How We Accelerated Growth Of An Executive Coaching Business & Hit 25% CAGR

Bill Glenn

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Published: June 23rd, 2022

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Bill Glenn

Founder, Crenshaw Associates

Founders

Employees

Crenshaw Associates

crenshawassociates.com

from New York, NY, USA

started January 1982

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Bill recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Bill recommends to grow your business!

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I’m Bill Glenn, Executive Chairman of Crenshaw Associates, a leading human capital advisory firm providing premier career and talent management services exclusively for global corporations, C-Suite and senior executives, CHRO’s, and heads of talent.

We focus on assessing, coaching, and advising senior executives and their teams to provide a range of services to accelerate business results.

Our main products fall under three primary services and underlying programs:

Integration & Onboarding
Coaching & Development
Transitions

Whether an executive is transitioning into a public, private, or private equity-owned role, our Integration & Onboarding program helps executives accelerate their ramp-up to productivity and quickly absorb the culture of the new company they joined. The program provides Executives with a jump start in conquering the cultural, political, strategic, and execution challenges they will face in their new role.

Our Coaching & Development programs sharpen the leadership skills of successful candidates and talent on the rise. Our methodology is rigorous and results-oriented to ensure the individual and corporation obtain tangible business results from their investment.

As executives navigate the next step in their careers, our Transition and Outplacement services support senior executives and answer the question “What’s next?”. We have successfully supported c-suite executives for forty years through significant marketplace changes, restructurings, and strategic shifts.

Our Suite of Services and products include myCAreer, CultureMappingTM, and Executive Leadership Assessments.

From the date of the acquisition in 2019 through the present, we’ve had a 25% CAGR and that’s coming out of 24 months of navigating through the pandemic and other geopolitical and economic factors which impacted business.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I have a strong background in leading and developing diverse teams. As a result of my personal experience, I understood why every executive needs a trusted advisor to reach peak performance.

During my tenure with American Express, I had been a client of Crenshaw’s, so I knew first-hand how valuable their services were to C-suite and senior executives.

Over the years, I made sound investment choices that put me in an excellent position to take this risk.

I started selling toothpaste for P&G in the backrooms of supermarkets and shops in Manhattan, ran the bottling operations in New Jersey with 600 teamsters for Pepsi, and ran the Pepsi foodservice business before moving to financial services at American Express. My last corporate job was CEO of American Express Global Business Travel (GBT), spun off by American Express to create an independent company. GBT was the largest global corporate travel business.

While this may read as typical large corporate roles, my assignments within these companies were anything but typical – most were autonomous business units that allowed me to set the strategy, reshape business models, develop data and insights functions and accelerate growth.

When I left AXP Global Business Travel and my rounds with PE firms, I received a call from Barb Bridendolph, CEO of Crenshaw, who I had known for 18 years. She told me that she and her partner were seeking a transaction and I was interested. I knew Crenshaw because Barb was my executive coach when I joined AXP from Pepsi. I had hired Crenshaw over the years to coach executives within my organizations and received great results. I liked the space. I had been running B2B businesses with B2B2C constructs for 20 years and this space was interesting, increasingly important, and complex as executives’ jobs became broader.

Barb has unparalleled experience working with senior executives. She is incredibly well respected and has a tremendous reputation in the industry for successful executive coaching. Barb has personally coached executives at AT&T, IBM and AMEX. She and her partner built a very strong business and I have always admired her tenacity and business acumen.

Crenshaw had strong positioning but, like others in this space, lacked some of the assets that could add significant value and differentiate the company from the competition. Barb is an exceptional executive and I knew we would make a great team. My goal was to figure out how to re-position Crenshaw to senior executives, CEOs, CHROs, and heads of talent.

Roger Enrico at PepsiCo once said, “You can’t pay enough for a great brand.” I agree- as long as you know how to capitalize on that brand’s equity brand and its assets to grow.

During my exploration after leaving AmEx with PE firms, I thought about where I could add the most value and drive a compelling value proposition. There were a few opportunities with companies that came up through the PE businesses that were probably $200 million companies, which is far smaller than the $2 billion or $6 billion companies I had managed. The PE firms were saying, “You only have big company experience. Can you run a small company?”

