Why CEOs Should Surround Themselves With CEOs, Not Students

It's 11:30 on a Tuesday night. The house is quiet, and you're still staring at the same spreadsheet you opened after dinner. You need to decide whether to open a second location or wait another year. Your sales director says go, because his bonus depends on growth. Your controller says hold, because protecting cash is her job. Your spouse asks you not to gamble what you've already built. And your business partner, who stepped back from day-to-day operations years ago, gives you the answer he always gives: "You know this better than anyone."

That's exactly the problem. You do know it better than anyone, which is why you have no one to think out loud with. Everyone around you has an opinion, but almost no one has your seat. Nobody else signs payroll, answers to the bank, or lies awake when a major customer is sixty days late on an invoice. If that sounds familiar, it isn't a personal weakness. It's a structural feature of the job, and it can be fixed. The fix isn't another certificate program full of students. It's sitting down with people who carry the same weight you do.

This article explains why an owner or CEO needs a CEO peer group, what the research actually says about learning from peers, and how to get the most out of a room full of people who run real companies.

The Loneliness at the Top Is Real

For years, "it's lonely at the top" sounded like a line from a movie. Today there's data behind it. In 2012, a survey of 100 CEOs by the leadership consulting firm RHR International found that 41% said they experienced loneliness in their jobs, as Fortune reported. That same year, RHR chairman Thomas J. Saporito wrote a Harvard Business Review piece with a title that left no room for ambiguity, "It's Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness." His argument was simple. Leader isolation is not a soft issue, and it's time to stop treating it like one.

More than a decade later, the conversation has become sharper. A research team led by Alaric Bourgoin surveyed 109 CEOs of major Canadian organizations and interviewed 46 of them in depth. Their findings, published in Harvard Business Review in December 2024, reframe the problem. CEO loneliness comes less from a lack of social contact than from the sheer weight of making the call, especially in a crisis. It gets worse when the CEO feels the board, the senior team, or middle management can't steady the organization, or is divided.

That distinction matters because it kills the easy answer. More meetings, more cocktail receptions, and more names in your calendar won't solve it. You're already surrounded by people all day. What's missing isn't company. What's missing is someone who understands, from their own experience, what it means to be the last one to decide and the first one to answer for it.

Another line of research sharpens the point. Professors Joe Magee, Eileen Chou, Adam Galinsky, and Adam Waytz studied the link between power and loneliness and, as NYU Stern summarizes, found that power also brings psychological resources, such as a stronger sense of controlling your own fate. Their central insight is that being alone is not the same as feeling alone. For an owner, the practical takeaway is clear. You can make decisions alone, because that's how the job works, without having to think them through alone.

Why Your Team Can't Be Your Sounding Board

Think about the last time you pitched an idea to your leadership team. There were probably a few questions, a couple of caveats, and then fairly quick agreement. Your team isn't made up of yes-men by nature. They simply depend on you. You set their pay, shape their careers, and, to a large degree, their peace of mind. Even when they want to be candid, a filter is at work, whether anyone names it or not.

The same is true, in different ways, of almost everyone around you. Your vendor wants to keep selling to you. Your banker wants to place a loan. Your consultant wants the contract renewed. Your family wants to protect you. Each of them offers a legitimate view, but none offers a view that is both free of self-interest and informed by having sat exactly where you sit.

There's also a language gap. When you explain to someone who has never run a company why you can't let go of the underperforming salesperson everyone talks about, you have to tell the whole story. He was one of the first hires, he owns the relationship with two key accounts, and his exit could pull others with him. With another owner, you don't need any of that. "He's an early hire and he has the big accounts" is enough for a knowing nod, because they've been there. That speed of understanding isn't a nicety. It's what lets you reach the question that actually matters in twenty minutes instead of two hours.

Research on executive development confirms how common this advice gap is. The 2013 Executive Coaching Survey by The Miles Group and Stanford's Center for Leadership Development and Research, which polled more than 200 CEOs, directors, and senior executives, found that nearly two-thirds of CEOs received no outside leadership advice, while virtually all of them said they would welcome it. The appetite is there. The right setting is not.

Students and Owners Learn Differently

This is where the most common temptation shows up. When an owner feels the need to grow as a leader, the first instinct is often to enroll in an academic program. That's a respectable choice and, in many cases, a useful way to pick up frameworks and vocabulary. But it pays to be clear about what you'll take away from a room full of students and what you won't.

