Kirk Drummond, Co-founder & CEO - Drumroll

Do teams that eats pancakes together perform better? Kirk Drummond thinks so. He and his team celebrate their 10th anniversary this year, and throughout those 10 years it has had an average client tenure of over 4 years.  In the advertising industry, that is a long time and a great benchmark of success. 

He attributes this great success to focusing on creating an amazing team. And, along the way on his journey from co-founder to CEO he also learned about:

• The isolation of being a CEO when you need to extract yourself from the teams doing client work.
• The importance of building networking skills, earlier.

Christopher Myers, Co-founder & CEO - BodeTree

Do you have someone on your team who manages your books and manually inputs data into a financial bookkeeping software? Chris Myers wants you to know that that task may no longer be necessary. His company inverts the entire small business financial management system on its head and makes it MUCH easier. 

As a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, Chris writes regularly about leadership, entrepreneurship, and the shift from Founder to CEO. In fact, he caught my attention when he wrote this piece for Forbes: Learning To Let Go: How I Evolved From Founder To CEO. 

This was well written and I asked Chris to come on the show and talk in greater detail about his 3 points and his personal connection with each insight. He gets candid about:

1. Why it was hard for him to let go and trust his team.
2. How he learned to embrace accountability.
3. How he shifted from a directive leader to become a servant leader.

He also breaks some news about BodeTree's next evolution!

Chris is super smart. How has his interview impacted you?

Many of you have asked me about the benefits of joining a CEO peer group. They go by many names. Sometimes they are called mastermind groups, roundtables, and self-directed development groups. They all basically meet very similar needs. In this episode I run through the 17 most common benefits for joining a CEO peer group. Please let me know what you think.

Mark Sears, Founder & CEO - Cloud Factory

Mark will inspire you with the story of how his integrates his company's mission with important work for many companies. He is also a fairly candid man about the journey from Founder to CEO. In this interview he talks about:

• The challenge of a "product Founder" shifting to "product CEO"
• Tackling the cultural challenges when you have a global startup
• The importance of finding a chief revenue officer
• Why having clarity of purpose is so important for you as a CEO, personally