, that threatened to destroy her business.

"You couldn’t talk about this kind of thing with anyone else." murmurs one of those listening.

Tony Trantas, a co-owner and founder of Levtran Enterprises Inc., which owns the Athletic Attic sports shoe stores and the Warehouse home fitness equipment chain, says bluntly that he didn’t want to join the CEO Club, but Strouse convinced him to come to a meeting.

At that session, the speaker discussed "100 ways to increase your profits." Trantas found out a number of them worked.

He agrees with Strouse that it’s difficult to talk to most people about business when you own or run a company.

"If you’re making money, you can’t tell the world. And if you have problems, you can’t talk about them," he says.

Everyone likes today’s speaker, Frank W. Abagnale, a convicted felon billed as "the world’s greatest con man" and the subject of a book (Catch Me If You Can, published by Simon and Schuster).

Before he reached age 21, he had posed for two years as a Pan Am pilot, flying around the world for free; served as chief resident pediatrician at a Georgia hospital; passed the bar in Louisiana and worked as an assistant district attorney; and then taught for a full semester as a Ph.D. at Brigham Young University.

Along the way, he passed $2.5 million in bad checks, which eventually landed him in jail. He was released early when he agreed to serve as a fraud specialist for the U.S. government.

Members of the CEO Club listen raptly and laugh often as the charming and witty Abagnale tells his life story.

But there’s a poignant twist at the end, when he tells the reason for the con: He ran away from home at age 16 because his parents were divorcing, and he never saw his beloved father again. In fact, he cried himself to sleep every night until he was 19 years old.

By the time he finishes talking about his father, most of those in the room are blinking hard or openly blotting their faces with their dinner napkins.

"So many entrepreneurs get caught up in their business and it becomes their entire life. They forget what’s important. It’s like the saying, "No one ever said on his deathbed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office,’ " Strouse says later. "I think this really hit home to the members."