Field guides to the calls nobody else in your building has made, every source shown. First-person accounts from CEOs follow, under real names.
The help that exists asks you to apply, interview, pay and wait before you hear a word from a peer. Here you read first.
86% of CEOs appointed across 13 major stock indices in 2025 had never held the job before. Russell Reynolds, CEO Turnover Index 2025.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 (263,810 respondents) finds leaders 10 points more likely than individual contributors to report a lot of loneliness the previous day. Gallup, 2026.
Nearly all of them say they would want it. Stanford GSB and The Miles Group, 2013.
| Dimension | VistageChief Executive programme | HamptonCore group | ceo.cafeThe archive and House Blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs a year | About $16,560, plus a $2,500 initiation fee Vistage publishes no price. Independent reviews, 2024 to 2026. [1][2][3] | $15,000, plus an initiation fee of an unpublished amount Hampton publishes no price. Independent reports, 2025 to 2026. [4][5] | $0 Reading and the weekly email are free and will stay free. |
| What it costs in time | One full day a month, plus a monthly one-to-one Cadence from vistage.com. Reviewers size it at 100 to 130 hours a year. [6][2][3] | About three hours a month, ten months a year From Hampton's FAQ. Optional events on top. [7] | Six minutes on a Thursday One email a week. A story reads in six to nine minutes. |
| Who is allowed in | Companies with $5M+ in annual revenue A separate programme covers $1M to $4M. [6][8] | $3M+ revenue, $3M+ raised, or a $10M+ exit, and one of 18 cities Hampton says about 2% of applicants are accepted. [9] | Anyone can read. You run the company to pull up a chair. No revenue floor, no age cap, no city, no funding test. |
Vistage and Hampton publish no prices; the figures are from independent reviews dated 2024 to 2026, sourced on the comparison page. Reading will not make you show up. A table will.
One rule at the door: you run the company. No revenue floor, no age cap, no funding test, no city. These are the four chairs we built it for.
A board that expects a transformation, a leadership team you did not choose, and no founder network that counts you. The board fight.
Too big for the founder meet-ups, below every peer group's floor, and nobody on the team you can say the hard number to. Money, raised or refused.
No co-founder to call at two in the morning, in a city no chapter has reached. The personal cost.
Sold one, running another, and more inclined to give than to take. Tell the call others are about to make.
Politely not for: people who sell to CEOs, aspiring CEOs, and anyone looking for a badge. Vendors are welcome to read. The Code of the Cafe.
A personal guarantee does not end when you step down, hand back your shares or sign a sale agreement. It ends when the lender releases it in writing or the debt is paid. Here is where owners lose the house, and the three points at which they can stop it.
In a cash crunch, the loyal move (make payroll) and the legal move (deposit the tax you withheld) split apart. The owner who pays net wages and short-pays the deposit has made the choice a court calls willful. Here is the arithmetic, the case, and the order to pay in.
Most advice for a CEO facing removal was written for venture-backed founders in 2010. If your board answers to a private equity sponsor, a family or a few minority investors, the question is narrower and more useful: who holds the votes, and what do your documents say happens when you go?
Whether a small layoff needs 60 or 90 days' notice, and whether your releases hold, is decided by counting: sites, 30-day and 90-day windows, and the ages on the list. Do the counting before the list is final, not after.
The first accounts are in editing. Until one is published, the format is shown with a labelled specimen: an invented story, never counted, never indexed.
Specimen. An invented story that shows the format. Not a real person, not counted, not indexed.
Twenty-three days from knowing to doing. Fourteen people out of sixty-one, $1.9M of annual cost removed, and a sales team that never trusted the forecast again. The bootstrapped CEO who made the call walks through every step of it.
Eight questions, one editing pass, your name on it. You see the final draft before anyone else does.
Your work email. No application, no interview, no call to book. Keep reading while you wait.
We confirm you run the company from your domain or a public profile. If we cannot, the answer is “not yet”, never “rejected”.
Two stories, one number and one question other CEOs are working through. About six minutes, in the gaps of a 62.5-hour week (Porter & Nohria, HBR).
Eight questions, your name, your numbers. You see the final draft before anyone else. Read for as long as you like first.
Nothing here opens on a date or counts down. Each room opens at a real threshold, and regulars are let in in the order they pulled up a chair.
A private board where a regular can ask the thing they cannot ask their own board. A first answer inside 24 hours is the house rule; the proprietor answers if nobody else has.
Eight to twelve regulars, one city, one question on the table. No speakers, no decks, no sponsors in the room.
Pay, equity, board, hours, personal liquidity and exit intent for bootstrapped, PE-backed and family-owned CEOs, by revenue band. Free, aggregate only, nobody's answers ever shown.
A fixed room of eight that meets monthly with a paid facilitator and calls out the dodge. The one thing reading cannot do. Regulars get first refusal, in the order they pulled up a chair.