National Capital Region Entrepreneurs Forum with Alan Peyser 

Alan Peyser has over 40 years of senior management experience. He has founded, led, and grown several successful business ventures, generating billions of dollars in revenue and shareholder value.  An engineer by training, Alan's career spans several industries, including aerospace and telecommunications.  Most notably, in 1975 he founded TDX Systems, leveraging two patents that he had in telecommunications.  Starting off with the title of Vice President of Engineering, he became COO in 1979, taking that leadership role after the company, with between $8M-$10M in sales, had been losing $6M a year.  In 3 years, he grew the company to $25M with $6M of profit.  During those 3 years, in 1980, Alan took over as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), a position he retained after TDX Systems was acquired by Cable & Wireless in the mid-80s.  Before retiring in 1995, he had created a worldwide leader in long distance telephone service with sales in excess of $1B.  His retirement didn’t last long; the company asked Mr. Peyser to return to the CEO role after 14 months of retirement (in 1996), and he was finally able to retire for good at the end of 1997.

Alan has served on about 20 corporate and foundation boards, some examples of which are:

• Suburban Hospital (Chair of the Finance Committee)
• BullsEye Telecommunications, a 70M+ telecom company
• The Investigative Project on Terrorism (Chairman) – works with a number of groups that fight for US freedom
• The Fairfax Education Foundation

Mr. Peyser has a BA from Dartmouth, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, and an LLB from Georgetown University.  He is a member of the Atlantic Council.

About the National Capital Region Entrepreneurs Forum (NCREF):

The purpose of the NCREF is to educate and inspire entrepreneurs and other business leaders to create remarkably successful enterprises.  We do this through interviewing entrepreneurs who have grown their businesses above at least $3M in revenue or CEOs of larger companies that have led their companies through growth periods.  The forum is run at breakeven, there are no sales pitches, there is nothing to join, and there is no marketing list.  The NCREF is a pure lunch and learn, with some light networking thrown in, for the express purpose of allowing entrepreneurs to learn from the great successes of others.

Using an interview format, questions are typically along the lines of:

• General background (where the speaker grew up, went to college, etc.  Basically any interesting aspects of his/her formative years,etc.)
• How he/she started or took over the business
• How did he/she grow the business to where it is today (or where it was when he/she exited).  Looking for events, strategies, key hires, key fires, etc.  Whatever were the key building blocks to getting him/her there.
• What were some of his/her most exciting victories (war stories)
• What were some of his/her biggest failures?  Things that if he/she had a chance to do over again, he/she would do it differently (common items here are waiting too long to fire someone, micromanaging, etc.).  Again, looking for war stories.
• What are the key takeaways that the speaker really wants the audience to know (ANYTHING  that is important  – lessons learned, processes, key advisers, hires, fires, leadership, marketing, tenacity, facing reality, etc., etc.)
• Anything else the speaker wants to share with the group?  Any words of wisdom? Who is/was his/her mentor? Where does he/she go for encouragement?  What book is he/she reading? Etc.

We’ll then end with Q&A from the audience.