Cost, time, confidentiality, who is in the group, and how someone gets in. Answered directly, because the ones nobody answers are the ones that stop people.
CEOs who thrive in these groups share seven traits:
Fit matters more here than almost anything else, because the wrong member changes the room for everyone in it. Read that list honestly. Most CEOs who recognize themselves in it earn back the time and the dues many times over.
A monthly meeting of about eight hours, plus a one-to-one session. Roughly four percent of a working year.
Most CEOs ask about the opportunity cost of attending. That is backwards. The real question is the opportunity cost of another day spent working in the business instead of on it.
On game day, when a player is not performing, the coach does not run onto the field and play the position. The coach builds a team and a bench that makes that unnecessary. Most CEOs do the opposite and then wonder where the week went.
Several members started at eighty-hour weeks, strained marriages, and high stress. Two or three years in, they were working one day a week while top and bottom lines quadrupled.
Almost every CEO starts there. It feels like a fact about the team. It is usually a belief about the team, and the two are easy to confuse.
Three things are worth separating. Sometimes the work was handed over but the authority was not, so people own tasks instead of outcomes and every real decision still comes back. Sometimes expectations were never made explicit, so nobody actually knows what good looks like. And sometimes the person is genuinely wrong for the seat, which the CEO has usually known for a while.
The first two are the common ones, and both are fixable without changing a single person on the payroll. The third is a decision most CEOs delay far longer than they should.
This is one of the most frequent topics in the room, because almost everyone there has worked through some version of it. The CEOs who do come out growing faster, making fewer expensive mistakes, and getting a significant amount of their time back.
The reason given is rarely the real one. Most cite a need for better decisions or growth, and those are true.
Underneath, three things come up repeatedly. It is lonely at the top, and there are questions a CEO cannot ask their team, their board, or their spouse. Second, imposter syndrome, which almost every chief executive carries and almost none discuss. Third, wanting to build a company of A players and not knowing where to start.
The room addresses all three, because everyone in it has felt the same.
There is also access to something no single company can build: the lessons learned across tens of millions of hours of closed-door conversation with chief executives and business owners, plus more than thirty member networks for reaching peers directly between meetings.
Almost every business problem, traced far enough back, is a people and culture problem. Nobody teaches that. Business schools do not, and most CEOs learn it by experimenting on their own companies, slowly and expensively.
A room of fifteen or twenty peers working that same class of problem every month shortens the learning curve dramatically.
A 2017 analysis of Dun and Bradstreet data found companies grew 2.2 times faster after joining Vistage. In the 2009 recession, member companies grew 5.8 percent while comparable businesses declined 9.2 percent. In 2020, during COVID, Vistage CEO members grew revenue 4.6 percent on average while comparable non-member companies declined 4.7 percent, across 1,897 member companies. Vistage member companies average more than 21 years in business, in a country where most businesses fail inside five.
During COVID, a member supplying a major grocery chain won a million-dollar order for banana muffins, then hit a supply chain wall and could not source banana paste. Nearly three hundred thousand dollars in profit was about to walk out the door. He asked the wider Vistage community, and ten days later, twenty-eight thousand pounds of paste arrived. He filled the order.
Members who started at eighty-hour weeks were working one day a week two or three years later, with top and bottom lines quadrupled. And in thirteen years of chairing, the record is a member who traced five hundred years' worth of dues to a single idea from a single meeting.
Vistage is a peer advisory organization for chief executives. It has been running for 68 years and has more than 45,000 members in 40 countries. Members meet monthly in small groups of non-competing CEOs, led by a Chair, to work through the decisions they are facing.
The premise is simple: a CEO surrounded by employees, investors, and advisors is surrounded by people with a stake in the answer. A room of peers has no such stake. The only agenda in the room is helping each member reach the best possible outcome for themselves and for their company.
Across Vistage, members run businesses from half a million dollars in revenue to north of twenty-five billion, with most between ten and two hundred fifty million. The majority are privately held, many of them family owned, alongside public companies and private equity-backed businesses.
Groups meet monthly, for about eight hours. Seven of the twelve meetings a year include a speaker workshop, running two and a half to three hours. The rest of the day is issue processing, a structured method refined over tens of millions of hours of closed-door conversation with chief executives. The group focuses intensely on one member's challenge at a time, typically forty-five to ninety minutes each.
