Kip Brockmyre III, president of LFI Inc., recently got ideas about putting together a wellness program to lower health care costs at his company in Smithfield from a fellow chief executive who recently had done the same and was glad to share his experience.
The discussion took place at a meeting of the Chief Executives Club of Rhode Island. Launched in September, the club provides a setting for presidents and CEOs of companies with annual operating budgets in excess of $2 million to meet, share information and hear from national business experts brought in as guest speakers, said Robert Fiske, executive director and founder of the club.
“There is a tremendous value in bringing accomplished leaders together to share their collective intelligence and experience,” Fiske said. “These chief executives run companies that employ thousands of people. The better they become as leaders, the more profitable their businesses become, the better it is for all of us in Rhode Island.”
The club meets for lunch on the third Thursday of the month – so far, every meeting has been held at the Federal Reserve restaurant in Providence, whose owner, Bob Burke, is a sponsor of the club. The three-hour program includes a guest speaker and a roundtable discussion.
On March 15, the speaker was Chester Elton, co-author of The New York Times bestseller “The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance.”
The club also plans to hold a social event every summer and a semiformal year-end dinner party, to which members can invite a guest. Members also can take part in the club’s C-Boards – groups of six local CEOs whose companies don’t compete with one another, who meet regularly to discuss business issues.
As another service, club members can have their businesses visited by a team of CEOs who spend several hours learning about the company’s critical issues and provide candid feedback and advice.
Membership costs $1,800 per year, and potential members are invited to attend a meeting for $79. So far, the club has about 40 members, Fiske said.
Fiske, a former executive with Compaq and Hewlett-Packard who later owned two small businesses in Portland, Ore., formed the Chief Executives Club after returning to his native Rhode Island in July 2005.
In 1994, while he was responsible for a global marketing project at Hewlett-Packard, Fiske said, he organized his first event for chief executives when he put together a world-business-leader forum for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Several years later, Fiske said he learned firsthand the value that such an organization can provide when he joined a chief executives club in Portland, where he launched a software company and a small publishing house.
“I just personally found that I was able to develop a peer support group. Having the speakers come in each month and provide challenging and interesting information kept me fresh in my thinking – and when I left Portland to come out here, I really missed that,” Fiske said.
With help from the Greater Providence, Newport County and Northern Rhode Island Chambers of Commerce, he reached out to chief executives across the state and formed an eight-person board of advisers that is chaired by Charles Nault, chairman of Atrion Networking Corp. in Warwick.
About 90 people attended the Chief Executives Club launch event in September, at which Gov. Donald L. Carcieri spoke, Fiske said.
The club offers a unique niche for the executives of successful midsize companies in southern New England, Fiske said. Most of the club’s members had at least $5 million in revenue last year, and many had annual revenues of $30 million or more, he said.
“We are not targeting the GTECHs and the Textrons and CVSs and all of the big guys in the state,” Fiske said. “One of the interesting comments that we got at [the club’s first] event was, ‘This is pretty neat. This is the first time we’ve had a gathering of CEOs without the usual crowd present and running the show.’ ”
Brockmyre, the president of LFI Inc., a contract manufacturer in the medical device and aerospace industries, said the club offers him a chance to share notes with local chief executives from other industries.
“Most of our customers are out of state, and so we kind of lose track sometimes of what’s going on nearby with other companies and executives,” Brockmyre said. “We tend to be getting involved with other associations within our industry, but they … don’t always have the same types of issues as local companies do. So we thought it would be particularly helpful just to be tuned in with what’s going on here in the state.”
