Alan Sugano: Finding immeasurable value

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of a series highlighting Vistage members who also contribute to the community as speakers, sharing years of experience and thought leadership with their peers.

When Alan Sugano joined Vistage, his IT consulting company was already two decades old. During the early 2000s, he cut his teeth speaking at conferences and events, and he was well-known for his expertise and engaging presentations, partly because of his role as a contributing editor of Windows IT Pro magazine.

At the same time, Sugano regularly met with two business owner friends to chat about business strategy and challenges. One of them, Chris Sugai, always brought up Vistage during these discussions.

“Chris was always talking about how great Vistage is,” Sugano says. He’s always been passionate about it.”

Alan with his best friend, Chris Sugai, at the World Series of Poker. “Chris introduced me to Vistage,” says Alan. 

When it came time to launch his company’s new cloud service in 2013, Sugano decided to leverage all the benefits he had heard about the Vistage community and joined that year.

“I joined because I didn’t want to screw up the launch,” he says.

‘It feels less lonely at the top’

Sugano quickly discovered he was now part of a network of peers, which he describes as “super smart people who can be relied on to have an answer to a weird esoteric issue so that it feels less lonely at the top.” He also found a new way of thinking about his business and speaking.

Before joining, Sugano was used to being asked a lot of technical IT questions. But in his CEO group, Sugano quickly realized he would be asked very different questions — ones that were more difficult to answer like, “What’s the value proposition of what you are doing?”

“I was like a deer in the headlights and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a good question,’” he says. “Now, when I speak, I have a different message for a C-level person versus a technical person.”

According to Sugano, understanding both the Vistage “language” and the question-asking process that Chairs and members use in conversations has helped him become a better speaker.

Specifically, using the Vistage process of asking questions and reformatting advice as a question makes real impact on an audience. He adds that joining Vistage helps speakers overcome feelings of being a “lone wolf” or isolated from others.

“Being part of a community is a tremendous benefit,” he says. “Sometimes you might be faced with a challenging problem that you obsess about and get stressed out about it. It’s nice to get different people’s perspectives.”

Sharing with his peers

Sugano didn’t join Vistage to land more speaking engagements or to find new clients, but both have occurred organically because of his membership. Largely, that stems from his passion to freely share information to help his peers understand cybersecurity risks, how to prevent hacks and the consequences of leaving it to chance.

“It’s kind of like a running joke now that whenever I open my mouth to make a public service announcement about whatever is happening in the cybersecurity world, everybody wants to jump out the window,” he says. “At the end of the day, I want to keep everybody safe because there are many, many companies flying naked.”

Alan (bottom, left) with his Vistage CEO group at dinner.

One point he stresses to his fellow members is that once hackers are “in,” they will compromise a company’s data and network, exfiltrate, steal, and delete data, delete all backups, and then launch a ransomware bomb.

“So, if you don’t have offline backups, which is one of the things that we absolutely preach, you have two options — to go out of business or pay the ransom?” he says. “Those are usually the only two options that you have.”

In the end, Sugano believes that being a Vistage member has brought immeasurable value to his life, both as a group member and as a speaker.

“If you’re interested in growing your business and becoming a better leader, join,” he says. “I wish I had joined earlier. You form lifelong bonds and have a genuinely nice, super smart group who can help you identify blind spots.”

If Alan’s story interests you and you’d like to know more, explore our membership options and take your success to a new level.

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