Brooklyn Advisors works with the CEOs, owners and leadership teams of Buffalo’s established, privately held companies, including the family businesses that carried the region through its hardest decades.
Book a Free Conversation →There may be plenty of people around the table, but fewer people with whom a CEO or owner can openly examine an acquisition, a leadership problem, an underperforming executive, succession, growth risk or a decision they haven’t yet made.
Sometimes the problem isn’t finding an answer. It’s seeing the question differently.
Brooklyn Advisors helps CEOs and leadership teams step outside the organization long enough to challenge assumptions, consider perspectives they aren’t hearing internally and make clearer decisions.
If there’s a decision on your desk right now, let’s talk it through.
Book a Free Conversation →1:1 work is private working time focused on your business and your leadership. We might spend a session examining why accountability isn’t working across the leadership team. The next could be about a key hire, a difficult employee decision, an opportunity to acquire a competitor or whether the company’s growth is beginning to exceed its management capability. There isn’t a predetermined curriculum.
With leadership teams, responsibilities overlap, priorities compete, important disagreements stay below the surface and the CEO becomes the person who resolves every cross-functional problem. We work directly with leadership teams to improve how they communicate, make decisions, hold one another accountable and lead the business together. The goal isn’t simply a team that gets along better. It’s a team capable of carrying more of the business.
Growth, ownership transitions, market changes and leadership changes all force companies to reconsider assumptions that may have worked for years. We can facilitate focused strategic work or remain involved as an ongoing outside advisor as the organization executes the plan.
OCTET is a confidential peer advisory board for CEOs, presidents and owners who value the perspective of people who understand what it means to be responsible for the whole company.
Members come from non-competing businesses and bring different experiences, industries and ways of looking at a problem. Once a month, those eight perspectives are focused on the decisions each member is facing.
OCTET membership also includes monthly 1:1 coaching and advisory.
Eight Perspectives. Measurable Impact.
Peer advisory works best over time. The value comes from building trust, understanding one another’s businesses, and developing the kind of candid relationships that make the board more useful month after month.
OCTET was designed to make high-quality peer advisory and executive coaching accessible to leaders of small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations — without compromising the quality of the experience.
Buffalo was built on steel, grain, rail and the auto plants. When much of that heavy industry left, the region didn’t. Manufacturing is still one of Western New York’s largest employers, now in plastics, precision machining, medical devices and semiconductor supply. The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the University at Buffalo and Roswell Park have made healthcare and life sciences a second engine, and a decade of 43North and Buffalo Billion investment put startups on the map.
The comeback is real. So is the pressure it puts on the companies that carried Buffalo through the hard years.
Many are family-owned and privately held, now in their second or third generation. They’re modernizing, competing for talent and deciding whether to grow, sell or hand the business on, often with no one outside the business to think it through with.
Those are the conversations Brooklyn Advisors is built for.
Leading a Buffalo business?
Every relationship starts with a free 30-minute conversation about where you are and what you’re working on. No pitch, no obligation.
Fees are shared directly during that conversation.
Get notified about upcoming Brooklyn Advisors news, OCTET roundtables and events in Rochester and Buffalo before they're announced publicly.
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