About three-quarters of the time, the member has misidentified the issue. Much of the conversation goes into finding the real one, and it usually sits in a blind spot: the CEO's own role in creating or sustaining the problem.
The work is done with questions, not advice. Members commit in front of the room, and the group follows up the next month.
Seven of the twelve meetings a year include a speaker workshop of two and a half to three hours.
The second half of that question is the more useful one, and the answer is in how speakers are selected. Members rate every one of them, and they are asked something harder than whether they enjoyed the session: would you recommend this workshop to other CEOs? Speakers who are less than excellent fall out of the system quickly.
The effect is that it is rare for a member to leave a workshop without a significant takeaway. A change in how they run the business or how they lead it, not a page of notes nobody ever acts on.
Yes, without exception. What is said in the room stays in the room, and a member who breaks that is asked to leave the group immediately.
No. Groups are composed of non-competing CEOs by design, and existing members hold a blocking right: any member can veto a candidate who competes with them or presents a conflict for any reason. Nobody in the room has equity in your company, reports to you, or reports on you.
Across Vistage, six years on average. In these groups, one member stayed eleven and a half of the thirteen years since Jed started chairing, and several others passed ten.
Dues depend on which group fits. As a rough guide, annually:
Dues are billed monthly, set by Vistage, and adjusted annually, typically each October, usually by three to five percent.
Most groups also take an annual retreat that spouses attend. How elaborate that is, and therefore what it costs, is the group's own decision rather than a fixed figure.
Whether that is expensive depends entirely on what comes back. In thirteen years of chairing, the record is a member who traced five hundred years' worth of dues to a single idea from a single meeting.
The exact number for the group that suits you comes up in the first conversation.
Groups launch with eight members and build toward sixteen to twenty. Membership fluctuates. Three members recently left one group inside three months, all because they had exited their companies and reached financial independence, in part through work done in the room.
Most departures are good news. Members exit their companies and reach financial independence, sometimes in part through work done in the room. Three members left one group inside three months for exactly that reason. Others retire. Others relocate out of state, which matters more for the in-person group. In that case, they can move into the virtual group, or Jed helps them find a Vistage group in their new location.
Less often, someone decides it is not a fit or is asked to leave for breaching confidentiality or for failing to bring their A game to the room.
No. Membership is month-to-month for the first three months. After that, members are required to give Vistage 90 days' notice.
There is one other requirement: a member who is thinking about leaving raises it with the group at their next meeting. Departures that get discussed in the room tend to be better decisions than departures that do not.
With Vistage. Members contract with Vistage directly. Vistage sets the dues, bills them monthly, and receives the 90 days' notice if a member decides to leave.
Chairs are independent contractors who run their own practices. The Chair builds the group, runs the monthly meeting, and works one-to-one with each member, but the membership itself sits with Vistage. That is also why the programs, the speakers, and the member networks come with it.
It also means a group does not depend on one person indefinitely. If a Chair stops chairing, the group most often continues under another Chair. Occasionally a group decides to disband instead.
A coach works with one person and brings one perspective. A consultant is paid to produce an answer, and both are hired and paid by the CEO, so the incentive runs one direction. A room of peers has no economic relationship with the member at all, which is why they will say the thing nobody else will.
The three are not mutually exclusive. Members of the two CEO groups get monthly one-to-one sessions as part of membership, with the same Chair who sees them in the room every month.
Ninety minutes to two hours a month between the member and the Chair. Two things happen there that cannot happen in the room.
First, members raise issues they are not yet ready to put in front of the group and work out how to present them and what the options actually are.
Second, the Chair connects the member to the wider Vistage resources, without spending the group's time on one person's situation.
During COVID, a member supplying a major grocery chain won a million-dollar order for banana muffins, then hit a supply chain wall and could not source banana paste. Nearly three hundred thousand dollars in profit was about to walk out the door. He asked the wider Vistage community, and ten days later, twenty-eight thousand pounds of paste arrived. He filled the order.
Three:
Which group fits depends on who you are, not on what is convenient.
No. Only one of the three groups meets in person in Los Angeles.
The second CEO group meets on Zoom nine times a year and in person three times, built for exactly this situation. The Key and Small Business group meets on Zoom.
Yes. The hybrid Key and Small Business group is built for the C-suite and for owners of companies under $5 million in revenue. It meets on Zoom. The company is smaller. The decisions are not.
