Peers Help CEOs with Pressure of Running Firms

An article by the Dallas Morning News' Cheryl Hall

A host of dilemmas and great expectations is represented at the table. 

John Brown, chairman of a steel housing manufacturer, is wrestling with the sudden death of his president and longtime friend. Michael Cope, chairman of Interphase, has weathered the "all-absorbing" trauma of laying of 15% of his computer equipment company workers.
 

Dodee Frost, Merrill Lynch financial consultant in Dallas by week, travels to Houston each weekend to tend her father's direct-mail business after a stroke left him incapacitated. Her attention-to-detail philosophy, which is the steering the company back to profitability, is polar opposite of her dad's. And Mike Sheaffer hopes to create a common purpose among his 130 employees at his electrical parts company. If Hi-Line, Inc., sells $16.9 million in 15-cent doodads this year, the entire staff and spouses get treated to a one-week cruise. Failure to reach the 20% increase goal means no one leaves landlocked Dallas.

Them times a year, this group of 10 CEOs shares company secrets with peers, who because they understand the pressures of running a small- to medium-size business, can offer real-world suggestions. 

Group therapy, chief executive style.

"No one ministers to the pastor," said Ms. Frost, recalling an old saying. "As a CEO, there's no one to pour  our hearts and souls out to. It's wonderful to have an outlet to say, 'These are the real problems,' and know  that it's not going anywhere. You receive sympathy and real answers."

She also finds common solutions that she can offer her private investment clients at Merrill Lynch.

Ms. Frost and the others have been jawboning and commiserating for 31/2 years s a presidential advisory council run by the Chief Executive Officer's Club, Inc.

Elsewhere in Dallas, two other councils caucus regularly, and a fourth is being formed. Thirteen more operating in Baltimore, Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco.

The Executive Committee of San Diego offers a similar concept to its 3,000 members in 50 cities, including about 60 members in six Dallas advisory groups. 

Joe Mancuso, president of the nonprofit New York-based CEO Club, says business owners want unbiased, intelligent feedback—even when it dictates drastic action such as firing a top executive, laying off staff or giving up personal authority to better-trained employees.

"It's very hard to go against the opinion of 10 CEOs who aren't selling you ongoing consulting services," he says. "It's impossible, actually. The opinion of a group of outside peers is a very powerful thing."

Dr. Mancuso, who has a doctorate in education administration from Boston University, is emotionally tied to the entrepreneur, having been one since he was a teen-ager.

He worked his way through undergraduate engineering school by promoting pop concerts for artists such as Peter, Paul, and Mary, Chubby Checker, and Roger Williams.

"I always used the money from whatever event to pay the next month's tuition," he recalls. "I made enough money from Johny Mathis to make it to Harvard Business School."

After getting his MBA, he headed the management department or Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a small engineering school outside Boston, and worked on his doctorate. Despite the security of academia, he was bored and wanted to go out on his own. "it was a novel thought for a tenured professor to leave school with a half-baked idea of organizing entrepreneurs into a self-help group."

Never one to spend extra dollars, he saved attorney fees by using the school's charter to set up his business.

"I crossed off the girls' volleyball team and things that didn't apply. The bare bones that was left became my charter."

In 1978, the Center for Entrepreneurial Management came to be.

Now the 59-year old makes entrepreneuring his business, operating his nonprofit organization from his New York penthouse. He touts it as the oldest and larges nonprofit membership association serving entrepreneurs and CEOs in America, with 3,000 members in annuals revenues of about $2million.

"I call it a lifestyle business, " he says during a recent trip to Dallas. He earns a comfortable living and mingles constantly with business owners—who Dr. Mancuso views a s the nation's true risk-takers and job creators.

His work also provides valuable information used in the 22 books on small business management that he's authored and published primarily through Simon & Schuster. "I've sold over a million," he says with a satisfied grin. "But unlike the lucky guys like Tom Peters (author of In Search of Excellence), who sold them all at once, I've sold them one at a time."

Four years ago, Dr. Mancuso and Dallas businessman John Dealey wanted to augment the Center's Chief Executive Officers Club, which brings in eight speakers each year to share how-to and success stories at its eight U.S. chapters. The duo studied the work being done by the Executive Committee in San Diego, which has been bringing top executives together for 34 years, and adopted the idea.

