The Smallest Changes That Had the Largest Impacts: 4 CEO Case Studies

My Guests

This is a very special episode of In The Trenches: In today’s episode, I will be interviewing 4 different CEOs of 4 different SMBs, and asking them just a single question: “What are some of the seemingly small changes you’ve made that have had the largest impacts?”

When taking over a new business, new CEOs often speak of operational “low hanging fruit”, so I wanted to ask this same question to 4 different CEOs to learn more about just what this low hanging fruit is.

Each CEO that I’ll be speaking with today is at a different stage of their journey: Betsy, who I’ll begin the episode with, is still in her first year in the CEO seat. Sheret, our next leader, has been CEO of his company for ~2 years. Robin Kovitz has been leading her company for ~8 years, and finally Adrian, our final CEO, ran his company for ~7 years before a successful exit to a strategic acquiror in 2019.

Does growth and success tend to result from a large number of seemingly small changes, or a small number or larger changes? That’s what we’ll endeavor to answer today, informed by 4 CEOs at very different stages of their respective journeys.


Betsy Harbison
CEO, Softrip

Sheret Ross
CEO, CarData

Robin Kovitz
CEO, Baskits

Adrian Bartha
Former CEO, eCompliance


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Questions Asked

“What are some of the seemingly small changes you’ve made that have had the largest impacts?”

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Thanks to our Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by The Profit Line. The Profit Line is a boutique finance and accounting firm that provides a wide range of accounting services to small and medium businesses generating anywhere between $5M to $50M in revenue. On a fractional, outsourced basis, they do day-to-day bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, month-end accruals, tax compliance, and financial statement preparation, among countless other things. I was a customer of theirs for 7 consecutive years while running my own company, and am speaking as a happy customer. Book a call with Founder and CEO, Fern Gordon (Ferngordon@theprofitline.com) or visit their LinkedIn page to learn how they might be able to help you exactly as they helped me.

This post is brought to you by Warren Coughlin, CEO Coach and founder of JumpStart Coaching. Warren focuses exclusively on coaching CEOs running SMBs, and has been doing so for over 20 years. If you’re not happy with the progress that you’ve made within your first three months working with Warren, he will give you your money back. If that doesn’t say confidence, I don’t know what does. Warren is offering $3,000 off of his coaching program for readers and listeners of In The Trenches. Just go to warrencoughlin.com/trenches to learn more.

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