Greetings!
What is the most important business decision you are facing today? Chances are, it might be the most important decision you have to make in all of 2011. When you think about your role as CEO or leader of your organization - making critical decisions is the most important and often most difficult aspect of what you do. While we make thousands of decisions each week, most all of them while functioning on auto-pilot, there are key strategic issues that need to be addressed - and your ability to access whatever resources you have at your disposal in order to make the best decision possible can be the difference between life and death for your business. Making matters even worse, we typically must make most of these decisions without all the information we would need or like and often with less time than we would prefer. Last week I talked about getting your company fiscally fit - and offered a tool to help you achieve that (you can download the white-paper by clicking here). Of all the areas you can leverage to improve the financial foundation of your company, invariably, raising prices is the most effective. It is also, more many, the the solution most widely resisted. Some benefits are clear and compelling and some are less obvious. Improving margins and cash flow are unarguable, but the real benefits for most small and middle-market companies can also include better market positioning, culling clients or customers you would be better to rid yourself of - and in some cases, the opportunity to make more profit off of a smaller base of operations and lower overhead. You can read more about that at my blog in posting titled The True Cost of Deliberate Leadership - click here..., it may surprise you. Other tough decisions the CEOs I work with are talking about include investing in growth, replacing mediocre talent with top talent and how to adjust wages and benefits to remain competitive without going broke.
Without question, one of the best ways to get better at making better decisions is to have the benefit of an unbiased group of peers functioning as advisers on your behalf: people who face similar decisions at the same level and with the same degree of importance and consequences. In fact Benjamin Franklin met with a group of peers for more than 30 years - and this "Junto" is credited with supporting both Franklin's personal and professional successes - but also the launch of many of the great institutions we benefit from today in American society.
If you are in any way interested in an advisory peer group, please contact me. There are numerous options, including Vistage, and I would be happy to help guide you towards a solution and provider that would best fit your needs.
Wishing you a great week, always.
Philip R. Liebman
Managing Director, Strat 4
Group Chair, Vistage International
PS - If you are a CEO considering becoming a Vistage member - or in any CEO peer group, you should consider being my guest at my Vistage CEO meeting on January 26, 2011 when I will have Mitch Goozé present his full morning workshop on "Effective Marketing - How to Get It or Tell if You Already Have It". I still have one opening for a new member of this group and will be launching a new CEO Board in February - and have begun to select members for that group. Please contact me right away to preserve your place on the 26th.
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