I knew Crenshaw historically because when I left Pepsi and joined American Express, they thought I needed an executive coach. After all, I’d gone from running a trucking company to financial services, and of course, I needed an executive coach.

Barb Bridendolph, the CEO of Crenshaw, became my executive coach. I had hired Crenshaw over the years, so I knew the brand well and I understood that there was an ability to add capital and a compelling value proposition.

I wanted to disrupt the executive talent industry. I got tired of hearing from PE companies that because I had been with a large company, I couldn’t run a small one. I guess I decided, “I’m gonna buy a small one.” I put my capital in Crenshaw. It was a combination of what I knew I could do from a business standpoint and I was also tired of people telling me what I couldn’t do and decided to do it.

I had an opportunity to think about a startup in this space, take an existing brand and scale it by creating a compelling value proposition, implementing data and insights into the value equation, and building a strong team.

Entrepreneurs may think they can do things alone- but the truth is, it takes a team of people around you to make things happen. Accelerated growth would not have been successful without my partner Barb and the team she developed.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

myCAreer is a proprietary technology platform we developed and brought to market to inform and engage our current clients and alumni. Hundreds of alumni are great advocates of the brand as a result of Barbs leadership, and today they are in positions to make decisions on executive services for their organizations. This tool was built by Barb and her partner, and I invested in it to improve the compliance protocol. It was rebuilt by Barb and I to improve the user interface, reconfirm the factors and dimensions, provide data protection and privacy.

The myCAreer platform was designed for executives to house all the work they completed with us. It also provides a platform to keep executives informed about new products, services, and current events. We recently hosted a webinar with Deloitte, which we announced and enabled registration through their myCAreer site.

We are strategically focused on capitalizing on our alumni relations, educating alumni on our current engagements and updating them on program development.

Barb is currently working to improve the myCAreer’ UI/UX and continually evolve the platform with the objective of a subscription-based platform with curated information and insights catered to executives.

Platform features:

Storage for career-related documents such as resumes, cover letters, executive assessments, and personal marketing stories.
Access to interactive tools, published resources, and webinars on career-related topics such as mastering networking, how to connect with executive recruiters, and becoming a Private Equity executive.

In addition, our CultureMapping™️ tool, a critical component of our integration program, is our unique and proprietary asset that identifies potential areas of cultural disconnection between new leaders and their teams. The tool provides a quantitative measurement of culture.

CultureMapping is a diagnostic tool that is often paired with an existing engagement, particularly for an executive new to a company or new senior assignment. The research, surveys, and personal experiences demonstrate that not understanding the norms, practices, and culture derail new executives and slow the road to full productivity. CultureMapping allows them to understand the culture they join across 32 factors and five dimensions. The tool enables the leader to identify the disconnects and congruencies between their predisposition vs. the team they are inheriting. We then present the findings and work with the leader and team to drive alignment.

Read: Intentionally Reforming Corporate Culture in Five Steps

Culture is a legacy term that has been used in corporations for years. If there is a disconnect and people don’t understand the company culture, it could derail growth. Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I expand that to go-to-market strategy and believe that culture devours execution. Our tools measure the cultural disposition of teams vs. teams or leaders vs. teams. The assessment battery is a way to recognize the differences and congruences against 32 factors and 5 dimensions.

READ: Culture Devours Execution

We’re on the first iteration of the platform, so we designed it based on some client/employee input with the functionality we believed we needed, primarily storage. The second iteration currently under production will be focused more on delivering information and resources to promote more interaction with the platform- access to published whitepapers, presentations, and webinars on executive career management.

The other features we’re focusing on in the next iteration include taking all the stored data on the platform and forming a data lake where we can spot trends and insights on career search and management using AI. From a design standpoint, we’re enhancing the UI/UX by going from less of a database to more of a library format and easier navigation.

Describe the process of launching the business.

I decided to invest in a 38-year-old company and relaunch it with the mission to become the fastest-growing, nationally recognized brand among human capital firms focused on leadership development.

I acquired Crenshaw Associates in 2019 with my own money and no outside funding. I knew the brand and the CEO Barb Bridendolph, who was my executive coach when I joined American Express as President of Merchant Services at PepsiCo in 2003.

Barb and I repositioned the brand to be expert-led, data and insights powered, and technology-enabled. One of our five strategic pillars was to rev up revenues through commercial excellence. During the re-launch, we met with existing customers and prospects and also hired a chief commercial officer to work with our CEO to build a dialogue.

