I Don't Have Time for a CEO Peer Group

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This is the objection I hear more than any other, and it is almost always true and almost always the reason to join. A CEO peer group costs about one full day a month plus a coaching session. If that day is genuinely unavailable, the problem isn't your calendar — it's that too much of the business still runs through you personally, which is exactly the condition a peer group exists to fix.

I want to be careful here, because this can sound glib. I know what it is to have no room. I became a full-time single dad with one week's notice while running a company. Time was not an abstraction.

But here's what I've watched happen across hundreds of conversations. The leader who says he has no time is usually describing a delegation problem he's stopped seeing. He's the final approver on things that shouldn't reach him. He's the escalation point for problems his managers could own. He's rewriting proposals at eleven at night because it's faster than teaching someone. None of that is a time management issue. It's a design issue, and it will not resolve itself, because the person who built it is too busy running it to redesign it.

The day you carve out is what forces the question. Members tell me the first three months are uncomfortable and then something shifts — not because they got more efficient, but because they finally had to build a company that could run without them for eight hours.

There's a version of you five years from now who either did this work or didn't. He's the same person. He just has a different life.

If you want to test it before committing, come sit in a meeting as a guest. Watch what happens when a room full of peers gets hold of a real problem. Then decide.