CEO Coaching International Summit 2019 Highlights, Part III

Our 2019 CEO Coaching International Summit in Santa Monica, California was truly a global event with more than 250 CEOs and C-Suiters from over a dozen countries in attendance. We spent an amazing two days of learning and sharing with some of today’s leading entrepreneurs and strategic thinkers.

And of course, we mixed in a little Southern California “fun in the sun” during the Summit.

This is Part III of our 3-part series on the Summit Highlights. To review the Summit Highlights Part I, click here. And to review the Part II highlights, click here.

To learn how you can become part of our community, click here.

Sarah Dusek on Putting Values Ahead of a $7 Million Investment

Sarah Dusek is the co-founder of Under Canvas, America’s leading company in the luxury camping business. She and her husband bootstrapped the company and reached the point where they needed an outside investor to build a financial cushion and really start scaling the business. “After about a gazillion nos,” Sarah finally got a term sheet for a $7 million investment. There was only one problem. The VC investor was a bully. He basically told Sarah, “If you don’t do this deal with us, I will blacklist you and make sure nothing good ever happens to your company going forward.”

So here’s her dilemma–do a $7 million deal with the devil, or run the risk of going so far in the red that her firm would never recover and end up going bust. Many of you reading this may have faced a similar gut check moment.

Sarah said, “It really, really challenged our values and challenged what I believed in and what I was willing to do to grow our company.”

So what did she do? Like Emma Cohen earlier, Sarah said NO. “We refused to sacrifice our values on the altar of success.”

And when you take a strong stand like that, good things often result. Just six months later, Sarah received a significant investment from KSL Capital Partners, LLC, a private equity firm specializing in travel and leisure enterprises.

John DiJulius on the Relationship Economy

John DiJulius is the founder of two thriving companies and an authority on world-class customer experience. His expertise comes not from reading books, but from writing them and from using his companies as living laboratories to test his findings and theories.

John’s highly rated interactive presentation focused on helping leaders understand the importance of “experience” in our relationship economy. He said, “If you know two or more things about anyone’s ‘FORD,’ you will own the relationship.’” And FORD stands for, Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Dreams. So anytime you or your team are talking to a client or potential client, make a point to learn one or more new things about that person’s FORD, and then add it to your CRM system. The more you can personalize your interactions, the deeper you can build the relationship.

He also challenged the audience by asking, “Are you zero risk to do business with?” To move toward zero risk means you have systems and protocols to minimize mistakes, but then when you do make a mistake (which we all do), you clean it up quickly and go beyond expectation.

Are you looking to rekindle a relationship with a client that has gone stale? John said it’s as easy as 3-2-1. Start by sending three emails, two handwritten cards, and one phone call to an existing client that you are not currently talking to. The personalized attention will grab their attention.

Learn more from John on his podcast with CEO Coaching International.

Jim Bennett on the Keys to Growing from $0 to More Than $100 Million in Revenue

Jim Bennett founded his own company as a franchisee of Worldwide Express and built it from $0 to over $120 million in revenue. He shared several keys to this great achievement including their unorthodox hiring strategy.

Once Jim’s firm hit $5 million in revenue, he knew he had a model that worked. Then the trick was to replicate it around the country. He did so by creating “playbooks” for each position within the company. In particular, he created a specific hiring process that lasted two weeks and placed an emphasis on finding Division III college athletes to fill his openings. He found these athletes by talking to Athletic Directors and coaches.

These newly hired sales reps were then plugged into a specific training program that was optimized over time to generate predictable results. By the third year, his reps were earning up to $200,000 a year. Being competitive athletes, it also helped that Jim ran competitive quarterly contests that ranked each sales rep by gross margin—not sales. As Jim said, “gross margin pays the bills, not revenue.”

Cyrus Sigari on Flying Cars and Thinking BIG

Cyrus Sigari is the co-founder of jetAVIVA, one of the country’s leading sellers of light jets. He took us on a journey with him as he shared the highs and lows of being a successful entrepreneur. One particular moment that captured the audience was when he talked about a certain day that he had just wrapped up talking to several billionaire clients and his business was riding high. Then he showed a picture of an empty glass on the screen and said, “That’s how I felt.”

You may have been there, too. You’re working hard, business is good, but something’s still missing. For Cyrus, this moment led him to take a multi-month sabbatical from his business, travel the world, seek out healers and mystics, and focus on becoming more self-aware about what would fill his cup.

How about you? Does your cup need to be filled with something more than just money?

And yes, Cyrus did talk about his latest passion, flying cars!

Learn more from Cyrus on his podcast with CEO Coaching International. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series of three posts highlighting some of the key insights from the 2019 CEO Coaching International Summit.

If you’d like to learn more about our coaching services and attending next year’s Summit in Miami, please click here.

The 2019 CEO Coaching Summit would not have been such a BIG success without the passion and dedication of all our clients, speakers, sponsors, families, friends, and the entire CEO Coaching International team. Thank you so much to everyone involved, and we hope to see you all again at the next Summit in Miami, Florida on April 24 – 26, 2020. 

About Mark Moses

Mark Moses is the Founding Partner of CEO Coaching International and the Amazon Bestselling author of Make Big Happen. His firm coaches over 185 of the world’s top high-growth entrepreneurs and CEO’s on how to dramatically grow their revenues and profits, implement the most effective strategies, becoming better leaders, grow their people, build accountability systems, and elevate their own performance. Mark has won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Blue Chip Enterprise award for overcoming adversity. His last company ranked #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Los Angeles as well as #10 on the Inc. 500 of fastest growing private companies in the U.S. He has completed 12 full distance Ironman Triathlons including the Hawaii Ironman World Championship 5 times.

About CEO Coaching International

CEO Coaching International works with the world’s top entrepreneurs, CEOs, and companies to dramatically grow their business, develop their people, and elevate their overall performance. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 350 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 20 different countries. Every coach at CEO Coaching International is a former CEO or President that has made big happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from $10 million to over $1 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight and nine figure exits. CEOs and entrepreneurs working with CEO Coaching International for three years or more have experienced an average EBITDA CAGR of 66.4% during their time as a client, more than five times the national average. For more information, please visit: https://www.ceocoachinginternational.com