Services

The Trusted Advisors Guild (TAG) provides expert advise, consulting, coaching, workshops and webinars for all aspects of your business. We work at three levels of your organization based on your needs and preference:

One-to-one with CEOs and presidents
Your senior executive team to gain alignment and focus
Your middle management to grow the next generation of leaders and implement your vision and strategy

We advise the leaders of some of the world's leading firms. We've earned their trust and confidence because we have helped them to succeed—over and over again—in many areas of their business. We can do the same for you.

How can we help you?
Click a link to the left or scroll below to find out more.

Strategic Planning

When surveyed about the number one issue companies and senior executives face, the overwhelming response is strategic planning. Our 4-3-2-1 Business Framework helps you clearly define, develop and implement a strategy that works.

There are four critical decisions every business must get right in order to sustain growth. There is also a definitive set of three fundamental habits that make it easier to manage and run your business—the same ones Rockefeller used to dominate both his industry and era. In addition, there are two drivers and one essential tool, which align everyone and gets them on the same page. The 4-3-2-1 Business Framework is used by many of the most successful businesses in the world.

We are certified coaches for Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, which has been used by over 22,000 senior executives to successfully run, manage and growth their businesses.

This proven, hands-on, real-world, take-away rich program will deliver "actionable" tools and strategies that will significantly impact your business—immediately.

We offer private workshops, annual and quarterly strategic planning sessions for your executive team. We also offer semi-private workshops for you and your peers from other companies.

Download Brochure Read 4 Decisions Article

Leadership Coaching and Consulting

Everyone can use sound advice. The world's most successful business people welcome the sage input from those who have been there before. Every star athlete has a coach. So whether you're the next Jack Welch, Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs or Tom Brady a coach can make the difference between success and mediocrity.

Why not learn from the experience and best practices of those who have faced the very business situations you face. As we said on the home page as success experts we know that all organizations face similar problems at various stages of growth and development. Be they related to leadership, strategy, sales, marketing, people, cash flow, compensation, technology ...whatever, it's all been fretted about, talked over, worked through and solved.

We work closely with CEOs, presidents, boards of directors, senior management teams, individual executives, middle managers, supervisors, sales organizations and marketing departments to identify and define specific areas of coaching need. Here are a few of the specifics we can work with you on:

Define and leverage your personal leadership style
Improve the outcome of difficult conversations
How to delegate and share authority
Coaching for improved performance
Building teams that excel
Generating and communicating a shared vision for the suture
Strategic planning and the Rockefeller Habits
Communicating and leading change
Improved decision making for management and executive teams
The accountable manager and executive
Meeting effectiveness
Delivering on the promise of client satisfaction

We can work with you one-on-one or we can work with your teams with a proven process that produces results.

Executive Development

We assess and evaluate the current strengths, limitations and capabilities of your senior team and provide clear direction for skills and career development.

Are your key players aligned and on the same page? Does every member of your management team have a sense of ownership in the organization? If you were out of the office for a month could the business run seamlessly without you?

Imagine the impact on your organization if all levels of your management team worked with a sense of ownership and felt they had a stake in the outcome. Communication improves. Productivity soars. Revenues increase. Business valuations double.

That's what we call The Leadership Mindset.

Developed by Sandy Blaha, and field-tested in hundreds of businesses, the Leadership Mindset is a specific set of skills, techniques and proven methodologies that can instill this crucial approach to business in each of your managers —regardless of whether they are seasoned senior executives or up and coming mid-level managers. The Leadership Mindset program creates a strong leadership team that is accountable and responsible for their commitments, actions and outcomes.

Our comprehensive offering is formatted to accommodate the way your organization works with flexible sessions in two-hour, half-day and one-day workshops. Choose the format and length that best fits your firm.

The Leadership Mindset is a hands-on, practical program designed to fast-track careers. Participants learn to...

Delegate, guide, and mentor understudies
Lead from your strengths
Inspire confidence
Increase influence
Lead teams effectively
Assume increasing leadership roles in your firm
Improve the efficiency and outcomes of difficult conversations
Facilitate meetings more effectively
Become a next generation leader

If you're ready to get your key players on the same page, if you're ready to instill a sense of ownership, if you're ready to reap the rewards of having every manager with a leadership mindset, then you need to sign up for The Leadership Mindset.

Marketing Communication

To succeed, you need to know what works and what doesn't. Guessing about your brand, your messaging, your target audience, your industry, your customers, or your competitors doesn't cut it in today's market. You must distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and hype, effort and result.

Unfortunately, most businesses fail at this, wasting piles of money on initiatives and campaigns that do not work.

If you want to know what's real—about your company, your clients, your competition, your market place—then you need the Trusted Advisors Guild.

We deliver creative strategies and solutions outside today's traditional paradigms. We fuse sales with marketing, leadership with management, vision with strategy and tactics. We have advised some of the world's best run and most innovative organizations, including IBM, Wendy's, Microsoft, Sony, Navigant, Xerox, Kendle International, Ingram, 3Com, Cisco, the United Nations and dozens of non-profits and socially responsible firms.
We go beyond the ordinary to bring you ideas that shimmer and shine—spirited concepts produce sterling results to make your top line sparkle. We've done it for hundreds of firms—and we can do it for yours!

Sales Effectiveness

When it comes to sales we suspect you want to do one thing—"sell more, faster, at a higher margin." We help you do just that.