A student, even a brilliant one, learns for the future. They analyze cases about giant corporations, debate hypothetical scenarios, and answer questions whose answers live in the textbook or in the professor's head. An owner learns for Monday morning. They walk in with an open problem, their own money on the line, and a team waiting for direction. The question isn't what General Motors would do. It's how to fix the margin on the product line that sells the most and earns the least.

That difference transforms the quality of the conversation. In a room of students, the most common objection is theoretical. In a room of owners, it's "I tried that, and here's what happened." One sentence like that is worth a week of reading, because it comes with context, cost, and outcome attached.

The academic research even contains a telling detail. In a field experiment with tech founders in India, which we'll look at more closely in a moment, the advice founders received from peers had less effect on those who held an MBA or had been through an accelerator. The researchers suggest that formal training may make people less receptive to the practices other entrepreneurs share. That's no indictment of formal education, but it is a reminder that learning from peers calls for a different mindset than the classroom. At Brickell, we put it simply. There are no students here.

What the Evidence Says About Peer Learning

For a long time, the case for networking for business owners rested on anecdotes. "I met my best customer at a dinner." "A colleague talked me out of a terrible contract." Those stories are real, but they don't prove anything. What's changed is that economists and strategy scholars have started measuring the effect rigorously, using randomized experiments.

The most striking study was published by economists Jing Cai and Adam Szeidl in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. They organized business associations for the owner-managers of young firms in China and randomly assigned 2,800 companies either to small groups that met monthly for a year or to a control group with no meetings. The meetings increased firm revenue by 8.1%. They also raised profits, the number of business partners, access to borrowing, and a management quality score. And the effects lasted at least a year after the meetings ended.

Two findings from that study should interest any owner. First, firms randomly assigned to stronger peers grew faster. Who you sit with matters. Second, owners shared useful business information mostly with people who weren't competitors, and firms whose owners discussed management, partners, or finance improved in precisely those areas. The conversation wasn't filler. It was the mechanism.

The second study is the India experiment mentioned earlier. Aaron Chatterji, Solène Delecourt, Sharique Hasan, and Rembrand Koning brought together 100 founders of high-growth technology firms and randomly paired them to advise each other on management. According to the working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, founders advised by peers with a more active people-management style, meaning regular meetings, clear goal-setting, and frequent feedback, ended up running larger companies that were less likely to fail. A one-standard-deviation increase in the peer's management practices was associated with firms 28% larger two years later, and survival rose from roughly 75% to 85%.

Read carefully, the message is powerful. It isn't enough to be around people. What moves the numbers is being around owners who do well the things you don't yet do well, and having conversations concrete enough to copy what works.

How a Peer Group Sharpens Your Decisions

Beyond revenue and survival, a good CEO peer group changes something less visible and more valuable. It changes how you decide.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman popularized the distinction between the "inside view" and the "outside view." The inside view builds a forecast from the details of your own project, which always looks unique. The outside view asks how things went for others who tried something similar. McKinsey's Tim Koller, who has studied the phenomenon for decades with Dan Lovallo, notes that using the right reference projects can cut forecast errors by 70%, and that many executives consult only one or two comparable cases before deciding.

That's the practical value of a table of peers. When you tell eight owners you're thinking about opening a second location, you don't get one opinion. You get a small database of real experience. One opened and did well because she cloned her best manager. Another opened and nearly went under because he underestimated working capital. A third decided not to open at all and invested in digital sales instead. Suddenly your project stops looking unique, and you start seeing it for what it is, one more case in a category with known outcomes.

Picture the owner of a food distribution company who has spent months debating whether to raise prices for her institutional accounts. Inside her company, everyone has a reason to hit the brakes. Sales fears losing volume, and finance fears pushback from the biggest customers. In a session with other owners, someone asks how much she's losing every month by not acting, and another walks her through how he segmented his customers before announcing an increase. No one makes the decision for her, but she makes it with more information, less fear, and a concrete plan to execute.

That's the real shift. A peer group doesn't tell you what to do. It forces you to explain your reasoning to people who have no reason to agree with you, surfaces the assumptions you never questioned, and gives you reference points to calibrate your optimism. It's the closest thing to an informal board of directors, without the politics that sometimes come with a formal one.

Mentors, Peer Advisory Groups, and Immersive Programs

Not every format for learning among owners works the same way, and it's worth distinguishing them so you choose well.

