The CVO Team
Accelerating Strategic Value and implementing the roadmap often requires numerous skillsets seldom held by one person. To assist our clients in any area of Strategic Value creation, CVO has assembled a team of experienced and vetted experts in many value creation areas, who meet the CVO standards for client service. This way our clients have the opportunity to utilize a vetted and coordinated advisory team under Joel’s direction to help ensure a successful implementation of their Strategic Value Acceleration Roadmap.
Joel Strom
My Story.
My Mission.
“My mission is to help CEOs accelerate their company’s Strategic Value, create “Gotta Have” businesses, and maximize their enterprise value.”
Joel developed the concept and process of Strategic Value based on more than four decades of practical experience as a business owner, advisor, investment banker, and CEO. He has seen the spectacular results that business owners and CEO’s have realized from accelerating their Strategic Value. He founded Chief Value Officers because he remains committed to helping businesses go from Ordinary to Extraordinary. Joel believes that the primary role of any owner or CEO in a privately held business is to be the CVO.
Joel’s greatest satisfaction comes from working along with a CEO/owner helping them transition and focus on their role as Chief Value Officer (CVO). He works with them and their teams to assess their current situation, determine their growth and value goals, develop their value acceleration roadmap, and then guide them along their route to maximizing enterprise value.
His CVO Strategic Value successes include a company that grew from $15M to $95M in sales culminating in a $350M sale in less than 10 years and another that sold for $75M just three years after losing a $25M offer.
Besides his client successes, he owned and grew his own manufacturing company and founded successful growth and value consulting practices in both Ohio and Arizona.
He recently completed a five-year period where he served as the CEO of a family owned 50-year-old technical product manufacturing company with 230 employees. During his tenure as CEO and in his role as CVO, Joel led that organization through a remarkable transformation. Utilizing the concept of Strategic Value, he was able to maximize the enterprise’s value by creating a world-class leadership team, shifting the company’s mindset to be forward-looking in the digital age, and by developing and implementing innovative and comprehensive go-to-market strategies and operational excellence. The result was securing its place as world leader in its industry and calumniating in being awarded the 2019 Manufacturer of the Year Award by the State Manufacturers Council. Once his mission with that company was complete, he decided to return to his passion to help other clients maximize their Strategic Value by founding Chief Value Officers.
Over the years, Joel has facilitated CEO peer groups and provided keynote presentations, workshops, and seminars on business growth and value creation to industry organizations and associations across the country. He is a published author and his articles about strategy, growth, and value creation appear regularly in local and national publications. Along with the Arizona, Ohio, and mid-America MEP’s, Joel was instrumental in developing and presenting educational programs for manufacturing companies to inspire and accelerate their potential and value growth.
He has and continues to sit on corporate and advisory boards and remains active in civic and industry associations. The Institute of Management Consultants designated Joel as a Certified Management Consultant (CMC), an achievement realized by less than 1% of all consultants worldwide. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Case Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management of Case Western Reserve University.
CVO Team Members
Maximizing Strategic Value in any organization can require some specific skillset and expertise. Chief Value Officers has assembled a team of value creation specialists. Each possess specific skills to assist clients in the development and implementation of their Strategic Value Creation Roadmap. Utilizing our CVO Team Members ensures a coordinated approach for development and implementation of specific components of each client’s Strategic Value Creation Roadmap.
Gary Covert
Leadership and Innovation
Gary Covert helps senior leaders and their teams execute at a strategic level, develop talent, and innovate continuously without burning out. Leaders who work with Gary regularly report improvements in profits, accelerated drive for results, higher-functioning teams, and significant growth in individual and leadership effectiveness. Clients work in a diverse range of industries, including logistics, technology, hospitality, eye health, restaurants, healthcare, financial services, construction, mining, and energy.
