On Friday the 13th of October, a little over 100 high-performing expert advisors to Entrepreneur Owner-Managers (EOMs) came together as guests of Bigelow at Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club to engage in Relationship Building, Sex, and Deliberate Practice as a Learning Community of Expert Advisors—whom we call Connectors. The best advisors aren’t merely soloists, but are practitioners who know the value of connecting with other advisors to collaborate and work as a team to bring positive experiences to EOMs.
At Bigelow we are always all about practical application but…sometimes it’s useful to gain a little perspective by refreshing our scholarship on foundation and theory to put our empirical, practical, day-to-day Entrepreneur Owner-Manager scar tissue in context.
Relationship Building: the expert advisors came from many different domains or professional fields including wealth advisory, trust and estate planning, law, accounting, tax, commercial banking, career / life coaching, and private company governance. The concept is to have advisors build strong relationships with each other so that they are even more effective collaborating as they come together in teams to help EOMs reach their personal and professional goals.
Sex: (but not what you think): ha ha ha... Learning is sex for the brain. So we shared stories and had lively discussions about some of the learnings and unlearnings from some of our co-created scholarship including Bigelow white papers on the VIA Signature Strengths of Seasoned Entrepreneurs, the Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Risk Tolerance Study, and the original research What Private Company Owners Care Most About in an M&A Transaction. Members of the Connector Community also get treated to the Bigelow Library where in collaboration with Juniper Books, we select and ship a book directly to them once per quarter. This year’s thought leadership included the books Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger, Influence by Robert Cialdini, PhD, and Strategy & The Fat Smoker by David Maister.
Deliberate Practice. Together we reviewed scholarship from Carol Dweck, Anders Ericsson, and Angela Duckworth, and spent time thinking about how the execution of Deliberate Practice could push us out of our Comfort Zone and accelerate our learning and growing as more effective advisors.
All of this work was a lead-in to the real fun which was a panel discussion of three super successful Entrepreneur Owner-Managers who have successfully navigated a capital gain transaction and transitioned in their own businesses. The dialogue was focused on the same questions that we addressed in the What Private Company Owners Care Most About in an M&A Transaction study. The panelists—Ken Johnson the Co-Founder of MAS Medical Staffing, George Mock the former CEO of Nye Lubricants, and Ross Silverstein the Founder and CEO of iPROMOTEu, were incredibly generous with their time, their candor and authenticity, and their wit. There were some high drama moments in the discussion, often followed by a lot of belly laughing.
The Bigelow Connectors Event is a Learning Community of Expert Advisors that convenes annually by invitation only. Together we focus on unlocking our collaborative energy by bringing together these world-class expert advisors to Entrepreneur Owner-Manager (EOM) clients. Participants also receive quarterly books from a library of thought leaders curated by Bigelow. The 2024 Connector event will be held October 2024.