The CEO Resource Center intends to help family-owned and other closely held businesses grow and prosper by providing them with access to experienced professionals who can serve in leadership and advisory roles.

The Clive-based company was founded this spring by local businessmen Dan Schneider and Don Doudna. They were spurred to form the CEO Resource Center by a need the two identified from client interactions they had in another venture, the Family Business Resource Center, which focuses on developing succession plans for family-owned businesses.

“We decided that there was a group of family and closely owned businesses, not only in Iowa but around the country, that desperately needed qualified advisers who had practical business experience,” Doudna said. “We decided that we would create a business designed to help them identify people who could serve on either a family board of directors or a board of advisers.”

Doudna said he has been asked by numerous clients to serve on their advisory boards, and though he wanted to say yes to all of them, he could not.

“We would work with family-owned businesses to prepare the next generation of the family to work in the business, and the end result of that has been that almost every family we’ve helped with their succession work for the future said, ‘Would you be on our board?’” Doudna said. “The answer to the first five or six was yes.”   So Doudna and Schneider pulled together a network of about 30 business leaders from a variety of backgrounds, all of whom have executive management experience. Based on a company’s needs, the CEO Resource Center makes a recommendation for its advisers to help.

“If they are looking for a board member who is a CEO, we have those in our database,” Doudna said. “If they need somebody who has marketing experience, we have that.

“The whole concept is that family-owned businesses don’t have a good way of finding qualified people. It’s easy for a Wells Fargo & Co. or a Principal Financial Group Inc. to recruit board members. It’s not so easy for a company that has 100 or 200 employees to recruit outside advisers that are competent.”

In addition, the CEO Resource Center can save companies money, Doudna said. Whereas corporate headhunting agencies can charge more than $20,000 for their recruiting services, the CEO Resource Center does not charge a finder’s fee. Instead, it collects a per-meeting fee, a majority of which goes directly to the adviser. For an adviser who serves on a company board and attend meetings, the fees can range from $2,000 to $3,000 for a small business, or $8,000 to $10,000 for a large business, such as Wells’ Dairy Inc.

Also, by investing in the CEO Resource Center’s people, who can “stretch their vision and ask the hard questions and help them grow and prosper,” there should be an immediate impact on the company’s bottom line.

“Generally, we help them to improve the profit dramatically,” Doudna said. “On the boards that I am serving on, for the last two years, they have had record years, and their profit often goes up dramatically. From our experience, profitability improves at least 25 percent when we work with them quarterly on their advisory board.”

Doudna says the big picture is that when the family-owned businesses grow, everyone wins. “The family-owned business is such an important part of the economy, so if we keep them vibrant, it is very good for this state or any other state,” he said.