Your products and services determine the selling method and personality types required for your sales force to be successful. As an example, selling professional services is quite different from selling products—it requires new knowledge, skills and mind-sets, coupled with enhanced performance management systems and a selling process to support and reinforce new selling behaviors.

We cut through the clutter regardless of which selling methodology you use to determine the most effective methods for your business. We understand and have deployed the world's most effective methodologies:

Customer Centric Selling
Solution Selling

Spin Selling
Sandler Selling

We evaluate the selling process, the management support systems, and the knowledge, skills, and mindsets resulting in compressed sales cycle times, lower cost of sales, and higher win ratios.

We have the research to support your strategy! Trusted Advisors Guild member, Alexander Consulting, is a recognized leader in field research that identifies and supports the best practices needed to sell effectively. Alexander Consulting has conducted hundreds of assessments, written hundreds of articles and completed years of research.

We have proven sales tools to increase your win rate by 36% or more. Simply by automating your proposal generation process you can reduce the sales cycle by as much as 30%, generate world-class proposals in minutes, ensure consistency—and dramatically improve your win rate. Want to know more? Shoot us an email or give us a call.

Talent and Assessment

Take the guesswork out of your business by using industry benchmarks and best practices to focus your improvement efforts in specific areas of your business:

Leadership and management
Sales force
Technical talent
Custom assessments tailored to key areas

The benefits of a professional assessment are many. They help organizations gather, synthesize, and use information to drive positive change. Implementing our assessment findings will help you:

Increase productivity
Maximize financial performance
Achieve consistency
Create competitive advantage

This is not a soft, warm and fuzzy "nice to have" service. This is powerful real-world stuff that can make a huge difference in your organization.

Armed with real data you can make more effective decisions—faster. You'll also be able to determine leadership style, strengths, and best-fit roles. You will improve communication effectiveness and you have 360-degree feedback from managers, peers, and direct reports.

Conducting an assessment is an important, clear-eyed tool that gives you crucial information so you can make sound decisions that can rocket your company forward. Contact us to learn more.

Succession Planning

You've worked hard to grow your business to where it is today. You had the vision, the drive and the determination. But what will your legacy be? Is your firm positioned for the next generation of leaders?

Founding and growing a successful business requires talent, skill and execution. Planning to transfer authority to the next generation of leaders can be even more challenging. Don't leave your firm's future success and perhaps your financial future to chance.

We've been helping business owners, senior executives, future company leaders for over twenty years. We are experts at helping firms just like yours begin the ever-important process of succession planning. Some of the features of our proven program include:

5 keys to develop future business leaders
The core competencies required to transition company ownership
How to transfer authority
Building internal capacity to handle the workload
How to attract and retain top talent
Proven talent assessment tools
Essentials to grow top and bottom line revenue 2-3X
Dramatically improve your business valuation so you can retire with more money

What are the 5 Keys?

The Five Keys to a Failsafe Exit Strategy is a tested and true methodology used by hundreds of mid-size firms to successfully develop and retain future business leaders and transition company ownership. Here's a brief overview of what we do:

Owner's Goals. You'll get clear on what the next iteration of your career looks like and how to obtain what you want from your exit strategy.
Assess Talent and Company Performance. Engage your staff in their own and the company's performance improvement process, complete with a detailed assessment, findings and recommendations.
The Leadership Mindset. A one-year action program that includes workshops with interactive hands-on learning, strategic assignments and coaching.
Strategic Planning. Get everyone on the same page working to improve your company's performance with well-established—and communicated—goals, priorities and metrics making everyone in the organization accountable and responsible.
Performance Compensation. We coordinate your legal, accounting and estate planning team to perfect the instruments and educational process that provides the vehicle for incentive compensation and stock purchase by key people that have proven their value to the firm.

If you're ready to develop the set of blueprints and build the foundation that can lead to your successful retirement and the ongoing success of your firm, you owe it to yourself, your family and your employees to develop a Failsafe Exit Strategy.

In addition to our ability to help any firm take control of any aspect of their business, TAG advisors possess significant expertise in numerous industry verticals, including professional services organization, information technology, architectural, engineering, publishing, In other words, we understand the nuances and unique nature of your business.

Organizational Effectiveness

Every organization wants—and needs—to optimize their performance. Regardless of your firm's current stage of development, the infrastructure required to manage complexity more often than not stifles innovation and agility. Much time and energy is wasted through ineffective meetings, unclear decision-making processes and adherence to rigid structure.

We offer support for implementing a comprehensive suite of organizational practices that embeds flexibility and effectiveness in core processes such as meetings, decision-making and governance.

Experience has taught us that increasing the capacity to adapt and respond to changing conditions yields optimal results. Drawing on the best practices of battle-tested firms and validated developmental processes, we provide the resources, framework and set of tools for staying in sync with changing conditions and monitoring the pulse of the organization. This gives the enterprise the ability to make strategically smart decisions while maximizing its potential.

Ours is an integral approach. We integrate individual development with institutional resilience; perspective with performance. The outcome is greater agility, innovation, transparency and health with an energized and engaged workforce. A recent study by Towers Perrin shows that businesses with the highest employee engagement are financial winners. These companies had a 19 percent increase in operating incomes and a 28 percent increase in net earnings. Conversely, companies with the lowest employee engagement rates showed a 33 percent decline in operating incomes and an 11 percent decline in net earnings.

For more details on the incredible impact organizational effectiveness can have on your firm, please contact us.