Victor Cheng, Why to Join the Coaching Group

Vic­tor Cheng is a CEO coach for founders of SaaS com­pa­nies, and author of Extreme Rev­enue Growth. He explains his back­ground and skillset, and the method­olo­gies he uses applies in lead­ing the Coach­ing Groups. He also explains what mem­bers can expect from join­ing a group, and how they will ben­e­fit.

I’ve worked in strat­e­gy, prod­uct man­age­ment, prod­uct mar­ket­ing, finance and growth strat­e­gy. I’ve done a lot of oper­at­ing roles, I’ve done a lot of strat­e­gy roles, and I’ve also served as a board mem­ber to var­i­ous SaaS com­pa­nies. My per­spec­tive on all this is to real­ly help founders and CEOs achieve the out­comes they want and do it in a way where it’s very achiev­able. I can take all this com­plex­i­ty and sophis­ti­ca­tion and just make it real­ly easy to use and to get results.

A lot of the things I teach you can prob­a­bly learn else­where. My abil­i­ty, per­son­al­ly, is to get peo­ple to do it — to make it easy enough where they’re not intim­i­dat­ed, it seems very doable, and then they actu­al­ly do it and they’re suc­cess­ful.

That’s the secret sauce, com­bined with bring­ing in smart, capa­ble peo­ple togeth­er as part of these groups. You learn an awful lot by being with peo­ple that are very smart and more expe­ri­enced than you or hav­ing dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences than you.

My focus has been tak­ing all those things that an insti­tu­tion­al investor will do after they invest in a busi­ness to make it more valu­able, take that exper­tise, and move it ear­li­er in the process so that the founder can cap­ture that val­ue they’ve cre­at­ed for their busi­ness.

Some­times peo­ple ask, “What makes this CEO group dif­fer­ent?”

  1. First, we’re very SaaS-spe­cif­ic. We’re focused on tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies, specif­i­cal­ly soft­ware, or ser­vice com­pa­nies where they have a tech­nol­o­gy enable­ment com­po­nent. That’s very dif­fer­ent than a lot of the larg­er CEO groups out there.

  2. And we are very focused not just on hav­ing a CEO peer group, but specif­i­cal­ly on build­ing a busi­ness that is ready to do a trans­ac­tion, or an exit-ready busi­ness, or an insti­tu­tion­al cap­i­tal-ready busi­ness. And that is a very dif­fer­ent focus.
Our focus is on SaaS com­pa­nies and tech­nol­o­gy-enabled ser­vices com­pa­nies that real­ly want to either raise cap­i­tal from an out­side insti­tu­tion­al investor, or to sell to an insti­tu­tion­al investor, or a strate­gic investor, or buy­er.

That’s very dif­fer­ent than run­ning a busi­ness just to take mon­ey from a salary every year. There’s a divide there, and we spe­cial­ize in those busi­ness­es that want to achieve that out­come.

I take things that are very com­plex and make them very sim­ple and action­able. It’s this huge world of all these things you need to know to build a com­pa­ny to be able to sell it. And it’s very con­fus­ing and over­whelm­ing.  I focus on what is the one action you need to take right now at this stage to get you to the next lev­el.

One of the things we do in our group is we invite a lot of guest speak­ers. We’ve had M&A attor­neys join, we’ve had folks that are exec­u­tive recruiters that hire pro­fes­sion­al CEOs, CTOs, and CMOs, and we’ve had oth­er types of con­sul­tants who’ve joined in.

Our goal is to bring all the resources in the entire pri­vate equi­ty, strate­gic equi­ty ecosys­tem need­ed to get a com­pa­ny to a very high lev­el. We bring all those resources to bear before there’s a trans­ac­tion so the founder can real­ize the ben­e­fits of increas­ing the com­pa­ny’s val­ue so they can cap­ture it for them­selves, as opposed to sell­ing the busi­ness and the new investors then do all these things so that they ben­e­fit.

If a Founder CEO is look­ing to join a group, there are a cou­ple rea­sons why they’d want to con­sid­er join­ing my group, rather than the oth­ers that are avail­able out there.

  1. The indus­try focus. There are very, very few groups that are real­ly focused on tech­nol­o­gy, or SaaS com­pa­nies specif­i­cal­ly, or tech­nol­o­gy-enabled ser­vices com­pa­nies. Recur­ring rev­enue is a very dif­fer­ent ani­mal, finan­cial­ly and oper­a­tional­ly, from sell­ing a ser­vice or sell­ing a wid­get. The chal­lenges, the headaches, the best prac­tices, it’s just very, very dif­fer­ent in a sub­scrip­tion busi­ness ver­sus anoth­er one.

  2. The focus we have around achiev­ing a par­tic­u­lar out­come. Our group focus is not just to make the busi­ness big­ger and bet­ter, it is specif­i­cal­ly to make it big­ger and bet­ter in a spe­cif­ic way that’s com­pat­i­ble with rais­ing cap­i­tal from or sell­ing a busi­ness to insti­tu­tion­al cap­i­tal or a strate­gic buy­er.

  3. My spe­cial skill, my super­pow­er, is to take those very advanced sophis­ti­cat­ed things that are on Wall Street, for exam­ple, and make it very doable for the aver­age founder and CEO.
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