Meet RJ - The CEO Coach
My name is Richard Jalichandra, or “RJ” as my friends and clients call me. I am a 6-time CEO who has led companies at various stages: from 20 employees to nearly 2,000, from $0 revenue to a half-billion dollars, and from near-insolvency to successful exit. Now, I coach CEOs to develop the leadership, mentality & functional acumen to achieve your business & personal goals.
As a former CEO, I understand the unique personal & professional demands of the loneliest job in business. With broad operational experience, I will show you how to coordinate and manage all the critical functions that make any business successful: sales, marketing, finance, HR, operations, product development, technology, client success, customer service and more. Having worked in multiple industries, my recommendations and insights come from a place of real experience and expertise.
While I employ my own unique processes, I am also familiar with other frameworks like YPO, EO, Scaling Up and EOS. More importantly, my goal is to give you a personalized path that takes into account your abilities and limitations, your company’s current situation, and the team’s culture. Lastly, every CEO and Founder wants to plan for growth and ultimately an exit; my extensive experience in M&A and fundraising will help guide you & your company towards those ultimate goals.
Curriculum Vitae - Highlights
- 6-time CEO for VC & PE backed companies.
- 2-time founder of profitable bootstrapped companies.
- Specialty: taking over from founders & optimizing to exit.
- Led companies that generated $4 billion of revenue.
- Principal in 40+ M&A transactions worth $2 billion.
- Raised $300 million of debt & equity as CEO, and $1.8 billion as private equity consultant.
- Experience early stage VC to late stage PE.
- Took 2 pre-revenue companies to 8-figures of revenue.
- Ran 2 large 9-figure P&Ls with 8-figure EBITDA.
- Span of control: largest team - 1,900 employees in 11 countries; smallest team - 18 employees.
- Industry experience: both B2C and B2B in media, publishing, ecommerce, martech, SaaS, manufacturing, supply chain, fitness & professional services.
- Relevant life experience: lived & worked in Asia & Europe for 10 years; traveled to 73 countries; nutrition and fitness expert; practices meditation.
The Sherpa CEO Coach Who’s Been There, Done That
Your first CEO lesson is on the house:
here’s the #1 objective I teach all my clients…
In three decades as an executive leader - including 20 years as CEO - I developed both broad leadership experience and deep functional expertise.
I began my career in large Fortune 500 corporations, but I truly became an effective leader by working in startups. In small early stage companies, the lack of resources required me to perform or manage almost every job in the company at some point - sales, marketing, finance, accounting, operations, customer success, product development, engineering, logistics, M&A, etc. At one startup, I actually had four (4!) business cards, each with a different job title depending on which client or partner I was meeting!
But as I developed as CEO, I quickly discovered that did not scale - even if I could do those jobs better than anyone else on my team. Then my career changed forever in a five minute meeting with my mentor. In fact, one sentence changed my entire philosophy about how to run a company: my coach simply said:
“As a CEO, your #1 objective is to do no work.”
The coach did not literally mean a CEO does nothing; rather, he metaphorically meant that a company cannot grow and scale properly unless the CEO can build an executive team of functional experts, then lead and guide them versus actually doing their jobs for them.
Thus, in each of my CEO stints, my biggest objective became to do no work. While the reality is doing no hands-on work is nearly impossible, I did discover that my peak performance as a CEO truly occurred when I did not perform any of the critical functions that make any company successful. Rather, in those peak performances, I only led and managed great teams.
In working with founders and CEOs, my role is to help them reach that ultimate goal: do no work; build great teams; lead and guide. If we decide to work together, I will help you work towards the goal of doing no work - which in turn leads to a company that scales faster, has more sustainable growth, and becomes an ideal acquisition target.
