My Vistage Member Blogs About His Experience (40% Increase in Revenue)

As many of you all know, once a month, both Sheril and I each attend an entire day Vistage meeting.  Vistage is an organization with the specific purpose of helping individuals grow professionally and personally.  Sheril and I are each in separate groups that meet on separate days, about 12 people for each of our groups plus our Vistage chair, Mark Taylor who organizes and moderates each meeting.  Vistage meetings are hosted each month by a different member of the group, typically at their office in a conference room.  The day is broken down into two sessions, 9:00 am – noon, then lunch with the group, then 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm.  The format is simple:  in one of the sessions, either am or pm, for each meeting we have a different speaker every month who talks for 3 hours and in the other session we process issues that anyone in group might want help on.

I cannot say enough about how Vistage has helped me grow, both personally and professionally.  Our Vistage chair, Mark, is a professional CEO Coach (check out his blog) and as a part of our Vistage membership, Mark also comes to our office 2x a month and sits in our executive committee (EC) meetings every other Tuesday (we have the EC meeting every Tuesday at 12:30 pm for about two hours) and Mark provides valuable insights and ideas, almost as a quasi board member.  It is also worth noting that I have been in Vistage now for two and half years and since I joined Vistage (Sheril joined about 6 months ago), DFW has grown revenues by nearly 40% in 2011 and is experiencing similar growth YTD 2012; and March 2012 was the best month EVER for DFW in terms of job volume.  Therefore, we are on track to nearly double DFW in two years.   I feel Vistage has helped me grow a lot as an individual and as a leader and I am excited about the future for DFW.  I plan to start sharing the lessons learned at Vistage with each of you by blogging about the specific lessons. The first of these blogs recapping our last speaker, Morrie Shechtman, Fifth Wave Leadership, will be coming very soon