I saw an opportunity to add data, insights, and enabling technology for a compelling, differentiated value proposition while preserving the critical 1-on-1 trusted advisor status that senior executives need.

It was not a typical startup experience. While we were refreshing our brand, updating our website, and building new platforms –– we continued to service our existing customers.

We’ve invested heavily in technology and our team. We also added customer-facing sales and client management talent, including a Chief Customer Officer and Chief Commercial Officer. In addition, we have an advisory board, which includes a former data and analytics officer who started the tech company, Zenon, and is a key partner in developing our platforms.

To announce our re-start, I initially talked to our employees, coaches, advisors, mentors, and experts about my background and reasons for the acquisition as well as the significant growth opportunities for career advancement.

We relaunched our website and brand positioning to the marketplace, developed our marketing and sales materials, and focused on developing brand positioning that differentiated us from the marketplace. Ericka Guerra was critical in spearheading and overseeing the execution of this project.

Crenshaws tagline emphasizes our historical track record of delivering today and developing for tomorrow.

Re-launching Crenshaw Associates together with Barb reinforced my experience of ensuring that 1099s were treated as part of our team. It also reinforced that being able to speak the language of the customer and have experience in this space is fundamental to delivering growth.

Create a compelling reason to buy based on the value you are delivering. We can accelerate business performance through our suite of services that enable companies to align strategy, value, and talent.

What is our differentiation and what is the value proposition? What differentiates you? Points of differentiation must be of value to the c-suite. The services you offer have to appeal to the customer. You need a lens to the customer or prospect to understand what their needs are. For example, for Crenshaw, customers' needs revolve around the ability to accelerate performance by improving the leadership capabilities of senior executives and teams. Boards of directors are asking executives to have metrics around culture. It is critically important, because culture affects the performance of the company. We have an asset (CultureMapping) that helps them do just that.

Focus on benefits. Crenshaw provides executive coaching and outplacement services for senior executives. However, today everybody in coaching says they do that. So, what do we do differently? We meet the needs of senior executives in corporations by being experts with corporate experience and using data and insights to deliver tangible value to the c-suite. See the difference? Features – benefits.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Why we do it: Ultimately, we want to help more people with the content we put out. We believe in an inbound marketing approach.

What has worked for us: The most successful marketing and advertising tactic we did that led to tangible growth and new accounts was repositioning our marketing strategy from a focus on the individual executive to a focus on enterprise. Before this strategy, we would coach or transition individual executives leading to sales of single engagements. By taking an enterprise approach, we’ve pivoted to closely partnering with CHRO’s of several blue-chip brands, leading to sales of multiple engagements at a time.

What hasn’t worked for us in the past that we won’t do again from a marketing perspective: Paid search engine ads such as Google Ads or LinkedIn ads aren’t a fit. With services that are niche to a particular market, our results were too broad, and dealing with the response rate of non-targeted incoming inquiries was more work than it was worth. The ads would pull in professionals who were not the right fit for our services or were looking for someone to introduce them to executive recruiters. The leads we received weren't the right fit for what we provide and/or they weren't looking for our type of services. LinkedIn has been a better fit for us to reach our target audience.

Newsletter: Our newsletter is read by CHROs and executives.

SEO: We are focused on organic growth and optimizing content for search engine visibility. The end goal is to help more people find the content so that the content can help them with any pressing pain points.

Content Strategy: From a content perspective, our focus is always on the end-user and how our content can help them. Crenshaw insights features market trends and B2B business intelligence. This article on Encore Careers has been our most popular. We tied it to the great resignation. We’ve seen interest from transition clients in Encore careers as an alternative to taking on another full-time role. The article had 2-4x more impressions on LinkedIn than our other recent posts. On the website, the Encore Careers article is the second highest visited page behind the homepage over the past year.

PR: Webinars are an important component of our public relations strategy. As an alumnus of Lehigh University, I am actively involved and have done several webinars. I was recently quoted in a Wall Street Journal article about executive compensation. The article was picked up by another outlet and led to a CEO calling me and asking about our services. Targeted public relations can be a powerful tool to help you reach an executive audience.

