They set a big number, sprint at it for a quarter, burn out, drift, and then set another big number when the pain gets bad enough. The revenue goal was never the problem. Every MSP owner in America wants a more profitable business. Wanting it has never been what separated the shops that get there from the ones that don’t.

What separates them is boring, and that’s exactly why it works. The profitable MSP isn’t the one with the most ambitious goal. It’s the one with the most consistent rhythm. Profit isn’t an event you achieve. It’s the output of a flywheel you turn a little every week, and the thing that turns it is leadership cadence.

The reason goals disappoint you and rhythm doesn’t comes down to a simple truth about improvement. 

You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. 

A goal is a direction. It tells you where you’d like to end up. But a goal doesn’t do any work. 

If your delivery is leaking margin and your team has no weekly mechanism to catch it, setting a higher profit target just means missing a bigger number. The messy room gets cleaned once and then fills right back up, because you treated the symptom and never touched the system that produced it. 

Fix the inputs and the outputs fix themselves. In an MSP, the input that matters most is the rhythm at which leadership looks at the business and acts on what it sees.

This is where the flywheel actually lives, and it runs on small numbers, not heroic ones. Getting one percent better in a stretch of a year compounds into something like thirty-seven times better by the end, while getting one percent worse compounds down toward nothing. 

The margin between the two isn’t dramatic on any given Tuesday. It’s a heading change of a few degrees that only shows up as hundreds of miles once you’ve flown the whole route. 

A leadership cadence is how you make those tiny corrections early enough to matter. Catch a client sliding below margin in week two and it’s a five-minute conversation. Catch it in the quarterly numbers and it’s a crisis. Same problem, wildly different cost, and the only variable is how often you looked.

So what does the cadence actually look like. The shops that run this well tend to build a nested rhythm across four tempos: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, each pre-scheduled so the time is protected before the week fills up. 

The daily tempo is a short standup where the team surfaces what’s blocked. 

The weekly tempo is where the real engine turns: leadership looks at the handful of numbers that predict profit, checks progress on the top priority, and reallocates people and attention to wherever the work is stuck. 

The monthly tempo pulls up to trends and the scoreboard. 

The quarterly tempo sets the next big rock and reviews the last one honestly.

The weekly beat is the one that matters most, and it’s the one owners skip first when things get busy, which is precisely backward. Quarterly goals are worth setting, but a quarter goes by fast, and a goal you only check quarterly is a goal you manage four times a year. 

Manage it no less than weekly and you get fifty-two chances to correct course instead of four. The whole advantage of cadence is the frequency of the correction, so thinning out the weekly review to make room for firefighting is like a pilot deciding to check his heading once a month to save time.

There’s a second benefit to running a real cadence, and it’s the part that makes the flywheel self-sustaining. When your team knows the weekly review is coming, and the monthly, and the quarterly, they organize their own work around those dates without you saying a word. 

A meeting that sits in everyone’s calendar weeks in advance pulls activity toward it. People close things out because the review is Thursday. 

The rhythm does the accountability for you, so you get to stop being the nag and start being the leader. That’s the difference between an owner who pushes the flywheel alone and one whose whole team is pushing it with him.

None of this requires new software or a consultant. It requires you to protect the same short set of meetings every week and actually look at the numbers that predict profit while there’s still time to act on them. 

Pick your handful of leading indicators, put a weekly leadership review in the calendar as immovable as a client SLA, and hold it even, especially, in the weeks that feel too busy for it. 

The profit target you keep chasing and missing isn’t going to yield to a bigger sprint. It yields to a wheel you turn a little, every week, until the momentum starts carrying you instead of the other way around.

You’ve told yourself a story about why. He’s a good tech and techs are hard to find. The last time you pushed on something it got frosty for a week. And it’s faster to just do it yourself tonight after the kids are down.

That story is expensive. You’re paying for it in hours you’ll never bill and in a team that has learned your deadlines are suggestions.

Most owners think they’re choosing between two personalities: the easygoing boss whose team likes him, or the hovering boss whose team resents him. So they pick easygoing, because they started this business partly to escape the second guy. Then they wake up at forty-five running a company where nothing ships unless they personally push it.

The choice is fake. Hovering is what you resort to after accountability has been absent so long that physical proximity is the only lever you’ve got left. It’s the symptom, not the alternative.

