It took me a long time to have this realization.  Even my A-Players needed room to learn and to grow, to “mess up” and recover from it.  A-Players vs. Perfect Player: perfect does not exist, try to understand that mistakes and other vices sometimes happen.  Be ready to coach, council & train an A-Player who makes mistakes from time-to-time.

Stare at the Beast – and stare him down. We all have demons and we have them all the time, every day. The key is to recognize them, and acknowledge they exist. Ignoring them or wishing they did not exist does not change in any way the fact that they exist and are hacking away at our conscious and unconscious minds. Beasts that we try to ignore and hope they go away consume huge amounts of our thinking and down time, and influence how we react to what the world presents us.

I created this site to help fill a gap I believe exists between business leadership theory and the execution, or implementation of theory on day-to-day basis.  I have observed and personally experienced the gap between a great seminar, class or book and the “What do I do with this information?” on Monday morning.

This site is intended for the small business owner or CEO.  I want to provide the benefit of my experience and my lessons learned from over 20 years of creating, running and growing a small business in the United States.  I do not wish to represent myself as being everything to everyone.  I do not have the answers to every question, nor do I have all the ideas.

Much of what you will read here comes not from my intellectual brilliance, but from my scars. If my lessons learned can help you prevent learning them yourself then I will consider this site a great success.

I searched for mentorship & coaching for years. I hired CEO Coaches, leadership coaches and life coaches. I have read, and continue to read a lot of books.  I also read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of TED Talks.  I have joined and participated in local, regional, national and even international business leadership and life improvement organizations. I participated in deep, immersive experiences that took 12-18 hours a day for 4-7 days at a time. I found a lot of good, a lot of bad and a lot of self-serving recommendations. I found a lot of big, generic theories that got me and everyone else around me excited. I found a lot of great events, ideas and materials. I saw a lot of people get addicted to events, entertainment and excitement. And then I went back home, back to the office and struggled with converting those theories, concepts and events into a specific action item at 8 AM on Monday morning. I found a gap between all the excitement and all the theory and Monday morning in the real world.

I found books written by former US Presidents and the CEOs of successful and large corporations to be entertaining and interesting. I also found them discussing the use of resource pools and access to the kind of money that I had no chance of reaching. They were great reads, but taught me little about the day-to-day leadership of my company.

I was looking for basic answers. How was I doing as a leader? How could I do better? What should I change and how should I prioritize my changes? How do I improve profitability? How do I improve employee retention? How do I stop the revolving door at the top positions of my organization? Was I behaving in a manner that forced my leaders out the door?

I have spoken to small business owners and CEOs since my experience and believe that many small business leaders struggle with a search for basic help and advice. What has worked? What hasn’t?

My wife runs the day-to-day operations of our horse farm – Summerfield Farm (check it out at SummerfieldFarm.com).  She leads a staff of six and asked me a great question; “Is there always a weakest link when it comes to staff?”

The answer is an unequivocal YES.  Yes, there is always a weakest link in our chains.  I believe we are deceiving ourselves if we think this is not true.  We could be turning a blind eye to a situation we are aware of, or we are choosing to not look for the weak link.  Sometimes we choose to not look because we simply can’t handle the thought of addressing yet another staff issue – another termination, another mentoring or coaching session, another ‘calling it tight’ session.  These can be emotionally draining situations and sometimes we choose to let one slide for a while.

I believe it important to understand the different reasons that cause a weakest link.  The reasons are diverse and not all are bad.  Being unaware of the reasons are what can cause us pain.  Weakest links can occur because:

• We chose to hire poorly.  We were feeling the pain of not having the position staffed and we shortchanged ourselves to just get the slot filled.
• We chose wisely and the person performed exceptionally well until…  People have life events that we may or may not be aware of that deeply and sometimes permanently affect their ability to perform well.
• We made our chain stronger, we made it better.  We uncover lesser weaknesses by addressing the greater weaknesses.  A link that appeared strong when the chain had weaker weaknesses suddenly becomes the new biggest problem.
• We chose wisely, we made our chain stronger, but we now expect more lift out of our chain.  We expect our staff to care for 20 horses and clients instead of 10.  We grow our company from $5M in annual revenue to $10M, then $15M then $30M.  The expectations of a chain expected to lift a $30M organization are far different than the expectations of a chain to lift a $5M organization.

I have found that I can reduce the pain of weak links by taking the time to hire only strong links, swiftly addressing existing or emerging weak links and being proactively aware of my increasing expectations of my chains.