We continue to drive sales and acquire new customers the old fashion way by networking with existing and past relationships. But, for a 38-year-old relaunch, we needed to evolve our approach and elevate the brand by elevating our digital platforms, social media, and PR.

Thirty-eight years of experience in the business gave us a unique understanding of the changing needs of C-suite and senior executives, CHROs, and heads of talent. We built a differentiated value proposition that represented compelling reasons to buy and strong barriers to exit. So, how do we let CHROs and heads of talent know who we are?

First, we launched the Crenshaw Insights blog, which consists of compelling news articles with content ranging from optimizing integration and early engagement for senior executives to how board service can enhance an executive’s career. In addition, we publish case studies and host webinars on key industry trends. For example, we recently hosted a webinar with Deloitte and shared insights on the Six Tech Trends that Will Impact the Future of Business.

We launched myCAreer with additional content available exclusively to Crenshaw clients and alumni.

Any time we post new content, we send a marketing newsletter under the Crenshaw Insights brand to our existing clients and alumni with a call to action to our website and/or myCAreer. In addition, we share content on LinkedIn. We also leverage our coach's and executive advisors’ networks through LinkedIn.

All of this contributed to the growth of our business year over year with 70% repeat customers and 30% new customers. Our recurring revenue is attributed to great customer experience, communicating insights to key stakeholders, and responding to the changing needs of the executive and corporation.

Now that we have a strong growth rate, relevant content, and solid infrastructure along with our focus on commercial excellence, we are investing internally in social media, content, and PR.

Your content should offer key insights and analysis. Our content strategy revolves around market intelligence and market trends. For example, a topic we are currently exploring is a business transformation and Artificial Intelligence: How will HR change? We anticipate the rising need of companies who will be looking to place Executives with enhanced AI business acumen and technical integration experience. We have to be prepared to answer these questions by staying on top of market trends. Knowing what is coming up next is critical.

At Procter and Gamble, one of the senior executives early on in my career said, “Strategy, smategy. It’s all about execution.” What I learned is that regardless of the size of B2B businesses, senior executives, and particularly CEOs, don’t spend enough time on customers—either in person or just what the value proposition was. I focused on B2B2C businesses or B2B businesses with B2B2C constructs.

Lessons learned:

Don’t incrementalize and look at the size of the prize. Stay motivated by thinking about the size of the prize, the total available market, and looking at the long-term view. The turnaround from the pandemic will be a long road that impacts the future of work. These are not episodic events, like the tech bubble, 9/11, or the financial crisis. This is sustainable change. Companies have a history of giving you 3 or 4 percent growth targets. The objective is to look at the size of the available market and what investments you need to capture a larger share of that. Conservatively, if we can grow our business by 5-6 percent and that outpaces the company’s objective, that is a win. The objective of long-term growth and acceleration is to look at the total available market and then link your investments to what it will take to get there. Don’t only look at how you will grow your business 3-4 percent when the size of the prize could be a lot larger and the available market is huge. How do you grow market share? Capture more of the market.

Take care of your health. Physically and health-wise, it is extremely important to make sure I am doing the right thing. When I am active physically, I’m more active mentally, and that’s critical for peak performance.

Try it before you buy it. I had been a client of Crenshaw's before I decided to buy the company. I knew the team and the client base at Crenshaw understood their assets and were confident in how to capitalize on the strength of the brand to accelerate the business. When you acquire or invest in a company, you want to accelerate growth. I had been a client personally and I also hired Crenshaw for my team at American Express. You have to go beyond the fundamental due diligence and understand and appreciate their customers in a potential acquisition.

Companies don’t buy your product or services, they buy what they can do for them. When I was running the Global Business Travel business, we needed a compelling value proposition to the corporation as well as to their employees. Always keep an eye on the customer with compelling value propositions because customers don’t buy products, they buy what products can do for them.

