In this testimonial, Chris Halstead, Chief Operating Officer of Excel Medical—a telemedicine platform focused on hormone therapy—shares his experience with Cameron Herold’s CEO/COO Alliance. After finding limited value in a prior COO peer group, he joined the CEO Alliance in 2024 and found it energizing, diverse, and high‑caliber. He participates in one‑on‑one coaching with Cameron, group sessions, and multiple in‑person events. Through the Alliance he secured vendor relationships, including a pharmacy partnership and an AI tool built for Excel Medical. He highlights the value of Cameron’s extensive network of presenters, practical frameworks, worksheets, and playbooks that aid problem‑solving, planning, and goal setting. The Alliance’s focus on AI tools—regularly updated with real‑world use cases—helps members stay ahead of rapid technological change. Halstead emphasizes timeless people‑and‑operations principles, combined with cutting‑edge technology, that enable scaling, efficiency, cost savings, and talent development. He praises the large, supportive community and the ability to both learn from and help peers. The Alliance offers a 10x guarantee: members who attend events and contribute are promised a measurable return, whether through revenue growth, people development, recruiting, retention, or operational efficiency. Halstead recommends the program to COOs, VPs of Operations, and senior leaders seeking high‑impact peer collaboration.
Chapters
Chris Halstead. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Excel Medical. We are a telemedicine platform. We focus on hormone therapy for men and women all across the US. I joined the COO Alliance in 2024. I have been in a lot of different peer groups. I realized kind of the COO group that I was in, I was kind of hitting a ceiling there of knowledge and information sharing and kind of who was in the room. It wasn't becoming a good value of my time. Everyone directed me towards Cameron Herold's CEO Alliance. And then kind of in starting into the CEO Alliance, like that was energizing, fresh, new, different, much more diverse range of caliber of people and business sizes. I do coaching with Cameron, so I do one-on-one coaching and then I do group. I've done multiple in-person events. I've been able to get some, a couple of vendor relationships out of it, one through a pharmacy that we're looking at using now. Is a member, another built an AI tool for us. Like, those have been pretty impactful. The in-person events, you get to know people a bit more through that. I've had other various just takeaways and thought-provoking things from all the presentations. Cameron's got quite the Rolodex of people to present content. That's a pretty unique thing to have. Another thing is kind of some of the frameworks Cameron's used over the years that probably often go underlooked. You get them a bit if you attend the in-persons, but there's a lot of tools tools and worksheets to kind of help problem solve, identify things, plan, goal setting. The AI side, he kind of went over heavy in that, so there was a lot of repetition through that, which was great because it actually helped provoke some thought. Feels like it's kind of— the market's kind of stabilizing now, and like everyone's kind of can, can speak some kind of like AI, if you will. Cameron just consistently had different people on there of, here's how I use the tool. And so as fast as it was changing and coming out, that was pretty valuable and helpful. There's all of the building blocks and basics that Cameron has used for decades when building businesses and his franchise businesses and so forth and scaling companies. When it comes to people and operations, some things that just do not change. There's also, as technology and new tools have evolved and really being cutting edge, Cameron's able to keep this group on top of the game, ahead of their peers in the competition. Because we're constantly learning about the newest tools, the best efficiency, the best things for our people to be ahead of the curve and grow at scale. It's energizing to know you've got a large community that you can lean on. And it's also energizing when you can help others solve challenges by giving learnings that you've had over the years. For anyone that hasn't done a peer group before, it's time you have to elevate yourself and that's— you have literally nothing to lose. That is why the CIO Alliance has a 10x guarantee. Whether you're going to an in-person event or doing the online community, you're guaranteed to get a return if you show up and contribute. You are around some of the top performers that are scaling from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in North America and around the world. So if you have a CFO, if you have a CEO or someone who is questioning, well, is this worth the investment? It isn't a question of it's worth investment. It's how many times over are you going to be able to get a return on that? It's not just about revenue growth. It's a lot about your people development. Does anyone have challenges recruiting, retaining, incentivizing your top people? This is the place. When you're talking about efficiency and process, cost savings, all of those things, this is the place. If you are truly a second in command or a chief operating officer or VP of operations, then you are one to go and make decisions. Now's the time.
