Charles: Making Sense of Many Options

Situation when he first approached O’Donnell Executive Strategies:

Age 45
BA Business. President of his college alumni. Involved in Rotary. Involved in church.
Married, coaches kids sports for both pre-teen son and daughter.
$160K total compensation. Travels 40% of the time.
Has been in a variety of Sales, Product Management, and Operations roles over time. His gift is New Business Development through alliance partnerships, where he is creating a service offering new to the industry or channel. Knows how to monetize, commercialize, and brand the offerings. His experience spans several industries.
Key player in several start-ups but the latest one is losing angel funding because of the soft economy. A large investment is needed to build the infrastructure and in the present economy it has a reduced chance of a quick return. He anticipates his role could end on short notice whenever the investors decide to pull the plug.
Years ago Pat helped him write a resume that secured a job quickly after months of no interviews.

Help him find opportunities to build channel offerings in a different industry where there is more investment capital.
Help him exploit successes of the last three years to find the more interesting and higher visibility projects.
As time might be short, show him how to streamline the discovery and networking process.

Updated his resume to show his leadership and innovation in developing several recent complex programs.
Created a decision support process together that allowed him to uncover, evaluate, and rank projects options against a long list of criteria. The criteria in his evaulation reflected his personal values, his vision for his future career, transferable skills, competencies, industry trends, competitive environment, available networking contacts, and monetary goals. It provided a networking road map and facilitated selecting which activities would lead to the optimum project and job offer most quickly.
The decision support process also clarified what positioning was crucial to emphasize with each hiring manager and potential alliance partner.

He took a Director of Sales role focused on creating solutions for mid-sized businesses. The solutions incorporate offerings from 3 divisions of his new employer.