Allow your definition of entrepreneurship to change. I used to not fashion myself as a true entrepreneur for two reasons. On the one hand, I had made decisions throughout my career to run the most autonomous business unit and act like an entrepreneur. The second is, though, that I didn’t put all my net worth at stake buying the company, so if it didn’t work out, I’d be personally disappointed, and there’s some money I would have lost—but it wasn’t going to break me. When I think about entrepreneurs who put everything on the line and at risk, I don’t put myself in the same category. But I like the idea of fashioning myself as an entrepreneur. The point is that there are different stages of entrepreneurship. You can be an entrepreneur in the second half of your life. These stories are often under looked but are critically important to tell because c-suite experience in traditional corporate America can be leveraged to build a business or re-start a business in phase two of your career. If you take away anything from this story, it is that. I hope my story inspires other people that it’s never too late to become an entrepreneur. A re-start requires entrepreneurial acumen. Even though you may not have built the initial business (Barb did), you are responsible for maintaining the business and growing it. That requires entrepreneurial skill, especially when it is on you to make things happen and hold a vision for the firm's future.

Bring in key resources to help you along the way. I’m not only writing the decks, but editing the decks, and making contacts with customers so it gets somewhat lonely. I’m relying on the network I had grown up with or been my mentors or my bosses to give me advice. Being able to bounce things off of others and being a sounding board and a trusted adviser is critical. Interestingly, that is exactly some of the things that we deliver to the CEOs and executives who we do business with.

Surround yourself with supportive people. Surround yourself with people who believe that you are going to make it and who remind you of this daily. My wife Lisa said there’s nothing to worry about if the company did not make it (we’re not in danger of this, don’t worry!). But not making it—is not what I signed up for, she would say. She had more confidence in what I could do than I did. As I looked at the industry paired with my experience, I saw that the right amount of capital could grow that business. I had a lot of confidence. But Lisa, I think, had more confidence. She was also supportive and said, “Don’t worry about it if it doesn’t work.” Even though she never told me that and didn’t think that it couldn’t work, I knew it was there. I’m fortunate to have three great daughters, too. They were proud of what I accomplished—not necessarily what I was going to do, but what I had accomplished- and that kept me going.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

While we have good representation and penetration across all sectors, the recent trends in healthcare and retail fit well with our core expertise. We continue to remain focused on senior executives. The available market is substantial and our experience and track record are well-positioned to grow and capture market share.

Our sales are primarily business development based on the Chairman, CEO, and CCO.

90% of our sales are referral-based. The large majority of new sales come through referrals from past clients and partners.

Plans to expand to new products/audiences/regions: We are looking to expand to new corporate customers and brands. Our goal is to obtain twenty new brands by the end of 2022. We are currently doing a rebuild of our client portal and expanding our CultureMapping product. Erica Guerra and Barb are spearheading this initiative with Alan Siegel and Kim Suter.

Technology represented 75% of our initial investment lineup. Today, we are profitable and growing with expanded margins and lower acquisition costs. We have invested in technology and our people and added customer-facing sales and client management people, including a Chief Customer Officer and Chief Commercial Officer. In addition, we have an advisory board, which includes a data and analytics CEO who started the tech company Zenon and is a key partner in developing our platforms.

Our short-term focus is on increasing brand awareness and equity, strengthening our proprietary assets, and powering up our existing proprietary assets – myCAreer, CultureMappingTM.

Long term, we want to continue to drive a 30% CAGR, ensure that our products continue to meet the changing needs of executives and the marketplace, and become the leading go-to firm in this sector.

Selection Assessment or Executive Leadership Assessment is our newest service offering. This is different from our Behavioral Assessments, which are tailored more toward development. Selection Assessment is more about grading an executive’s competencies to select them for a new role.

READ : How Executive Leadership Assessment Leads to Better Executive Talent Decisions.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Even though they are not employees, 1099s are still a valuable part of the team. Coming from typical large corporate companies, one thing I’ve had to learn (or readjust) is the rigor needed for placing investments and allocating resources in a company without the capital infrastructure of a global brand.

The last two years have also reinforced the criticality of the need for great talent, including understanding how to treat our 1099s in terms of how we communicate and engage with them to build company culture. The pandemic reconfirmed for me that data and insights represent a competitive advantage, both of which are needed to ensure we’re continuously meeting the needs of our customers.

Having the organization stay focused was helpful. I made it a point to keep them engaged by meeting every quarter as a team. I provided our team with guidance on marketplace goals.

The pandemic also created some interesting challenges for our business and HR customers (CHRO). At the time, executives were figuring out how to balance work and personal issues during an unprecedented time in our lives. CHROs were not focused on evolving their talent.

