Guest: Geoff Goldwater, a founding member of Odell Studner, which is a fast-growing risk management and consulting company. Geoff is also an entrepreneur coaching client of CEO Coaching International.

Episode in a Tweet: Will a crisis break your business or open up a new path towards BIG?

Quick Background: The scale of Covid-19’s disruption to global life and business is unprecedented. But if you think back ten years, the experts were saying the same thing about the Great Recession. Go back another ten and we were coping with the fallout from 9/11 and the tech bubble bursting. A previous generation of leaders had to struggle through Black Monday, just as their predecessors had to deal with stagflation in the 1970s.

The pandemic environment may well be more daunting than these previous challenges. But good business is good business, no matter what the particulars are. Companies that are still struggling to regain their footing during Covid-19 can adapt strategies that helped CEOs win during previous crises to this difficult moment.

On today’s show, Geoff Goldwater shares the three-step process he used to reinvent his company after the Great Recession and lead it back to a fast growth path.

Growing your own company is challenging. Growing someone ELSE's company challenges CEOs to apply their skill sets in very different ways. Instead of building your own culture, you're inheriting the founder's. Instead of seeing your own vision of BIG, you have to make sure you and the founder see eye-to-eye. And while, at your own company, you might have struggled to hold yourself accountable, as a hired gun you won't be CEO for very long if you're not meeting the founder's expectations and maintaining a growth trajectory.

On today's show, Jeff Tennyson shares his three-step framework for stepping into a founder CEO's shoes while still making the job your own.