I’m Chad Carlton. I’m CEO of C2 Strategic Communications. I’ve been in Vistage about seven years, and I joined at a time when our business was really at a point where I—as a communicator, not as a business-trained person—felt comfortable moving forward with some of the big decisions that I needed. Vistage made a huge difference.
Our company has grown almost fourfold from the time that I made that decision seven years ago, and Vistage has been a big part of that.
Part of the challenge for any business owner is getting access to information and good advice. That’s one of the things about my Vistage colleagues: They’re always eager to share information and good advice, ideas, experiences they’ve had, good or bad. You can always learn from somebody else’s mistakes or somebody else’s successes, and that’s the way we look at things in Vistage.
One of the other aspects of this is that camaraderie that you build with your group. It’s really been a situation where we lean in in our meetings. We talk to each other about our challenges, and regardless of the size of the business, a lot of the times the problems are the same. How do you attract talent? How do you keep it? How do you offer benefits that make a difference? How do you reach out to new sectors and clients? There are lots of different common answers that cut across different businesses.
Vistage has been the resource that I’ve I have relied on again and again to help me build my strength as a business owner, and now, I really am much more confident in the decisions that I make. I’m much more familiar with the people and the products and the services that can help our company move forward.
If you’re thinking about joining Vistage, ask yourself the question—not what does it cost to join—but what is the investment that I’m making and what is the potential reward?
For me, as a small business owner, that price tag was pretty high, but when I looked back at what it’s done for my business, that’s a small investment in building a better future.
I would recommend looking into Vistage and joining in the hundreds of others of people who have joined in this community and made a difference. I built a lot of strong relationships through Vistage, both with peers in my group and other business leaders in the community. It’s a place where people can get together under the cloak of confidentiality and trust—it’s a circle of trust—and that means that you can handle those tough questions, the things that you don’t want to share with your competitors or you don’t want to admit that maybe you need a little bit more information on. For me, that’s one of the great benefits of Vistage.
Vistage is the sharing of information peer-to-peer with nothing but goodwill and good results as the outcome.
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