During this time, I participated in a couple of webinars from consulting firms that highlighted that for some companies like King Arthur’s Flour or Zoom, demand for their products grew exponentially, whereas, for companies like ours, demand went to zero. There was no playbook to address this unique challenge. So, we stayed around the rim and lent our support vs. aggressively selling. We focused on our existing customers and offered coaching sessions free of charge to help executives lead through the disruption. As a result, our cash flow started to decrease, but as we came out of the other side of this it resulted in thankful repeat customers, we were there for them.

One of the biggest errors I made was calculating speed to scale. While I have been running B2B and B2B2C businesses for years and recognized the long sales cycle, this was a much longer cycle impacted by our speed of hiring, learning the business and language, and firming up the infrastructure.

I pride myself on strict investment and capital allocation in large companies. I wasn’t just managing the P&L. At American Express, I chose not to run the consumer issuing business, but the merchant business, which was critically important to the company, but not necessarily the day-to-day focus of Ken Chennault, who was the CEO. I had experiences making P&L decisions that allowed me to look at more than just the top line and make decisions on capital allocation and investment prioritization, which helped a lot.

CHALLENGES & OBSTACLES

CHALLENGE 1: It’s hard to recruit great talent to a boutique company, especially since my network had been composed of senior executives from larger corporations. There’s a salary component, a bonus component, and equity and/or with large corporations, stock.

So that became more difficult than I anticipated, and still is the case—the people I wanted to bring in are people that I knew or knew of and connected with, and probably weren’t at the same stage of their career as I was. They also wanted a lot more equity than I was willing to give up from my ownership share in the company. That continues to be a challenge.

In a smaller company, surrounding yourself with premium talent is critically important and a bit lonely or difficult.

CHALLENGE 2: I only ever had to worry about getting beat up about my P&L performance when running a big business in the Global Business Travel space. So large businesses, $6 billion, GBT was a $2 billion spin-off and I never had to worry about cash flow. It was more about my P&L performance. Now, all of a sudden, I’m worried about how much cash we have in the business and the flow of cash. I never had to look at the bank account, which is something that I’m looking at today because I always managed the P&L very carefully and I am aware of cash flow in the P&L, but never fully had to worry about it. Today, that’s what I’m partially focused on. During the pandemic, it became a full-time job, rather than just occasionally looking at the bank account, or cash flow, and the P&L.

CHALLENGE 3: Executives were stressed out and needed a trusted advisor to talk to. We didn’t charge for it because we knew the environment they were in. Even the folks that I historically had a great relationship with—and had started to get new business from over the past year and a half—weren’t as open to the discussions that we had before, or open to me taking up their time. There are a lot of companies whose demand went to zero during the pandemic. In year one we grew 55%, and in 2020, our business ultimately wound up down 17%, which we’re pretty proud of. But for some time, it was very soft, and cash flows were very tight. We had to cut back on some of the investments I made.

Unfortunately, I had staffed up and added capital to grow the business because we were on a trajectory, so it became pretty difficult. But my focus was hanging around the rim, which means making sure that while we couldn’t—I knew we weren’t getting new engagements from the customers, but we wanted to stay connected. We remained connected by giving gratis sessions to some of the customers we knew were executives who were going under some stress and anxiety. Keeping our name involved in the conversation, and not necessarily soliciting business, but giving our feedback, advice, and observations on what we were hearing and seeing kept us in the game.

CHALLENGE 4: Zoom Fatigue. What’s been a bit troubling for us internally and for me is the same thing that has happened to executives in corporations, which is fourteen Zoom calls a day.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

From a customer-facing perspective, myCAreer, and CultureMappingTM are tools that I’m passionate about because we developed them.

The need for solid infrastructure and data is critical and not just for the insights we provide to our customers, but for internal use.

Crenshaw's favorite business tools:

SalesForce is a key customer relationship management (CRM) tool we leverage to manage our relationships and engagements with clients and prospects.

Salesforce Partner Communities. As a professional service company, our work will continue several months well after we've made our sale. Leveraging our CRM to track service delivery, specifically through our Partner Community interface, gives us the ability to track critical milestones with clients while maintaining secure divides between our sales and service data. Customers can view the progress of our experts' work in real-time within their organization, so they have an instant view of the impact we're making.

Constant Contact is a tool we use to communicate with our customers and alumni. As we continue to grow our digital footprint and social media efforts, I’m sure there will be more tools that I will rely on.

