Media

In my career as a business consultant, board member and coach, I’m fortunate enough to work with all sizes of businesses across a myriad of industries. Over the past few months, one of the things I’ve seen—and I’m far from alone in this—is that consumer discretionary spending is down across the board…

After 21 years as a CEO—during which time I bought 58 companies, built three and achieved profitable exits for multiple private equity sponsors—I decided to shift my focus to helping other entrepreneurs and founders achieve their own dreams. For the past several years, I’ve coached clients looking to scale and exit their businesses; served on boards for large companies; and given seminars and guest lectures to business owners, founders, executives, MBA candidates and more…

If you’re like thousands of other business leaders around the world, you’re probably working with an executive coach (or strongly considering it). If you are, I can say with confidence that you are on the right track: Study after study has shown that working with a CEO or leadership coach can lead to numerous benefits for an executive’s business, including higher revenue, increased productivity, less turnover and greater customer satisfaction…

Being an entrepreneur and small business owner has a lot of upsides. You can do what you love, be your own boss (to a certain extent, anyway), and—if you play your cards right—generate a lot of wealth.

However, there are also challenges. One of the biggest I have found is that, unlike CEOs at larger companies, those of us who are entrepreneurs and small business owners often wear all the hats…

Private equity (PE) deal volume hit $2.4 trillion in 2022. Clearly, the world of PE is a lucrative one for investors.

It’s also extremely volatile.

A 2018 report drives this home. It pointed out that only 27% of CEOsof companies acquired by PE will still be in place at the end of their company’s investment hold period (typically five years). That’s right: In the world of PE, 73% of CEOs are let go or leave in less than five years…

I recently taught a seminar to hundreds of entrepreneurs. Representing a diverse array of industries and businesses, many attendees ran what are best described as lifestyle businesses: LLCs, sole proprietorships or corporations that bring in enough profit to support the entrepreneur’s chosen lifestyle.

There are as many kinds of lifestyle businesses as there are entrepreneurs. My consulting company, for example, is a lifestyle business…

Everywhere you look, the signs are there. Christmas lights have come down, those unrelenting holiday ads are a distant memory, and the Salvation Army’s bell ringers have packed up their red buckets for another year. It all adds up to one thing: The holidays are over, and the new year is well underway.

But for many people—and small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners are no exception—shaking off the holiday cobwebs and figuring out how to move forward is often easier said than done…

The question of rebranding and renaming comes up frequently in my discussions with my clients. This is no surprise, as a brand is foundational to a company’s success.

But when is the right time to rebrand? And how can you go about doing so? To help you unpack those questions, I’d like to share some of the advice I give my coaching clients with you…

I once attended a conference with more than 200 hundred other CEOs. Collectively, we had more than 1,000 years of experience among us. To put it bluntly, there was a lot of knowledge and expertise in that room.

One particular morning, we were in the middle of an intense debate: When should a business leader fire someone who is failing to meet expectations? Some leaders in the room (myself included) argued the right course of action was to…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. When he penned these lines over 160 years ago, Dickens was writing about the French Revolution—but his words are just as applicable today.

Our country is politically divided. Inflation is high, and interest rates are climbing. We are on the cusp of a full-blown recession. Businesses across America are facing…

In my career as a business leader, I’ve been fortunate to have great mentors who taught me an incredible amount about developing, growing and scaling a business. One of the greatest was Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric.

I was at GE during the last 10 years of Jack’s career, from 1991 until 2001. In that decade, GE was arguably the most admired company in the world, and Jack was unquestionably the king…

Over the last 12 years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be a guest speaker at some of the top business schools in the country. This has given me the opportunity to lecture hundreds of executive MBA candidates about a multitude of business-related subjects. One of my favorite topics: culture and its importance to growth…

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and business leaders I coach ask me is, “When is the right time to sell my business?”

It makes sense. After all, there are lots of different reasons someone might consider selling their company. Sometimes, a perceived economic need drives an entrepreneur to think about…

There are over 30 million small businesses in America. Collectively, they account for 99.9% of all U.S. companies, and they employ nearly half of all the workers in this country.

It’s fair to say that America is built on small businesses, and yet 82% of them fail due to insufficient cash flow…

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, if your goal is to achieve sustainable growth in your business, that might just be the worst advice you could follow.

Why? Because running your business from this mindset doesn’t allow for careful consideration of how best to achieve a goal. Instead, it leads to processes that are obsolete. Even worse, it leads to processes that are inefficient…

Over the course of my career, I’ve been hired by private equity groups to run several different companies. In almost every instance, when I arrive as the new CEO, I find a sleepy organization with a 6% to 8% annual growth rate. My job is to boost that significantly. In fact, I’m expected to take the business’s growth from 6% or 8% to 30%.

As you might imagine, this can be very difficult to do, especially because…

Many entrepreneurs — and this may be true of you, too — want to reduce the taxes they pay. To achieve that aim, they do everything they can to limit their business’ cash profit, including recognizing a host of expenses that lower that profit and, therefore, their tax liability. If this is how you run your business, rest assured that working to legally reduce your taxes is okay.

Private equity plays a massive role in the M&A industry, whether as a buyer or a seller. But unlike strategic buyers, they do not intend to keep the acquired business for a long time. A typical PE firm will have…

BREA, Calif. — The Orange County Business Journal recognized Adam Coffey, CEO of CoolSys, in its annual OC 50 Special Report. Known as the Orange County Business Journal’s Annual Inventory of Influence, the special report features the most influential business leaders and individuals in Orange County…

Not all money is the same. And while this may or may be your main point of concentration, understanding how money works, who to partner with, who to avoid will save you a lot of time in your entrepreneurial journey. Even if you’re more of an inventor type it’s good to have enough knowledge on this side to be dangerous.

CoolSys has created a relief fund to provide financial support for employees during the pandemic and other unexpected life challenges. Initially created to help employees who were furloughed due to COVID-19, the CoolSys Cares Employee Relief Fund has now been expanded to assist..

A dozen CEOs and CFOs share ideas for using financial strategies and tactics to navigate the post-pandemic environment.

BREA, Calif. — The Orange County Business Journal recognized Adam Coffey, CEO of CoolSys in its annual OC 50 Special Report. Known as the Orange County Business Journal’s Annual Inventory of Influence, the special report features the most influential business leaders and individuals in Orange County, California, who have risen in their careers and professional endeavors beyond their peers…

Ares Management has acquired Source Refrigeration Holdings (DBA CoolSys) from Audax Private Equity. CoolSys is the parent of company of a number of refrigeration and HVAC companies nationwide. Audax acquired Source Refrigeration from Arsenal Capital Partners in December 2015.

Source Refrigeration & HVAC announced that Adam Coffey has been appointed as its new president and chief executive officer. Founder Brad Howard will remain in his position as chairman, working with Coffey to further develop the company’s strategic vision, organic and acquisition growth initiatives, and customer relationships.