One of the CEOs who attended The Entrepreneurship Institute’s (TEI) Charlotte President's Forum event in December 2012 owned a chain of retail stores. This was the second business venture for Frank, the company owner. In 2005, Frank sold his first company for a handsome profit.  He and his wife had the financial security needed to retire comfortably.  Like many successful entrepreneurs, they found retirement to be boring and purchased a struggling Charlotte retail operation in 2007.

Frank quickly turned around the struggling $3mm retail business and made a profit in 2008.  He knew there were other opportunities to purchase similar unprofitable businesses and by 2012 Frank had 4 profitable locations in three southeastern states doing $13mm in revenue.  Unfortunately, day to day management of the business took a heavy toll on Frank.  It wasn't fun anymore and Frank contemplated selling the company and giving retirement another try.

After registering for the TEI President's Forum, Frank invested 15 minutes taking the Business Wellness Checkup™, a service TEI offers nationwide through a strategic alliance with EvaluSys® and Level Management Partners.  Frank found the Checkup results to be quite interesting and signed up for a Checkup Review meeting facilitated by Tom Bixby, President of Level Management Partners and founder of EvaluSys®.

During the hour long Checkup Review meeting, Tom and Frank discussed the top strategic goals for Frank and his company, reviewed Frank's progress against those goals, and focused attention on Checkup-diagnosed issues likely to be barriers to meeting Frank's goals.  Several critical issues were exposed, and Frank decided to hire Level Management Partners to perform a deeper diagnostic examination using the EvaluSys® Business Wellness Diagnostic Series™.

Frank was extremely busy and was concerned the diagnostic process would take up a great deal of his valuable time.  Tom tailored the program to Frank's needs by spreading the diagnostic series out over a 5 week period, prioritizing the evaluation to focus on the most urgent issues first.  This ensured that Frank would need to allocate no more than 3 hours per week to the program.

The Diagnostic Series examined management practices in Executive Leadership, Business Planning, Financial Planning & Control, Human Resources, Management / Supervision, Exit Planning, Marketing, Sales, Product/Service Innovation and Business Process Quality.  Tom reached out to members of his local Business Wellness Advisor Network to invite them to participate as subject-matter experts as Frank and Tom reviewed evaluation results during weekly review meetings.  The Network advisors who sat in on the review meetings did an excellent job helping Frank understand the implications of the diagnostic results, the relative urgency of taking action and possible solutions to identified problems.  Frank liked what he heard from the Network advisors and asked for their help in implementing the needed solutions.

After the 5 week program was completed, Frank had gained renewed enthusiasm for his business.  He had a clear vision for what needed to be done and had the expert resources identified to make it happen.  He has great confidence in his ability to grow the business to over $50mm in revenue within 5 years and is excited to see that vision realized.

This amazing transformation began when Frank invested 15 minutes taking the Business Wellness Checkup!