Dr. Mancuso facilitates one Presidential Advisory Council in Dallas, and Mr. Dealey is responsible for two and is forming the fourth group. Members, who pay $1,000 to belong to the CEO Club, spend an additional $4,000 a year to participate in a PAC.

"When you say 'PACs,' everyone thinks of political action committees," Dr. Mancuso says. "But I think of it as a wolf pack. It takes about a dozen wolves to bring down a big bear."

The bear, to Dr. Mancuso's way of thinking, is "any bad buy or problem hurting the business."

The Executive Committee members, who pay annual dues of $8,400 and a one-time initiation fee of $750, are typically CEOs at companies with $12 million to $15 million in annual revenue, although one Dallas member tops the chart with a nearly $1 billion in sales.

That's fairly similar to the profile of Dr. Mancuso's members, who—including the 50 in the Dallas chapter—are the top officers of companies with $20 million in revenue and 100 to 200 employees.

At monthly Executive Committee sessions, half of the day is devoted to discussion the members' business, and a resource specialist spends the afternoon talking about the latest trends and hot business topics. 

At the CEO Club meetings, the location rotates so that each members company is visited once a year. General discussion in the morning is followed by an intense second-half session  in which the host's business is dissected and analyzed.

On this day, Aggie Jordan-DeLaurenti's training and service contract company, J-DL, Inc., is under the microscope.

She wants ways to home in on commercial business so that her company is less vulnerable to the vagaries of the government, which is proving to be a "large, sluggish monster." The unpredictable nature of federal business is making it less and less desirable.

Dr. Jordan-DeLaurenti spent $100,000 making an unsuccessful proposal for a $150 million contract to provide training for air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration. Just as well, she shays in retrospect. The actual business that will come from the FAA deal appears  to be much less than originally thought.

She wants to know what pat ho take when the business she's in is dying.

The group pints out that she's been smart enough to build her business from nothing. Since J-DL  seems to be financially sound. she has enough time to do a 180-degree turn and develop her commercial business by looking at utility companies, schools and other organization that have training needs.

No shocking revelations there, she admits, but the advice strengthens her self-confidence and solidifies her thinking.

"It gives you help," Dr. Jordan-DeLaurenti says afterward. "It doesn't give you a way. You can only find that way yourself."

next day a good climbing day and other climbers found and rescued him. They carried him off the mountain in a stretcher, estimating he’d been in the snow for over nine hours.

He has severe frostbite on all his fingers and several toes. It’s too early to say, but the odds are he will lose several tips of his fingers and toes. He wears bandages now in hopes of rejuvenating his extremities.

Now for the lifetime lesson.

Chris recalls reading in an old Jack London short story ("To Build a Fire") that you mustn’t fall asleep when you are in such a predicament. Falling asleep spells sure death. He also says you have to have lots of topics to keep your mind awake in -10° weather and 100-mile-per-hour wind while lying face down in the snow. Those thoughts have to last nine hours.

The one saving thought, he recalls, was that "I just paid $7,000 for a CEO Club lifetime membership and I’ll be damned if that Mancuso will outlive me." He repeated that thought process millions of times to keep himself awake. He says it was the one that gave him desire.

Remember a fairy tale starts out with "Once upon a time" and an entrepreneurial tale starts out "You ain’t gonna believe this." Mr. Chris Walker told this story about two weeks after his return to the U.S.A. at his Washington PAC meeting. It’s a very moving and touching story. What he forgot to mention is that CEO Club lifetime membership depends more on Mancuso’s life than his own!

Chris is an inspiration to so many, so we felt it necessary to tell you this CEO story.

As with all great CEOs and entrepreneurs, they have a way to turn lemons into lemonade. Chris is now constructing a shelter with heat and water at the location where he collapsed. He figures it will save a couple of lives annually and be a gift to other mountain climbers. The Washington, DC, PAC all wanted to go to Argentina to see the shelter but no one was willing to climb 20,000 feet to go inside. We agreed to settle for photographs.