The 30min-CEO©

The Argo and the Argonauts

Who ever heard about the Argonauts and their trusted vessel the Argo endeavoring the stormy seas? As we are progressing with the Dach2US initiative to create a transatlantic entrepreneurship, business-hub and investment facilitator we have already found a fitting name for the project: ARGO.

Today I would like to speak about a methodology, the 30minCEO© that we will put in the near future in service of the businesses onboarding to our hubs distributed in 3 main regions: The European Union, South-West-Florida and the United Arab Emirates with the objective, among others, to strengthen  the friendship and business relations between those destinations through bottom-up, hands-on, boots-on-the-ground, active knowledge transfer, business advisory and access to finance.

In recent years close business partners, academics and I have developed the 30minCEO© methodology.

The small business owners dilemma

Our working asumptions:

• A Small Business is confronted with the same clusters of business administration challenges as a Medium Size or Large Corporation.
• Often in a Small Enterprise the founder is by default also the incidental GM or CEO.
• In many cases a Small Business owner has its core expertise in the underlying business model.
• Many Small Business Owners lack thorough experience in Corporate Finance & Managerial Finance.
• There is also often little background in the management of large, structured and compartmentalized corporations.
• CPA’s, Lawyers and other advisors like CFP’s, Business Circles or Support Groups do not bolster SME’s and owners in a comprehensive way and do not have to carry the all over responsibility either.
• Therefore the Small Business Owner has the dilemma to manage and grow its business while focusing on the core business model.
• The need arises for a professional GM/CEO which is often not affordable.

Being a successful entrepreneur and business owner is a massive challenge. It takes smarts to understand the right opportunity, at the right time and the bravery to invest in one’s vision on top of spending considerable time and energy in starting, growing and accelerating the business.

A good friend of mine once said: “ … everybody is cheering and sometimes envying the successful founder but only few understand the sweat and tears that most of them had to go through in the years leading to success.

A Pilot’s Operating Handbook

While managing and management is none of the above it is nevertheless a relevant part of long term success and a trade, a profession based on knowledge and decades of experience. Using the VGCG-Sphere-Analysis© based on M. Porter’s value chain approach, one can extract the different dimensions of a business in general.

• Corporate General Strategy including the business model, ICT and Innovation.
• The Inbound Sphere.
• The Transformation Sphere.
• The Outbound Sphere.

In each of the above mentioned 4 spheres there are subsegments to be managed but it is the owners, GM’s or CEO’s challenge to keep all of them on the radar, to understand the necessities and to find remedies and opportunities for improvement and all that while keeping profitability up high. Every aspect should be working smoothly in synchronization and coordination with the other corporate dimensions.

Management is not rocket science but a job

The areas to be actively planned and benchmarked, to be reviewed and eventually adjusted, improved and expanded are the following:

Depending on the industry of course some of the fields are more or less dimensioned and relevant and since it can be assumed that no business has unlimited financial resources interventions need to be prioritized.

The 30minCEO©

To solve the small business owners dilemma we developed the 30minCEO advisory approach where we offer an affordable subscription plan that allows the business owner, GM or CEO to confer with our specialized teams on decision making, budgets, controlling and all relevant business necessities driven by numbers in a weekly compact 30min call.

Instead of hiring permanent management or expensive advisors that look usually compartmentalized at a business we provide a sounding board and guidance in a compact and efficient way relying on our extensive, decades long experiences and on experts in all the corporate spheres in a comprehensive way.

Summary and takeaways

• SME’s face the same organizational and structural challenges as large corporations.
• All dimensions of the corporate reality exist but just on a smaller scale.
• The SME’s dilemma is that professional GM’s, CEO’s are expensive and over-dimensioned.
• The 30minCEO is a subscription program for SME’s offering weekly compact decision making support from expert teams.

About the author

Dr. Torsten Reiss is co-founder of Dach2US. He graduated from the Universa’ degli study di Bologna, the oldest University in the world and  after he started his career as Investment Banker for Deutsche Bank. Later he worked for many years in Strategy- & Management consulting in countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK and several countries in LatAm before returning to deliver concepts for the PE and M&A industry.

In recent years TR gained in-depth insights into the world of Technology- & Business Model Innovation working with start- & scaleups. He has a strong academic record teaching as guest and working on case studies with some of the top 10 MBA schools worldwide and to end up developing a MiniMBA together with some renowned professores from Universties like UC Berkeley, MIT and IEEE.

As entrepreneur and executive TR was involved in more then 40 company launches and Internationalization projects on 3 continents.