Tag: The Savvy Entrepreneur

Advantages of CEO Peer Group Mentoring

Being the founder/CEO of a startup or small business can often be lonely, confusing, discouraging, and downright overwhelming. Most of us start a business around an idea we’re passionate about, and it often revolves around something we’re good at or know well.

But building and running a business requires many skills, and few of us are good at all of them. We need to make good decisions, but we don’t always have the expertise or skill to make them.

That’s why there are many CEO peer mentoring groups, both formal and informal. There are Meetup Groups, and online groups. But there are also in-person, more structured groups. For these groups, a time commitment is required, and a membership fee assessed.

There are nationwide organizations that match and facilitate these groups. The best-known is probably Vistage, but YPO and LX Council, among others, are also well-established.

And if you poke around, you’ll also find lots of CEO peer mentoring groups that are locally organized. Some are industry-focused. Others focus on startups. Some are based on religious affiliation. There are even groups for entrepreneurs who are moms, juggling business and family. Some focus meetings driven mostly by current member challenges, and others have a fairly formal curriculum.

Lori Dann’s President’s Leadership Council is a Chicago-based CEO peer mentoring group facilitator. She puts togethers groups of CEOs of small but fairly well-established businesses in non-competing industries. Lori says their working sessions are focused on solving existing problems experienced by the group members.

She joins The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show to share a bit of her own journey and how she decided to create her business.

Lori also offers some helpful tips on how to find the right CEO peer mentoring group for you, if you’re a CEO and/or founder.

Click on the arrow to take a listen!

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Tips to Successfully Scale Your Business

Thinking about scaling your small business?

There’s lots of great reasons to scale your business. Scaling often makes you more attractive to potential investors. It lets the founders/owners and other key people in the business grow professionally or allows them to focus on doing the things they are best at and enjoy most. And it can bring in more revenue, allowing the business to expand strategically.

Jeff Galas, CEO of OnPurpose Growth, is passionate about helping small businesses scale. But more than that, he is a process-driven guy who wants to make sure businesses scale the right way.

Jeff shares with The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show a bit about his structured process for helping businesses make sure they focus on the right things first, including whether they are really serious about scaling or not.

There are more than a few businesses out there whose owners say they want to scale, but their behavior. There are plenty of others that have successfully scaled, but left the owner(s) unhappy because they lost touch with the things in the business that mattered most to them.

Jeff believes that owners/founders need to be crystal clear about the parts of being in the business that makes them happy and soul-searching about where they want their scaling journey to take them. Jeff offers some insights about his process, and also shares some of the most common scaling mistakes he’s seen over the years.

Every business owner who has thought about scaling needs to listen to this interview!

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Matriarchy: Coaching Feminist Businesses

Allison Staiger’s company, The Matriarchy, is a great example of a company building a business around a very specific niche.

The Matriarchy coaches feminist women, helping them build caregiving businesses.

The Matriarchy is Allison’s second business venture. Her first, Highwire Therapy, is a counseling practice focused on perinatal mental health.

Allison joins The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show to chat about how she’s rebuilt her business after moving from Louisiana to Illinois, and has gone about finding new clients.

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Memoir For Me: Custom Memory Books

Nora Kerr’s company Memoir For Me began when her father was dying of prostate cancer and was told he only had 6-8 months to live. Nora took that opportunity to sit down with him over the course of several months. She asked him many of the questions she’d always had about him and his life, and worked to sort through and learn the stories behind the many photographs.

She found she truly loved doing this. She started volunteering her time to do it for friends and other family members, as well as members of her community that were nominated by neighbors.

Along the way, Nora realized that not only could she make money doing this, but that it was a perfect way to blend her writing and photography skills with her IT background. Thus, Memoir For Me, a custom life-story memory book company, was founded.

The biggest challenge, she’s found, is convincing people that their ordinary, everyday stories are worth capturing. That everyday people lead remarkable lives in the small things they do, and that these deserve to be captured. But customers are increasingly finding her, and Memoir For Me is growing steadily.

Memoir For Me has been self-funded so far, but is just starting to look for funding, as Nora is realizing the company can’t continue to grow without investments in personnel and systems. It’s a great story — in fact, The Savvy Entrepreneur hopes Nora takes time to document her very own everyday, remarkable story of how her company got started and has grown!

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Lavender Eucalyptus: Helping NonProfits Be More Strategic

Trina Ntmere and her company, Lavender Eucalyptus LLC, are passionate about helping nonprofits become more strategic.

By helping them do that, they raise more money, provide more valuable services, and make better use of scarce staff resources. She shares with The Savvy Entrepreneur some of the ways she and Lavender Eucalyptus do that.

Non-profits struggle just like for-profit companies with too much to do and too few resources, says Trina. And this problem is magnified when long-term strategy is murky, changing, or non-existent.

She knows not every non-profit is a good fit for Lavender Eucalyptus, and she has become creative along the way in helping her clients find funding for initiatives they work on with her.

Trina shares some great insights into non-profits, where entrepreneurial skills are needed just as much as in for-profit companies. She also is living proof that there are opportunities for entrepreneurs in working with non-profits.

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