Calvin Ellison figured going independent would be a slam dunk. Six months in, he was calling his dad to borrow money. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Calvin Ellison, president of The Executive Impact Group, an Indianapolis executive coaching business built around peer groups, where CEOs and senior leaders meet on a regular basis and use each other as an advisory board. Calvin grew up in California, went to UC Davis, and worked his way east through Philly and Detroit before landing in Indy, with three Fortune 500 companies on the resume along the way. The last one was Xerox, where he taught sales training, and when he left in 1993 the business started as exactly that. Around 1999 it shifted to management development, and it’s been leadership work ever since. He and Matt have known each other for twenty-some years, so this one has war stories in it. Wife, four kids, grandkids. Pretty busy.
Matt usually asks every guest the same three questions. This time he skips them, because Calvin has spent close to thirty years inside other people’s businesses and Matt wants what he’s seen. Start with who belongs in a peer group. Not every CEO does. The ones who fit are green and growing no matter how long they’ve had the seat, and they’ve got the courage to hear feedback they’ll never get inside their own company. Why they don’t get it: a business starts with friends and family, then fills up with strangers who have a paycheck to protect, so problems go to a buddy instead of the boss and the leader ends up the last person to know how bad things are. It’s worse in a second or third generation business, where the employees are still loyal to the founder and the new leader is building trust from scratch. Calvin’s advice there is go slow to go fast. He tells the story of a next-generation leader whose rapid changes set off rumors that the company was about to sell, and how the group got him to hit pause and start over with the why instead of the what. Buy-in isn’t a features-and-benefits pitch. It’s modeling the way, saying it consistently, and saying it again after you’re sure you already said it, until behavior changes. Calvin left corporate for freedom, not money, and says the first thing nobody tells you is that it’s harder than it looks: the umbrella is gone, and revenue, the P&L, taxes, and your own sanity are all yours now. Ask what he’d tell himself the night before going out on his own and he’s got it. Document the plan, put it away, come back and edit it. Everything sounds great in your head. Like game film the day after a win, the paper doesn’t lie.
Learn more about Calvin Ellison and The Executive Impact Group at https://eigcentral.com/.
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