UNH center helps top execs share concerns
“The captain drinks alone.”
It’s a phrase Robert Bonfiglio uses to describe the isolation a company CEO can feel on the job.
“You can’t necessarily share all the issues with your people who are working on your team,” said Bonfiglio, CEO and co-founder of Rise Private Wealth Management in Bedford.
But he does share those issues with a group of peers assembled through the CEO & Family Enterprise Center at the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.
“It’s nice to talk to other CEOs that are dealing with the same issues,” said Bonfiglio. “You get ideas from other people, you’re able to share ideas. I’ve learned a lot throughout my career; I’m willing to share, and I’m always looking to learn from other people.”
The CEO program started about 12 years ago with one group, according to Michelline Dufort, director of the center at the UNH Durham campus, and has grown to its current number of five.
The groups meet monthly, and group members — ranging from eight to 10 — come from non-competing business interests. The members represent diverse businesses — including family-owned, private and public — and have varying sizes and scope.
During the course of the year, each group member serves as host at their company, and they can choose the topic of the day with the Center taking care of logistics, such as establishing the time and agenda. According to Dufort, as a matter of routine, each meeting has a check-in, which is a review of a particular issue proffered at a previous session by a member to see if it was resolved or needs more discussion.
The Center provides the facilitators who moderate each session. Dufort is one of them.
“We are not business coaches. I don’t show up to tell someone what to do with their business. I show up to keep track of the things they’ve been working on, worrying about,” she said. “They don’t get in the middle; their job is to move the conversation along.”
An important component that serves as a foundation for each group is trust for unfettered advice.
“Ultimately, it comes down to one person making the decision, and this is an opportunity for people to have someone who knows them intimately in their business that they trust completely and that can help them in that decision with nothing to lose or gain in the decision,” said Dufort.
Workforce frustrations
That trust was evident during a recent peer group meeting held at a Seacoast area company. NH Business Review was invited to attend the session with the stipulation that the participants wouldn’t be identified so as not to impede the frank discussions that, on this particular day, included workforce frustrations.
Hiring, especially for rapidly growing companies, is hard enough, they agreed. What makes it doubly hard is the fact that they are holding on to underperformers because hiring replacements is so difficult. And those underperformers, by virtue of some longevity with the company, believe they deserve a raise or even a promotion.
“All of us are in positions where we probably keep people that we aren’t necessarily best suited for that position, but they’re fulfilling a role,” said one group member. “We know as business owners that that person isn’t thriving or really performing the way we’d like them to, but they think because of their longevity with the company that they deserve to be promoted, or they deserve to be compensated greater. It can create conflicts because, again, we’re keeping them when they’re not necessarily the best for the position, but they just see that their longevity with the company should be rewarded in some sense.”
Said another: “If we fire them and eliminate them, the company won’t do the volume of business in order to sustain the rest of us. It wouldn’t be a tragedy, but it’s going to be making it significantly more difficult for us to reach our goals. So we sort of squint our eyes and bite our lip. I don’t know what else to do, but we’re advertising like crazy trying to come up with somebody who could step into that role.”
Meet, connect, learn
The CEO & Family Enterprise Center started almost 30 years ago as the Center for Family Business, an organization devoted solely to family-related companies.
Its family business programs offer members of family-owned enterprises the opportunity to meet, connect and learn from each other, as well as from experienced leaders, including an Ask the Experts Series and awards given annually to recognize family enterprises for their outstanding achievements in business leadership and excellence.
As the center grew over the years, so did the needs of other businesses in the Granite State, large and small, as their CEOs came to grapple with many of the same issues as family-run businesses. Programming offered by the Center reflect that need; the CEO peer group session is an offshoot of that expansion, and it has an emerging leaders program.
The center also sponsors a CEO Speakers Series.
Hollie Noveletsky, CEO of Novel Iron Works in Greenland, is scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, at Three Chimneys Inn, Durham. Amy LaBelle, founder and winemaker at LaBelle Winery in Derry, is scheduled for Thursday, March 10, 2022, at Three Chimneys Inn.
For Bonfiglio, there’s tremendous value in the giveand-take in his peer group, of which he has been a part of for about three years. He found out about the groups through a business associate who spoke highly of his experience.
Bonfiglio’s company, a franchise of Ameriprise, manages about $2 billion in assets for 2,500 individuals and families. He employs around 50 people, with most of the staff concentrated at the company headquarters in Bedford.
“When you’re managing a team of people, usually you have similar issues, even though our businesses are very different,” he said.
Dufort noted it can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be isolating.
“It can be a very lonely, challenging place to be as a CEO. You’re in a solitary situation. You may have a board of advisors or a board of directors or family members, you have employees, you have direct reports, you have key management teams, you have advisors, but it really comes down to that CEO is ultimately in charge of the direction of the company, the profitability of the company and decision-making,” she said. “And there’s no better way for these CEOs to get peer-to-peer advice on decision-making than members in their own group who have nothing to lose or gain by that decision.”
According to Dufort, discussion topics have also included succession, human resources-related issues and the tactical aspects of running a business. She noted that the complexities of filing for Paycheck Protection Program funds at the start of the pandemic was a big topic.
During the pandemic, peer group meetings continued as scheduled, using Zoom as a replacement for in-person sessions. They shared their concerns and their strategies for managing a company during a time when the CEO and the employees were all working from home.
Remote working remains a hot topic today, as many companies have emerged from the pandemic with a hybrid of people working in the office and people working remotely from home.
According to a peer group participant, the remote capability these days is “a double-edged sword.”
“We lost a senior person because with remote work he still lives here, but he’s working for a company in San Diego,” said the CEO, who noted on the other hand: “We have an employee who left a New York City firm, and he’s working remotely for us from New York.”
He noted that the complexities of this hybrid workforce could be with us for a while.
“What I’m geared up for is a really rocky ride until this whole remote thing sorts itself out, and employees kind of understand the consequences of this flexibility,” he said. “They’re not always going to be positive consequences. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, and I don’t know what the consequences are myself, good and bad.”
For information about the CEO & Family Enterprise Center, visit paulcollege.unh.edu/ceo-family-enterprise-center.
