Brooklyn Advisors works with the owners and CEOs of Finger Lakes farms, food and beverage producers, manufacturers and family businesses: the companies that keep the region’s towns running.
Book a Free Conversation →That creates a particular kind of leadership responsibility.
Business decisions can affect employees you’ve known for years. Ownership and family relationships can overlap. Leadership succession may involve both business and personal considerations. Growth can mean deciding whether — and how much — the company itself should change.
The value of outside perspective isn’t having someone who already knows your answer.
It’s having someone who helps you see the decision more clearly.
If there’s a decision on your desk right now, let’s talk it through.
Book a Free Conversation →An executive may be struggling. You may be uncertain about the next generation of leadership. Growth may be exposing weaknesses in the organization. You may know something needs to change without yet knowing exactly what. 1:1 advisory creates private space to slow those issues down, examine them from different angles and decide what to do next — part coaching, part mentoring, part problem-solving, and always grounded in the business you’re actually running.
As companies grow, the CEO cannot remain the connection point for every important decision. We work with leadership teams to clarify responsibilities, strengthen accountability, surface issues earlier and improve the team’s ability to solve problems together. Rather than taking the team away from the business for abstract exercises, we use the business itself as the work.
For many privately held businesses, strategy isn’t an annual planning exercise. It’s deciding whether to expand. Whether to invest. Whether to enter another market. Whether the organization has the people to support growth. How ownership might transition. Or what the business should become over the next five or ten years. We help leadership teams examine those choices, challenge assumptions and translate direction into priorities.
But geography and industry can make it difficult to build a truly independent peer group.
OCTET brings eight CEOs, presidents and owners from non-competing companies together in a confidential monthly board session.
Nobody around the table works for you. Nobody is trying to sell you anything. And everyone understands what it means to be accountable for a business.
Each member also works individually with their OCTET Board Director every month.
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.
The Finger Lakes punches well above its size. Corning Incorporated has been making glass at the southern end of the region for more than 150 years, and its optical fiber and Gorilla Glass are in networks and phones around the world. Wine Enthusiast named the Finger Lakes its 2025 American Wine Region of the Year, with more than 140 wineries on its hillsides. And in Geneva, Cornell AgriTech helps food and beverage companies turn research into products.
And the region sits on a corridor that’s drawing national attention. Along the I-90 Thruway between Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, the federal government has designated a semiconductor Tech Hub backed by CHIPS and Science Act funding, and Micron broke ground in January 2026 on a planned $100 billion chip complex north of Syracuse. That brings new opportunity for suppliers, and new competition for every skilled worker in the region.
But most of the region’s businesses look nothing like Corning. They’re farms, dairies, wineries, food producers, manufacturers and contractors, many family-owned, many in towns where the CEO’s customers, employees and neighbors are the same people.
That makes some decisions harder to talk through. Who do you ask about succession, a difficult employee or selling the business when everyone you’d ask is part of the story?
That’s where an outside perspective earns its place.
Leading a Finger Lakes 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.
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