CEOs or entrepreneurs are often very lonely when faced with a strategic challenge. They can’t easily share these with their staff, families, or even their existing investors. Many entrepreneurs are also reluctant or time constraint to rely upon individual coaching or mentoring. So, they often get stuck relying on the same insights and recipes that they tried before that did not provide a remedy or a way out.

What is the power of peer collaboration?

Many CEOs and entrepreneurs face similar situations. Would it not be great if they could share their challenges to gain insights and recommendations received from fellow entrepreneurs? In fact, CEOs and entrepreneurs learn and adopt much faster new approaches and the motivation to implement them if they have been developed in a collaborative and trusted setting. That is the experience of CEO-Collaborative Forum (CEO-CF), a membership community of CEOs running successfully for over 14 years. InvestHorizon asked CEO-CF to contribute the core of its tried-and-tested methodology of trust groups to the InvestHorizon Accelerator.

What is the CEO-Collaborative Forum (CEO-CF)?

Created in 2005, CEO-CF continues to serve a community of 100 European CEOs built on values, experience, high quality listening, and inspiration and who meet in person to collaborate every 4 months. CEO-CF led the resolution of more than 2,000 CEO challenges, creating significant impact for many businesses, with a strong network of CEOs who are buddies for life! It has also affected team dynamics, the number of exits of companies, the creation of new companies, and business model changes. Companies such as Shazam, Kalray, Cameron Health, Solvo Biotechnology, and Movidius have been acquired and exited, but at one point they took part in CEO-CF and their company exit was largely influenced by the network of CEO-CF members.

What are the values of the trust groups?

CEO-CF’s values are carried throughout their team and trust group approach that will also be the cornerstone of the InvestHorizon acceleration approach. The three most prevalent values are honesty, trust, and care for others. CEOs are set up and facilitated to be humble enough to receive, generous enough to give back, and ambitious enough to solve strategic challenges. Christian Dupont, the CEO of CEO-CF, emphasises that the trust groups solve challenges and that it’s not any single one who brings the solutions, but rather the group CEOs (and in InvestHorizon’s case also with supporting investors) helping each other with honest insight and feedback coming from their diverse experience, nationality, domain of expertise, and age.

Why the association with InvestHorizon?

InvestHorizon brings a large number of CEOs, experts, investors, and challenges across different tech sectors to the table. CEO-CF is proud to power part of the methodology to InvestHorizon CEOs to collaborate and use each other’s strengths to resolve the challenge most important to raise-funding. Dupont hopes that CEO-CF collaboration with InvestHorizon will help its 500 CEOs to succeed in raising round A funding and then have the chance to join CEO-CF during their company scale-up phase, if the fit is appropriate. These different phases of CEO collaboration provided by InvestHorizon and CEO-CF will boost the chances of CEO success and their companies.