This is not a pitch with your numbers pasted into it. It is the questions I ask every CEO I interview, answered by you, and then followed to their conclusion.
"Take me back three years. What was the business doing in revenue?"
"Standing there three years ago, looking forward, where did you believe you would be today?"
"And where are you? Not the forecast. Today."
The gap
"Three years from today. Where do you want this business to be?"
From here to there
"Revenue is the vanity number. What falls to the bottom line?"
"How many decisions are sitting on your desk right now that are genuinely significant? Not the noise. The ones that move the company."
"Over the next three years, what are you planning for?"
"Last one. Do you know what your company is worth today? Not what you hope. What a buyer would pay."
The three year ledger
Three years, at the numbers you entered.
Three year profit impact
Enterprise value
Per dollar
The test
BizEquity data. Every member in my groups completes an enterprise value report, and we track it every year.
"I already have a board."
Good. And every one of them has a bias. They hold equity, or they are your friend, or they are family, and they are giving you the view from where they sit. This is a room of sixteen CEOs with no stake in your outcome, in a confidential setting, whose only job is to tell you the truth.
"I have been doing this twenty years. What is a group of peers going to tell me?"
Experience counts. It also has never gone stale faster than it does right now, with AI, a shifting global economy, and a workforce that does not behave the way it did five years ago. And here is the harder part. Exiting a company is a completely different skill than building one. I have been through dozens of exits with members and one of my own. If twenty years of experience were going to get you to your exit, you would already be there.
"I cannot afford a full day out of the business every month."
Then you have a bigger issue than the one we are discussing, and I would want to process that one in group. If the company cannot run for one day a month without you, that is not a scheduling problem. That is the finding.
"Of course Vistage members grow faster. They could afford it."
It has never been about the money. Any company above five million can afford this. It is about whether you are willing to spend the time, sit in a room of your peers, and be honest about what is actually happening in your business. That is the filter, and it is a real one.
Closing the gap. The share of your own miss you told me is recoverable, phased in across three years rather than assumed on day one, converted to profit at your margin.
Decisions. Your count of significant decisions, at the value you put at stake in each, at the share you believe better input captures. This is the same way we score every issue processed in group.
Weather. Only applied if you selected a headwind, and set by default at half the published spread.
Enterprise value. The year three profit run rate at your multiple. Shown separately, never added to the profit line, because it is only realized at a transition.
What is not counted. Retention of your leadership team, the speakers, the network, what your people learn from a CEO who is being challenged every month, and the thing members name first, which is being asked a question they were avoiding.
This is not for everyone. About one in five people I interview end up joining, and that is by design. Some are not ready. Some do not fit what the group needs. If the number above is compelling and you still do not want to sit in that room and be challenged, then it is not the number that is in the way, and we should both save the time.
Tom Cuthbert · Vistage Master Chair · San Antonio · tom@tomcuthbert.com · 210-248-7330
There are roughly 1,200 Vistage Chairs worldwide. My groups have ranked in the top twenty for a decade and are currently in the top five. Members of this community have completed more than 40 liquidity events over the past twelve years, ranging from mid eight figures to just under two billion dollars. Each of my CEO groups processed over one billion dollars in issue value in 2025.
Illustrative only, built entirely from the figures entered above. Growth comparisons reference Dun and Bradstreet analyses of Vistage member and nonmember companies. Nothing here is a projection, a guarantee, or financial advice.