What Does a Vistage Chair Actually Do?

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A Vistage Chair builds and leads a peer advisory group of CEOs and business owners from non-competing industries, facilitates their monthly meetings, and coaches each member privately one-on-one every month. The Chair is not a consultant who hands you answers. The Chair is the person responsible for making sure the room is honest, the right people are in it, and you leave with a decision instead of a feeling.

Three jobs, really.

The first is curation. A peer group is only as good as the people in it, which means the most important work happens before anyone joins. I turn away more prospects than I accept. Wrong stage, wrong motive, wrong willingness to be uncomfortable — any of those and the whole room suffers. Getting this right is most of the job.

The second is facilitation. Twelve to sixteen strong-willed leaders in a room will default to advice-giving within ninety seconds if you let them. My job is to slow that down — to make the group ask questions long enough that the real issue surfaces, which is almost never the issue the member walked in with. A member brings me an operations problem. Four questions later it's a conversation he's been avoiding with his brother-in-law who runs the warehouse.

The third is the one-on-one. Once a month, just the two of us, no audience. This is where the things too raw for the group get said out loud. Succession. A marriage under strain. Whether he even wants this business anymore.

I came to this after twenty years as a Navy officer and twenty-plus years in business, including three startups and a manufacturing company I grew to ten times its revenue. That background matters less than people assume. What matters is that I've sat in the chair, made the payroll, and made the bad calls. I'm not observing from outside.

The way I describe the work: I help leaders see into their blind spots. Everyone has them. The dangerous ones are the ones your team knows about and you don't.