It runs on the same format as the CEO groups, with one difference: the monthly one-to-one sessions are optional and available separately.
Members take turns hosting, at a location of their choice. Often that is their own offices, which gives the group a look at each other's businesses. Members without space to accommodate the group can borrow another member's office or use one of several free meeting facilities the group has access to, if available. Failing that, a hotel meeting room for the day.
The group is. Not the Chair.
Members refer candidates from their own networks, and the combined networks of fifteen or twenty chief executives are vastly larger than any one Chair's. Members also know better than anyone what kind of person would raise the quality of the room they sit in every month.
It also means the people already in the room have a real stake in who joins it. Nobody is filling a seat.
Yes, and for most CEOs it turns out to matter as much as their own seat.
Vistage runs core leadership programs across the whole organizational hierarchy: for the C-suite, for vice presidents, and for managers and directors. Which solves a problem most CEOs recognize immediately. They do not have the time to coach and develop their people, and often their senior leaders have neither the time nor the skill to do it either.
There is a second effect that is easy to underestimate. Sixty-eight years, more than 45,000 members, and tens of millions of hours of closed-door conversation with leaders of businesses of every size and industry produce a body of hard-won practice. Running programs at several levels at once brings that into the company rather than into one person's head, and it gives the organization a common language for how decisions get made and how people are held to account.
No. Jed also delivers leadership workshops outside Vistage, through his company Infiniti Leadership. They are available to any leadership team, at any company, of any size, and have been delivered for organizations from startups to firms above one billion dollars in revenue.
Two primarily. Jed is certified in Patrick Lencioni's The Six Types of Working Genius, which identifies the kinds of work each person is energized by, can sustain, or genuinely struggles with. He has also spent five years facilitating The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, including several workshops for a division of Amazon.
Additional tracks cover delegation and accountability, and carefrontational communication: how to have direct and difficult conversations without damaging relationships.
A 30-minute discovery call is enough to work out the best fit.
Jed Daly is a Vistage Chair and CEO advisor in Los Angeles and has spent 36 years working almost exclusively with chief executives.
For the first two decades, that meant helping entertainment CEOs find capital and structure or monitor their deals. Some highlights include the deal structure for the Star Wars prequels for Lucasfilm and the business plan and capital raise that launched Lionsgate. For the last 13 years, it has meant helping CEOs become even better leaders: chairing CEO and C-suite peer groups and spending more than 750 hours a year in confidential conversation with chief executives.
Members who arrived working eighty-hour weeks were down to one day a week two or three years later, with top and bottom lines quadrupled.
He holds an MBA and an MA in Communications from Stanford, and a BA from Duke.
Almost every business problem, traced far enough back, is a people and culture problem. Nobody teaches that, and most CEOs learn it by experimenting on their own companies. Keeping the room on that work is the Chair's job.
The Chair builds the group, runs the monthly meeting, and holds the standard for the quality of the questions asked in it. Between meetings, the Chair works one-to-one with each member, and focuses the resources of Vistage (the programs, the speakers, the member networks, the accumulated practice of more than 45,000 chief executives) on each member's challenges.
A Chair works as a coach, not a consultant. Consultants provide answers. Coaches ask questions. We don't answer your questions, we question your answers.
No. Chairs are independent contractors, each running their own business. Vistage provides the back office, the brand, marketing support, content, and administration of more than thirty member networks that let members reach each other directly between meetings.
A conversation, and it runs in both directions. Where you are, where you want to go, and whether the room is a fit for both sides.
This is closer to an admissions process than a sales process. Adding someone who is not a fit does the group no good, and it does the candidate no good either.
Start a conversation, or read more about what happens in the room.
Yes, and it runs in both directions.
It starts with two preliminary conversations, working out whether there is a fit and whether it is worth going further. If it is, the next step is meeting members of the group.
That conversation does two jobs at once. It gives the candidate the chance to hear directly from members what they are actually getting out of it. And it gives the members the chance to ask their own questions and decide whether this candidate would add to the room.
A CEO joining a Vistage group is admitted by the people already in it, not sold a seat.
Questions, mostly. What the business looks like, what is hard about running it right now, what is hard about being a CEO, and what you want to be true in three years. By the end, both sides usually know whether it is worth a second conversation.
Some questions only get answered by talking. Thirty minutes is usually enough for both sides to know whether it is worth a second one.
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