Jamie Glass
Sales, Marketing, and Growth Strategies
Jamie is a proven executive leader experienced in growing profitable businesses and increasing market share in alignment with business goals. She is hired by CEOs to drive awareness, influence, engagement, and retention strategies that create value and proven results. As an action oriented CMO and CRO with broad expertise, she is best known for building reputable brands and accelerating sales with effective sales and marketing strategies for lead generation, sales enablement, web and digital media, communications, and loyalty programs. She is an expert in developing new business models, accelerating multimillion-dollar revenue streams, crafting investment opportunities and implementing profitable customer relationships.
Alan Rohrer
Sales Training and Customer Engagement
Today, many CEO’s and Business leaders are scratching their head trying to figure out how best to organize sales and marketing while developing the best sales team to focus on their business objectives and revenue targets. After three decades in industry, Alan’s focus is to assist by undoing the sales gimmicks and tricks from the last 30 years. Alan develops and delivers training strategies to address skill development, revenue enhancement and customer engagement models. He is experienced working with groups from high-tech, professional services, medical systems, financial services, pharmaceuticals, business consulting, food services and telecom sales among others.
Joe Bockerstette
Systems and Processes
Joe Bockerstette has more than 35 years’ experience as a CEO, business consultant, and private equity/angel investor. Joe was previously a Management Consulting Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, co-founded a private equity firm, Equity Management Group and was the first Managing Partner of the Main Street Venture Fund, the first angel pledge fund in Indiana. Joe holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Cincinnati, and an MBA from Xavier University. He has served as a director on a variety of public, private and non-profit boards and has co-authored three books Time Based Manufacturing, Attracting an Angel, How to Get Money From Business Angels and Why Most Entrepreneurs Don’t, and the soon to be published Strategic Process Management.
Colin Reed
Lean Thinking and Management
Colin and his team are experts at implementing the Lean Tool Set and guiding cultural transformations. Throughout North America, they serve every type of company: transactional, service, distribution, and manufacturing. Colin has training materials on over 45 Lean Thinking topics to help manufactures with all their needs. His firm leads companies through basic training, plan development and facilitation of process improvement events to fix problematic systems. They help companies reduce order lead times by up to 80%, WIP by up to 90%, floor space required by up to 75% and improve quality by up to 90%. They can do this all while developing the associates to sustain and improve the changes made.
Shawn West
ERISA Specialist
Shawn shares almost two decades of ERISA plan management, fiduciary stewardship, legislative advocacy, and consulting experience to every situation. With an appreciation that nearly seventy-five perfect of company-sponsored retirement plans are out of compliance, he works with leadership teams to limit this personal exposure. By utilizing his approach, leadership teams can provide a well-designed and managed retirement plan that complements a total benefits package. Shawn has considerable experience with ERISA plan mergers & acquisitions, public and private companies from enterprise to small family businesses in all industries.
Mari Tautimes
EOS Implementation®
Using a complete proven system of real-world practical tools and disciplines, Mari works with the leadership teams of entrepreneurial companies to increase their value by helping them achieve Vision, Traction and Healthy (VTH). VTH means running a more profitable company that is easier to run and more fun to be a part of. Vision meaning, getting every person throughout the organization on the same page with where they’re going and how they plan to get there. Traction is about instilling discipline and accountability so that everywhere they look, they see people executing on that Vision. Healthy is about helping the organization become a healthy, fun loving bunch of people who want to spend time together, because most of the time they’re not.
COMMITMENT
CONSISTENCY
Creativity
GROW
Moving Forward
How it Works
Joel does one thing and one thing only. He helps businesses grow successfully and accelerate their enterprise value.
One of the most basic components of a company’s success is a strong and well defined vision for the future of the business. Where is the business heading? What is the ultimate goal? What direction should everyone in the business be rowing in? Besides being an important component of basic business management, a stated and understood vision critical to accelerating enterprise value.
When there is one owner, assuming he or she has, in fact, defined and communicated that vision, there is no question and there is no conflict. One person, one vision. However, when there is more than one owner, when there are partners or multiple shareholders, we often lose that certainty. Unless the owners can agree on a common vision for the company, sooner or later there is going to be conflict and that conflict will prevent the company from ever reaching its potential.