|
|
|
|
Guest: Sasha Kelberg, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Sasha is a Wharton-trained entrepreneur, CEO, and strategic advisor with over two decades of experience building, scaling, and exiting high-tech manufacturing and export businesses. He has led teams from lab concept to global scale with a leadership style grounded in accountability, continuous improvement, and values-based culture.
Quick Background: It’s impossible to lead your business with clarity if your identity is fused with your business. And it’s impossible to achieve meaningful scale if your connection to the business is concentrating too much decision-making at the top. The best CEOs evolve beyond a start-up mindset as they learn to let go, pivot towards opportunity, and reinvent themselves as both leaders and as people.
On today’s show, Sasha Kelberg explains why learning to separate yourself from your business is one of the most overlooked keys to Making BIG Happen.
Keys to Growing Your Business and Evolving as a CEO From Sasha Kelberg
1. Take a Step Back
Most successful founder CEOs follow a similar path. Their idea becomes their company. Their company becomes a growing business. The business achieves meaningful scale.
And, in many cases, that founder CEO’s sense of self, of accomplishment, and of purpose, becomes inseparable from the success of the business.
“I really had myself and my ego inextricably tied to the business,” Sasha Kelberg remembers. “Every sale felt like a personal win. Every loss felt very deeply personal. That worked for a while, when you are working under pure willpower and carrying it through.”
But experienced CEOs know that without moderation, willpower and drive eventually give way to exhaustion and burnout. At that point, you can either keep letting you and the company grind each other down. Or you can take a step away to recharge, rethink your priorities, and take a fuller perspective of what you’ve built.
“It started actually with me just being very tired working,” Sasha says. “And taking everything personally. I felt exhausted and I said, ‘I think I need to take Wednesday afternoons away from the office.’ I would go to a cafe and spend time on thinking tasks. And I realized that things didn’t collapse. And people stepped up when I wasn’t physically in the office. Decisions were made. And that did light a light bulb for me that it’s healthy for both me and the company.”
That one afternoon away from the office helped Sasha appreciate that his company could do more than survive without him — it could thrive. Without the CEO acting as a bottleneck for every major decision, day-to-day work got done while the CEO was free to focus on CEO-level tasks, like setting the vision for what comes next.
2. Redefine Purpose
When CEOs learn to sacrifice control, they begin to remove ego from the leadership equation. They also gain perspective that can help them redefine their personal and professional purpose.
“In the early days, purpose was what can I create that would be meaningful and that will help me build a nest egg,” Sasha Kelberg says. “Having an immigrant mentality, I wanted to make it. That was pure and simple. When I dug deep I realized it’s actually not about chasing the numbers, but it’s giving 200 people a chance to grow professionally.”
A series of pivots also helped Sasha and his team broaden its perspective on how his company, Groglass, was serving customers. After starting out as a supplier of greenhouse glass, Groglass began supplying protective glass to museums and collectors.
“The realization that one or two million people put something they really cherish on the wall behind our product was very meaningful,” Sasha says. “We improve that experience for a couple million people per year. So there was a combination of what does the company do for us as a community, a community of individuals, a community of families, and then what does it do for the greater world.”
Like so many business, Groglass had to put its purpose to the test during COVID. Lockdowns froze the company’s usual framing business. Sasha had to choose between laying off almost 80% of his workforce and convincing his team to sign an agreement that they would forego government severance and stick with the company until the tide turned.
“We said, ‘Sometimes the ship carries you and sometimes you have to carry the ship on your shoulders,'” Sasha says. “90% of our people signed that paper. Facing uncertainty, facing their families’ needs. Most of our people said, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do this for the greater good.’ That to me was a real test that purpose was something meaningful and that purpose really works.”
3. Get in the Habit of Reinventing Yourself
In his book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, David Brooks describes life as a journey between two mountain peaks. We start our climb focused on individual achievement, career, status, financial rewards, recognition.
But, when we reach that “peak,” we often find ourselves unfulfilled. We want more from business, and from life, than just more of what we already have.
“The second mountain is more about relationships and service,” Sasha Kelberg explains. “It’s answering the question, ‘What can I give?’ Happiness is very individualistic. Joy is very relational and enduring. Freedom versus commitment. Individualism versus community. On the second mountain, the CEO would be shifting from ego to purpose, to serve the team, to serve the customers, to serve the mission. And ironically, that’s where performance improves, because the leader is not the bottleneck anymore. The company scales faster. EBITDA can improve. It’s important to really believe in that purpose of serving, because that really is a better way to do things.”
Unfortunately, many CEOs don’t start that climb up the second mountain until they’ve fallen off the first. Sasha believes that CEOs who are committed to reinvention can keep their own journeys from becoming a series of ups and downs — especially if they work with a coach who can help them redefine BIG ahead of a major pivot or a planned exit.
“ Reinvention is evolution,” Sasha Kelberg says. “Name me one startup that is still doing the stuff they said they would do on the first day. They probably don’t exist. Personally, I started thinking that I would become a musician, like my father and my grandmother, and I played piano for the first years of my life. And then I pivoted to writing, then to dot coms, then to business school. Now, going from executive to non-executive to coach, I have to relearn everything that I know about making decisions or making suggestions, or having a coaching conversation and not a consulting conversation. These pivots give you energy, they give you life, they give you purpose. I think it’s important to practice reinvention every day.”
Top Takeaways
1. Stop “being” your company or your company will never be truly BIG.
2. Expand your purpose to include service to your community, teams, and customers.
3. Reinvent yourself every day by learning, facing your blind spots, working with coaches, and planning your next BIG adventure.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
Learn more about executive coaching | Meet our world-class coaches