Classic mentoring runs in one direction. Someone with more experience guides you. It's extremely valuable when you're entering unfamiliar territory, but it depends entirely on one person's judgment and on how closely their experience matches your reality.

A peer advisory group runs in many directions. A small number of owners meet regularly, each brings a challenge, and the others pressure-test it. Its strength lies in the diversity of perspectives and in continuity, because over time trust lets people discuss what they can't discuss anywhere else. Some owners call this a business mastermind. Whatever the label, the principle is the same.

Immersive programs combine content and community. Over several days, a group of owners works through a focused topic, such as operational control, pricing architecture, or sales strategy, using real company cases and deliberate time to talk with one another. What you learn in the morning session gets debated over dinner, and what gets debated over dinner comes back the next day as a sharper question.

Each format plays a role. Mentoring guides. A peer group sustains. An immersive program accelerates. What matters in all three is that the person across the table runs a business, makes the calls, and answers for results.

How to Get the Most From a Room of Peers

Being in the right room is half the work. The other half is on you. A few habits separate the owners who leave with scattered ideas from those who leave with decisions made.

First, bring a real problem, not a presentation. The owners who get the most from these settings are the ones willing to put the issue that keeps them up at night on the table, even if the story isn't neatly packaged. An honest question like "I've tried to hand off sales for two years and I can't figure out why it isn't working" opens conversations a polished pitch never will.

Second, listen to other people's cases as if they were your own. Many of the best ideas arrive when another owner describes their problem and you quietly realize you have exactly the same one. Industries differ, but the underlying dilemmas repeat. Delegating, pricing, keeping customers, getting operations under control, and aligning the team.

Third, make the most of the informal moments. In an immersive program, the morning session gives you the framework, but the decisive conversation often happens at dinner, on the ride back, or over afternoon coffee. That's where a manufacturing owner explains to a services owner how he calculates the true cost to serve each customer, or where someone hands you the introduction you needed. Don't treat those moments as breaks. They're part of the program.

Fourth, leave with concrete commitments. The energy of a great session evaporates within a week unless it turns into action. That's why every Brickell program ends with a 90-day plan, because peer conversation only pays off when it becomes decisions your team can execute on Monday.

Fifth, come back. Trust among owners isn't built in a single meeting. The groups that create the most value stay in touch, hold each other accountable, and celebrate each other's progress. A real peer community is built over time, not with a business card.

Why Brickell Puts Owners in the Room, Not Students

Brickell Business School was founded on a simple conviction. Owners and CEOs learn best among owners and CEOs. That's why our executive education programs are built for people running growing companies across the United States and Latin America, not for people at the start of their careers.

We work with cases from real companies, with sizes and challenges similar to yours, not examples from corporations that have never sweated a tight payroll at the end of the month. The people teaching are practitioners who have lived on the operating, selling, and profitability side of the business. Our formats combine intensive sessions, dinners, and peer activities in Miami, along with hands-on labs that can be brought to your own company to work alongside your team.

If your priority is keeping customers and turning service into growth, the Customer Experience: Sell, Retain, Scale program is a strong place to start. In every program, though, the most valuable part won't just be the content. It will be the people you get to work through it with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a CEO peer group?

A CEO peer group is a small, recurring group of owners and chief executives who meet to discuss real challenges in their companies, share experience, and pressure-test one another's decisions. It helps reduce the isolation of the top job and improves decision quality. In a randomized study by Cai and Szeidl, monthly meetings among business owners raised participating firms' revenue by 8.1%.

How is a peer advisory group different from networking?

Networking for business owners usually focuses on expanding contacts and generating business opportunities. A peer advisory group goes deeper. It relies on trust, continuity, and candid conversations about management, finance, and leadership issues that people don't share at an open event.

Is a business mastermind the same as mentoring?

Not quite. Mentoring gives you guidance from one person with more experience, while a business mastermind or peer group gives you several perspectives from people facing similar challenges at the same time. Many owners benefit from both.

How do I choose the right peer group?

Look for a group where the other members run real companies, ideally at a level of complexity equal to or greater than yours, and where there's a method for turning conversation into decisions. Cai and Szeidl found that firms with stronger peers grew faster, so the quality of the room matters as much as the content.

If you've been making the most important decisions in your company on your own for too long, what you're missing may not be information but the right table to think them through. Talk to a Brickell advisor and find out which program fits where your business is today and the questions that keep you up at night.