COO Alliance Testimonial | Michael Sanfiorenzo

My name is Michael Sanfurenzo. I am the COO of Philip Jeffries. Been with the company for 14 years now. We've seen tremendous growth, uh, and that ties into some of the feedback that I'll have about the COO Alliance. When I started, I was the 33rd person. We had one facility, and now we have about 370 people worldwide and I think 15 locations. So I joined the COO Alliance just about a full 3 years ago. We had one facility in New Jersey, and now we facilities worldwide, including one in Singapore, two in the UK, a showroom in Paris, and then a bunch of showrooms in the US totaling about 15. This is kind of the next step for me in terms of joining a group that's going to get me to the next level. I think for me, everything felt like a guess. You can read a ton of things and you can hear a bunch of speakers, but it's much different when you're talking to somebody who's like, yeah, I'm going through that right now. Or I just went through that and here's some things that you should keep in mind. So my prior company was very similar to this. When I started, I was member number 6. We grew to about 240 people. I was now past my previous experience, so I couldn't leverage my previous experience really anymore to get me or the company to the next level. And so I kind of felt like decisions were like best guesses. And so that doesn't feel great. You want to make decisions based on either your own experience or at least leveraging some real-world experience that somebody else has gone through that you trust. At the time, I was like, I really need to join something where I can be around folks that can help me. If you guess a big major thing wrong and don't leverage resources that are out there and experience of others that have gone through it, you know, you could make— it could be disastrous financially and operationally. It's definitely about the community. For me, the most valuable things that I've gotten have been conversations with people around specific things I'm going through that they have experience with. Just earlier today, I reached out to somebody about, um, one of the things we're thinking about doing is opening a second facility. We've never opened a second distribution facility, so do I think we can do that successfully? But it sure would help to talk to somebody else who, who's already done it, who also thought they would do it very successfully and now can tell me where the bumps in the road were or where the things that they didn't think about were so that we don't miss those things. I had reached out to somebody just this morning via a conversation circle and said, hey, can we get on a call? The sum of all that together has helped me make decisions, has helped me feel more confident in my role, right? Has helped me deal with situations that I've avoided dealing with, like employees or conversations I don't want to deal with. Definitely conversations like, Cameron making us all stand and say, hey, do you have somebody that doesn't belong in your company? And if so, stand up. And then being like, okay, when are you going to let them go? And it's like, wow, that's really powerful. Like, when? I don't know. We did let somebody go as a result of kind of those conversations in the CEO Alliance, which I'm sure had a direct impact to other retention and other A-players staying and working harder and things of that nature. Without the COO Alliance, it would be like a missing— it'd be like a missing leg on a stool for me in terms of developing strategies and working through problems. The COO Alliance has helped me feel way more confident. I would say to anyone thinking about joining, it's like a no-brainer for me. If you are somebody who wants to be able to leverage this huge network of other COOs, who have likely gone through the problems that you're having today so that you have someone to talk through these issues outside of your company. This is like a no-brainer.