All Business Owners View Success Differently:

What if you could see what your future success looks like today?

If closely held businesses are to survive and thrive, they need to develop a culture of embracing change. Owners of closely held businesses are generally averse to change. They often do not understand or appreciate the role of personal and business strategic planning in developing a competitive advantage that will ensure the success of the closely held business beyond the first years or the first generation.

Our experience at Pinnacle Insights is that closely held businesses can be inherently insular, inward focused and restricted. They are reluctant to plan and if they do, adopt a strategy that replicates past successes. Strategic decision-making, both personal and business is often ad-hoc, based on the owner's intuition, and is invariably triggered by a crisis or setback such as the loss of a key employee; steadily declining profitability; change in customer needs, products, technology; increased competition, etc.

Pinnacle Insights, Inc.

Founded in 2006

Our Mission:

Innovative thought and results that produces real success in achieving the

personal visions of our closely-held business owners beyond what they dreamed possible!

The only way create to your Pinnacle Insight™ is by developing a clear vision and a dynamic strategic plan, pursuing change relentlessly and embracing it. The owner(s) must adopt a structured approach to personal strategic planning. The clarity of the personal plans will make business plans simple to understand and execute. Closely held business owners from corporate backgrounds, they may acquire the closely held business through the mechanism of a management buy-out. They lose the art of strategic planning, growing complacent and intolerant of processes, any process! They can seem to become less objective, more rigid, inflexible, and averse to risk and change.

Each business owner is uniquely individual, going through differing development phases and circumstances, as do their families, their staff and the business itself. Each stage of the entrepreneurial life cycle has its own challenges, hurdles, responsibilities and tasks. It is vital that the closely-held owners' personal strategic plan is updated regularly, is linked to and influences the business' strategic plan.

The closely-held owner's personal strategic plan should address issues such as succession planning - do they want to perpetuate the closely held business in terms of ownership and/or management; equity ownership for key employees or family members; the potential for family members assuming an active role in the business; retirement of the first or second generations; the challenges of remuneration of active key staff or family members.


So what is Personal and Business Strategic Leadership?

It is a deliberate search/determination of the business' goals and objectives, and planning of courses of actions, including allocation of resources to develop and take control of the business' competitive advantage and unique attributes. It gives the business direction. It needs to be structured and include:

  • Values, Vision and Mission
  • Building an environmental analysis
  • Strategic diagnosis (SWOT)
  • Setting of specific measurable objectives and strategies with specific action items
  • Establishing the time frame (1.5-3 years), responsibilities and resource requirements
  • Development of corporate and operational structures
  • Creating a "dashboard" so all can monitor of the achievement of the plan
  • Routine revision and upgrade of the vision and plan.

All key executives and outside advisers are needed to challenge and stimulate the strategic planning process. They provide a constructive voice of reason and create a new dimension of experience, objectivity, candor, and can help in anticipating new challenges.

It is most important that the plan is clearly communicated within all stakeholders of the business (staff, family , advisers, bankers, accountants, etc.) to ensure understanding, ensuring commitment as well as understanding. Closely held businesses who wish enjoy their success they envisioned as their Pinnacle Insights™ and be successful in the 21st century must preserve the vision of the owner while creating a culture of change, innovation and flexibility.