Confrontation Is a Customer Service Word

The research team behind Crucial Confrontations spent over 10,000 hours shadowing people at work, eventually studying more than 25,000 across dozens of organizations, hunting for what separated the genuinely influential from everyone else. They expected charisma or technical chops or seniority. What they found was that the most influential people were the ones best at stepping up to a colleague, or a coworker, or their own boss, and holding them accountable to their face.

Their definition of confrontation is worth sitting with. It means holding someone accountable, face to face, in a way where both parties are candid and both are respectful. When it goes well, two things happen: the problem gets solved and the relationship improves.

The relationship improves. That’s the part your gut refuses to believe.

Think about your best client. Not your biggest. Your best. The one where you can call and say “your backup strategy is wrong and I’ve been letting it slide because you pushed back last time, and that was a mistake on my part.” You have that relationship precisely because hard things get said in it. The clients you tiptoe around are the ones you’re going to lose, and you’ll lose them without warning, because nobody in that relationship has ever told the truth out loud.

Your service desk works the same way. The team you tiptoe around isn’t a team. It’s a group of people managing your feelings.

The same book has a mock dictionary entry for the culture you’ve been protecting. Nice: a pleasant, nonconfrontational attitude that eventually kills you.

Two Causes, Never Three

Here’s what actually costs you money, and it’s not the missed deadline.

When someone falls short, your brain convicts them before they open their mouth. Doesn’t care. Not committed. Bad attitude. That verdict is usually wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that guarantees you’ll respond badly.

Crucial Confrontations narrows it to two root causes. Motivation, or ability. That’s the whole list. Attitude isn’t on it. Character isn’t on it. And the authors are specific about the cost of guessing: miss an ability barrier and the person literally cannot comply no matter how motivated they become. Misread a motivation block and every button you push is the wrong one.

Run it on your documentation guy. Does he have a template? Does he have a block of time that survives contact with the ticket queue? Has anyone shown him a completed example so he knows what finished looks like? If any answer is no, you’ve got an ability problem, and you’ve been treating it with pressure. That’s like putting a splint on an infection.

I Don’t Want To Be A Micromanager

This is the actual anatomy of micromanagement…

Micromanagement isn’t a personality defect in controlling people. It’s what happens when you never diagnose. You see a miss, assume motivation, apply pressure, watch it fail, apply more pressure, get closer, and eventually you’re standing behind someone’s chair watching them work. You didn’t become a tyrant. You became a man guessing repeatedly, at increasing volume, because he never asked the first question.

Heavy-handed authority buys you short-term bitter compliance and nothing else.

Go look at your service board tonight and ask whether that’s a fair description of what you’re seeing.

“We” Means Nobody

Your meetings end like this: “Great, so we’ll get that standardization piece moving this week.”

Nothing happens. Nothing was ever going to happen.

Crucial Confrontations prescribes four components for any assignment, and drops one line that ought to be painted on your conference room wall: in business, “we” is usually synonymous with nobody. Who does what by when, plus a follow-up. Miss any one of the four and the whole thing quietly evaporates. Most assignments in most companies carry two of the four, maybe three.

We’ll tighten up escalations. We need to get better about time entry. We should really standardize the backup stack. Every one of those is a decision to do nothing, dressed as ambition.

There’s no we. There’s Dave, and Dave has until the 14th, and you’re checking in on the 8th.

It comes down to names and dates.

Scheduled Follow-Up Is a Promise. Surprise Follow-Up Is Surveillance.

You’re going to resist this next part.

You believe checking in is hovering. The research says the opposite problem is the real one: people rarely follow up too much, they mostly don’t follow up at all. Plans get made, dates get set, and then everyone lets them drop.

The difference between accountability and surveillance isn’t frequency. It’s when the check-in was scheduled.

If you agreed on the 8th at the moment you assigned the work, the check-in is a contract. It says: I’m not going to leave you stuck on this for three weeks in silence. If you appear at Dave’s desk on the 4th because you got anxious over lunch, that’s surveillance, and Dave can tell the difference instantly. Same action. Opposite meanings.

This is why calendar rhythm does more for accountability than any personality trait you could develop. When dates sit in people’s diaries weeks ahead, they start organizing their own work around them. The meeting on the 8th shapes what Dave does on the 5th, 6th, and 7th, without you saying a word.

The calendar does the enforcement. You get to stay a human being.

The Part You Won’t Like

The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders, and that leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.

Tolerate. That’s the word that should keep you up.

