There's a particular kind of alone that comes with running a company.

It's not loneliness in the ordinary sense. You're surrounded by capable people. Your leadership team is smart, committed, and invested in the outcome. You have advisors. You have people who genuinely want to help. And yet, when the decision is big enough (a new market, an acquisition, a restructure that none of you have navigated before) you end up carrying the weight of it in a way that nobody else in the building quite can.

I experienced this firsthand at ASL. We were running a profitable business in a dying industry, and we knew it. The path forward wasn't obvious. Over several years, we rebuilt. Not tweaked. Into four distinct business units, each carrying real risk, each requiring conviction that we were making the right call before the market confirmed it. Then came acquisitions. New ventures. Moves into territory none of us had covered before.

I had a strong executive team. What I learned is that even the best team has a natural ceiling, not because the people aren't capable, but because they can only see as far as they've been. A team running a $15 million company can work hard, think clearly, and execute well. Imagining what it takes to build to $30 million is a different thing entirely. They don't know what they don't know. That's not a criticism. It's just how experience works. You can't give what you don't have.

So when new ideas came back inside the business, they often met resistance. Caution, skepticism, occasionally outright pushback. That resistance wasn't irrational. It was a natural response to unfamiliar terrain. The question wasn't whether to expect it. It was how to move through it with enough confidence that you weren't abandoning a sound decision just because the room wasn't ready for it yet.

That confidence came from a different room entirely.

A peer group of CEOs, presidents, and owners who had already crossed similar thresholds (or different ones, equally difficult) offered something structurally different. They had no stake in my answer. No organizational agenda. No career tied to the outcome. They could push back without an agenda and validate without a stake. That combination is rarer than it sounds. They could see around corners I hadn't reached yet, because some of them had already been there.

More than that, they surfaced things I hadn't thought to look for. New verticals. Structural approaches. Ways of thinking about a problem that weren't in our industry's vocabulary. Some of our most significant growth came from ideas that originated in that room, not ours.

It's hard to explain to a CEO who hasn't experienced it: the peer group doesn't compete with your executive team or your board. It compounds them. The team runs what you have. The board holds you accountable to your commitments. The peer group, combined with one-to-one coaching that connects what you're hearing to the decisions you're actually living, adds a layer that none of those structures can replicate on their own.

One of the most powerful forces in business is compounding. Most people apply that idea to capital. It applies equally to leadership capacity. A functional board, a strong executive team, and a peer group with coaching don't simply add together. They multiply. You feel it in the quality of your decisions before you ever see it in the numbers.

The decisions that matter most (the ones into an uncertain future, the ones where your team is either too cautious or too optimistic, the ones where being wrong has real consequences) deserve more than your best thinking alone. They deserve pressure-testing from people who have been tested the same way.

That's what the room is for.

Cole Dolny is a TEC Chair and the founder of 6S Advisory. As President and CEO of ASL Distribution Services, he led the company through 15X revenue growth and 17 consecutive Best Managed Company designations. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, EBITDA grew by 40%. He holds an MBA from York University, a degree in Engineering from Toronto Metropolitan University, and is a Certified Executive and Business Coach through the Center for Executive Coaching. He works with CEOs, presidents, and owners of small to mid-sized businesses across North America.

If you recognized yourself in any of this, Cole's peer advisory work through TEC Canada is based in the Greater Toronto Area, but his coaching and advisory practice at 6S Advisory serves leaders across North America. To explore whether either is the right fit, book a complimentary Strategic Discovery Session at calendly.com/cole-dolny.