Workfolio and Directory. Showcasing the experience and expertise of our team of coaches and advisors is one of our chief selling points to customers. Workfolio is a close partner of Crenshaw's and their directory platform is a tool we use to create custom directories specific to our customer and their needs, giving them access to view detailed information about our coaches including experience, engagements, and certifications.

Sample Directory.

SharePoint. The expanded functionality of SharePoint has allowed us to elevate past a dumping ground for documents to guided experiences for our employees and partners used for training, service delivery, and operations.

Tableau. Through our work on organizational culture (CultureMapping), we've been able to take abstract concepts and make them digestible primarily through data visualization. We have found that Tableau is more versatile and user-friendly than its competitors. This allows us to make our work interactive for our customers to explore the permutations and insights from the data.

Calendly. The most valuable resource for our coaches and advisors is time. Any tool that can cut down on administrative work is potentially revenue earned for our business. Calendly helps shorten the scheduling experience, freeing up our coaches and experts to focus on the strategic work that matters most to our customers.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Leadership books stand out to me, each for different reasons. Each of these books allowed me to reflect on my past experiences, both in business and personally. These experiences are what led me to choose to acquire Crenshaw – to continue to focus on delivering value and meeting the needs of our customers while focusing on my second act.

Leadership that Gets Results by Daniel Goleman , let me reflect on my past experiences and the different styles of leadership that I deployed. It is data-based and identifies 6 leadership styles and shows how combining a few to a situation results in the best financial results.

Thank You for Being Late, by Tom Friedman, talks about lifelong working capacity and the results from lifelong learning. He asserts that to ensure lifelong working capacity, we all need lifelong learning. The rate of change driven by technology outpaces human’s abilities to catch up.

100 Year Life, by Gratton and Scott, helped me reinforce what we needed to do about our value proposition, particularly around the fact that people are living longer and working longer. They’re not retiring at the age that they used to for several reasons. This led us to create Encore, a product that focuses on helping individuals define what’s next. The book discusses living and working longer in an age of longevity. People today have a variety of professional choices and flexibility that for corporations and especially their HR departments can often sound like a nightmare. It captures the complexity and challenges that CEOs and CHRO's face in acquiring and retaining top talent.

Strength to Strength, by Albert Brooks, is about finding happiness and success in your second curve. It teaches you how to use your skills, knowledge, and experience for productivity and happiness.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

MISTAKE: You can’t create a product or service without understanding what the needs are. The wrong way to build is to create a product and hopefully, someone will buy it. Do not do this.

MISTAKE: People think executive coaching is only for the c-suite. Everyone could benefit from a trusted advisor or coach.

Executive assessments are valuable to understand:

· What you get motivated by

· Where you draw energy from

· What type of leader you are

· What environments you perform better in?

· How you interact with others

Learn to use this data to your advantage to better understand how you operate. You have to know how you operate and perform under stress. You are at a disadvantage in corporate America if you do not understand the internal system of what you are working with when your peers around you do. If they have invested in internal growth, and you haven’t, they are more likely to advance. Level the playing field.

TL; DR: You must learn how to fight some of your natural tendencies to become a better executive.

TOP TIPS:

Remain focused. I never present myself as wasting a prospect's time when I ask for the initial call. There is always a purpose to what I’m doing and there should always be a purpose to what you are doing, too.

When you are assessing the product-market fit and go-to-market strategy, review the following:

By the time you have launched, you should already have answers to these questions.

Key strategic questions to ask:

What’s taking place in the marketplace? People liked to hear my stories when I was at American Express. What does this mean? They will want to listen to your stories, too. Don’t hold back. What do you bring to the party that addresses the customer’s needs? It is compelling for organizations to hear that.

What’s our Watson? What data and insights do we have that can add insights to our customers so they want to buy from us?

Where is the Amazon? The non-traditional / non-legacy competitor that will eat your lunch.

Do we staff to the task? Put executives in the right place at the right time based on the critical needs of the business.

Who is our customer, both now and in the future? None of the people you think are your true competitors are. AI and data are disrupting everything. You aren’t only looking at your traditional competitors.

Am I offering premium pricing without a premium service? A compelling proposition leads to premium economics. Premium services equate to premium pricing. You can’t have one without the other.