The Smallest Changes That Had The Largest Impacts: 4 CEO Case Studies

This episode is brought to you by The Profit Line.  The Profit Line is a boutique finance and accounting firm that provides a wide range of accounting services to small and medium businesses generating anywhere between $5M to $50M in revenue. On a fractional, outsourced basis, they do day-to-day bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, month-end accruals, tax compliance, and financial statement preparation, among countless other things. I was a customer of theirs for 7 consecutive years while running my own company,  and am speaking as a happy customer. Book a call with Founder and CEO, Fern Gordon (Ferngordon@theprofitline.com) or visit their LinkedIn page to learn how they might be able to help you exactly as they helped me. 

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This episode is brought to you by Warren Coughlin, CEO Coach and founder of JumpStart Coaching. Warren focuses exclusively on coaching CEOs running SMBs, and has been doing so for over 20 years. One of my biggest regrets across my 7 years as a CEO was not hiring a coach, and I want to prevent others from making the same mistake. For listeners of In The Trenches, working with Warren is effectively risk-free: If at the end of the first three months you're not happy with the direction of your business, he will give you your money back. On top of that, Warren is offering $3,000 off of his coaching program for listeners of In The Trenches. Just go to warrencoughlin.com/trenches to learn more.

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This is a very special episode of In The Trenches: In today’s episode, I will be interviewing 4 different CEOs of 4 different SMBs, and asking them just a single question: "What are some of the seemingly small changes you’ve made that have had the largest impacts?"

When taking over a new business, new CEOs often speak of operational “low hanging fruit”, so I wanted to ask this same question to 4 different CEOs to learn more about just what this low hanging fruit is.

Each CEO that I’ll be speaking with today is at a different stage of their journey: Betsy, who I’ll begin the episode with, is still in her first year in the CEO seat. Sheret, our next leader, has been CEO of his company for ~2 years. Robin Kovitz has been leading her company for ~8 years, and finally Adrian, our final CEO, ran his company for ~7 years before a successful exit to a strategic acquiror in 2019.

Does growth and success tend to result from a large number of seemingly small changes, or a small number or larger changes? That’s what we’ll endeavor to answer today, informed by 4 CEOs at very different stages of their respective journeys.