Katahdin Group

Consider the mid-market CEO. She has, let’s say, forty million dollars in revenue, a board that wants to see the numbers, and a leadership team that reports to her. This is a person with a great deal of power and almost nobody to be honest with. Her direct reports cannot give her unfiltered advice, because she signs their checks. Her board has an agenda, because that is what boards are for. Her spouse has heard enough about the supply chain. The structural problem of being a CEO is that the higher you climb, the fewer people can tell you the truth - and the more it costs you not to hear it.

Katahdin Group, a Boston consulting firm of roughly forty-six people, sells a solution to exactly this problem, and the solution is almost comically low-tech: a table. You put a CEO at a table with a dozen other CEOs who have no stake in her company, and you make them talk to each other. That is the entire product. It sounds like it should not be a business - like something that should happen for free at a bar - and yet the firm has been doing it, profitably, for twenty-five years, which tells you the thing is harder to build than it looks.

The Origin, Which Involves a Canceled Magazine Program

The origin story is a good one, and it has the shape of a business that was never supposed to exist. In the 1990s, Inc. Magazine ran a CEO peer program called the Inc. Eagles. A staffer named Melissa Raffoni helped run it. Then Inc. did what magazines do to programs that aren’t the magazine: it canceled the thing. And here is the interesting part - the members refused to leave. They asked Raffoni if she would keep running the group herself. She said yes, and in 1999 The Raffoni Group was born, which is a lovely inversion of how companies usually start. Most founders have to go find customers. Raffoni’s customers found her and declined to be fired.

Over the next twenty years, Raffoni refined the methodology and added programs - a version for the C-suite, and a strategic-planning system for teams that needed more than an annual retreat. The firm was building something that compounds slowly and quietly: a repeatable way to make a room of executives useful to each other.

The CEO Who Was a Customer First

Which brings us to Gordie Spater, and the second thing that makes this company unusual. Spater did not come up through consulting. He co-founded Kurgo, a dog-travel products company - the kind of business that starts in a basement with an idea about making it easier to bring your dog in the car, and ends, sixteen consecutive years of revenue growth later, with two hundred-plus products in five thousand pet stores and an acquisition by Radio Systems Corporation. Somewhere in the middle of building that, in 2009, Spater joined one of Raffoni’s CEO peer groups as a member.

So the arc is: he was a customer, the product worked, he sold his company, and then he came back and agreed to run one of the groups he’d benefited from. Now he’s the CEO of the whole firm. This is a genuinely rare thing in the advice business, where the person selling you leadership wisdom has often never had to make a payroll. At Katahdin Group, the guy at the front of the room has actually done the climb, missed a number, and lived through an exit. When he tells you the feedback will be uncomfortable, he is speaking from the receiving end.

Why a Mountain

The name is not an accident and it is not just branding, though it is also branding. As the firm grew, Spater and the team wanted a name that captured what the work is actually about: the climb of building a company and, eventually, the descent of selling it. Spater has spent time throughout his life at a camp overlooking Mount Katahdin in Maine, and has hiked it more than a dozen times. Katahdin means “The Greatest Mountain.” The Raffoni Group became Katahdin Group. The methodology and the members came along; only the sign on the door changed. Notice, too, that the programs are named like a mountaineering route - Strategic Ascent, High Impact, the CEO Collective. Somebody thought about this.

What You Actually Buy

The flagship is the CEO Collective, and it has a bouncer. To get in you generally need $5 million in revenue and profitability, or a clear path to both. This gatekeeping is the point: a peer group is only as good as the peers, and a room where everyone is roughly at the same altitude produces better feedback than a room where they aren’t. The meetings run on a case method - the same format that makes law school terrifying. One member presents a real, live problem from their business, and the table interrogates it. No slides, no vanity, no theater. Just a dozen people who’ve seen the same movie asking: what would you actually do here?

There’s also a structural choice worth pausing on. Katahdin Group does not run its groups as a franchise, and it isn’t pay-to-play. The facilitators are employed - former CEOs and C-suite operators the firm calls Strategic Facilitators and “CEOs-in-Residence.” The firm’s own pitch to prospective facilitators is that it invests in them with training and tools and cares more about doing good work than about hitting a metric. Whether or not every consultancy that says this means it, the model at least aligns the incentive correctly: the person running your table works for the firm whose name is on the door, not for a territory they bought.

The Succession Angle

One more thing the firm figured out, which is the least glamorous and possibly most valuable: succession. Every founder avoids the question of who takes over until it becomes an emergency, usually right when they’re trying to sell. Katahdin Group built for it. The Key Executive Collective develops the people one rung down, and a 2023 partnership with Boston Search Group - an executive-search firm that works with private-equity portfolio companies - added peer groups explicitly for the “CEO-in-waiting.” If you’re planning your exit, you are also, whether you like it or not, building the person who inherits the summit.

Who It’s For

If you run a growth-stage company past a few million in revenue, feel the isolation of the top seat, and suspect your best decisions would get better if someone with nothing to gain pressure-tested them, Katahdin Group is selling the room where that happens. It is not a workshop you forget by Friday. It is a standing table you return to for years - through the growth, the plateau, and the exit. The competition for that attention is real: Vistage, YPO, EO, and a field of boutique coaches all promise versions of the same thing. Katahdin’s bet is that a case-method rigor, an employed-operator bench, and twenty-five years of not quitting add up to a table worth keeping a seat at.

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