The First Year Is the Riskiest Year. Here's One Tool Most New CEOs Overlook.
According to Spencer Stuart, 85% of newly appointed S&P 1500 CEOs in 2025 were serving in their first public company CEO role. And half are statistically destined to underperform their peers.
The firm's January 2026 research makes clear that CEO failure isn't predetermined — but it is shaped by the quality of the intelligence and relationships a new CEO builds in year one.
A board of directors is one piece of that equation. Customers are another — and they're often the last voice in the room.
Customer Advisory Boards can change the math
A well-structured Customer Advisory Board (CAB) gives an incoming CEO something no internal briefing can: an unfiltered pulse from the people whose decisions will determine whether the strategy works. Not managed and filtered through sales. Not softened by client leads. Direct.
In the first 90 days, a new CEO is making foundational judgments — about where the business stands, where the strategy needs to shift, and which inherited assumptions are wrong. Spencer Stuart's research notes a significant expectation gap between what board of directors believe they're providing and what CEOs say they're actually getting. The same gap exists with customers — companies routinely overestimate how well they understand current client sentiments during leadership transitions.
A CAB addresses that gap structurally.
Three functions a Customer Advisory Board serves in year one
Done well, a CAB in year one serves three functions:
1. Reality check on strategy. Before committing to a strategic direction with the board (Spencer Stuart recommends a formal strategy offsite within 6–9 months), a CAB session surfaces where the company's current trajectory has drifted away from customer needs.
2. Competitive intelligence. Customers see the competitive landscape differently than analysts do. They know which alternatives they're evaluating and why.
3. Trust-building at the top. A new CEO who convenes customers early signals a different kind of leadership — one that listens before it acts. That reputation is built in year one or not at all.
The first year isn't just a board governance test. It's a market intelligence test.
Why a Customer Advisory Board isn't just another listening tool
A listening tour gets a new CEO in the room. So does a well-run NPS process, or a series of quarterly business reviews.
But — in addition to the fact that CEOs *aren’t* always in those rooms —those formats carry an inherent limitation: the company controls the agenda, and customers respond within it.
A well-structured CAB inverts that dynamic. The questions belong to the CEO — and the conversation belongs to the customers. There's no account team in the room managing the relationship, and no implicit expectation that the meeting ends with a product demo. That's a different kind of intelligence, and it surfaces different things.
Questions a new CEO should be asking customers
If we were advising a new CEO on what to bring into that first CAB session, the questions would cluster around a few themes:
What's changing in your own business that we don't yet understand?
What do you wish our leadership team understood that they probably don't?
If you were in my shoes, what is one thing you would fix today?
Where have we lost your trust, and what would rebuild it?
Which of our competitors are you paying attention to, and why?
These aren't satisfaction questions, or product feedback questions, or account health questions. They're the deep strategic questions that only work when a senior leader is willing to hear an honest answer — and when the customers in the room believe that's actually the point.
What a Customer Advisory Board in year one actually requires
One note worth making, given the number of directions a new CEO will be pulled: a Customer Advisory Board in year one doesn't have to be a fully built program with formal governance and a multi-year roadmap.
Some of the most valuable first CAB sessions we've seen were lean — a focused group of eight or ten customers, a well-prepared CEO, and a clear intention to listen. The infrastructure can follow. The listening can start now.
Spencer Stuart's data makes clear how many new CEOs struggle — and why. A Customer Advisory Board is one tool that can shift those odds — but only for the CEO who asked the right questions early enough for the answers to matter.
A new CEO who succeeds isn’t the one who moves fastest internally; it’s the CEO who stayed closest to customers while doing it.