Every slipped deadline you didn’t mention taught your team the local meaning of a deadline. Every time you said you’d get back to someone by Friday and didn’t, you set the exchange rate on your word. And every night you spent quietly finishing someone else’s work at nine o’clock, you were teaching the whole company that missing a commitment costs nothing, because the owner eats it.

When you say you’ll do something as the owner, you have to actually do it, or you’ll burn trust faster than any other way available to you. He also passes along Lencioni’s chain, which reads like a chart of half the MSPs in this country. No trust, no honest conflict. No conflict, no commitment. No commitment, no accountability. No accountability, no results.

Look where accountability falls in that sequence. Fourth. It’s downstream of everything. You can’t write a memo and expect to have it appear. It grows out of trust and honest disagreement, or it doesn’t grow.

Which is genuinely good news, in a way, because the input at the top of that chain is the one variable in your entire business you control completely and can change this week without anyone’s permission.

Go have the four-minute conversation with your documentation guy. Ask him what’s actually in the way. Then shut up and listen to the answer, because it’s probably going to be something you built.

In most service businesses, coaching problems rarely show up as abstract talent questions. They show up on the service board, in escalations, in missed documentation, in shaky client calls, in uneven project handoffs, and in the quiet frustration of managers who know a team member could be better but are not sure what kind of help that person actually needs.

One technician is eager, loyal, responsive, and hardworking, but keeps making avoidable mistakes. Another can solve complex issues faster than anyone else on the team, yet drifts, resists process, dismisses feedback, or only performs when the work interests them.

Both people need management. Both people need development. But they do not need the same kind of coaching.

Coaching Only Works When the Employee Is Willing to Engage

That distinction matters because coaching only works when the employee is willing to engage with it.

Coaching is a partnership built around questions that help people discover their own answers, develop critical thinking, and take ownership of results. It also makes an important point that many leaders learn the hard way: you can require someone to attend a meeting, but you cannot force them to think critically, try new techniques, or persevere through failure.

In other words, coaching is not just a manager activity. It is a shared commitment. That insight gives us a useful starting point for managing two very common profiles.

Two Common Profiles That Need Different Approaches

The first is the high-will, low-skill team member. This person wants to win. They care. They usually respond well to feedback, often show loyalty, and tend to take responsibility even when they are still learning. Their main problem is not attitude. It is capability, consistency, exposure, or judgment.

The second is the high-skill, low-will team member. This person often has the technical brain, experience, and raw capability to perform at a high level, but their motivation is unreliable. They may be bored, cynical, poorly aligned to the role, resistant to accountability, or simply unwilling to do the unglamorous parts of the job well. Their problem is not mostly skill. It is energy, ownership, purpose, or fit.

The Mistake Most Managers Make

Leaders often make the same mistake with both groups: they coach each one as though the issue were identical.

They give more encouragement to the high-will, low-skill employee when what is really needed is structure, repetition, and supervised practice. Or they give more training to the high-skill, low-will employee when what is really needed is clarity, consequences, shared goals, and an honest conversation about whether the role still fits.

The result is predictable. The willing beginner feels supported but does not get better fast enough. The capable drifter gets more tools but stays disengaged.

Separate Willingness Problems From Capability Problems

A better way to manage this is to separate willingness problems from capability problems before you decide on the intervention…prepare for coaching by identifying the actual performance issues, skill gaps, or development goals involved, then begin sessions by asking the employee to take the lead, surface their own agenda, and help define a shared goal for the partnership.

That advice is especially relevant in service businesses, because operational noise makes it easy to treat every problem as urgent and visible rather than causal and diagnostic.

Coaching the High-Will, Low-Skill Employee

For the high-will, low-skill employee, the right coaching posture is developmental and structured.

This is the junior technician who is hungry but green, the project coordinator who wants to do well but lacks judgment under pressure, or the account manager who cares about clients but does not yet know how to navigate difficult commercial conversations.

What they need is not vague encouragement. They need a staircase. They need clearer expectations, narrower performance targets, shorter feedback loops, and repeated practice in the real environment where the work happens.

Think about the performance of your players in terms of interest, practice, purpose, and hope. High-will, low-skill employees already tend to have hope and at least some level of interest. What they often lack is disciplined practice aimed at weakness.

Growth is not just a matter of passion. It also requires challenge-exceeding-skill practice, repeated over time, in service of real improvement.

In practical terms, that means you as the manager should not merely say, “Keep at it.” Rather, define what better looks like this week. Better ticket notes. Better time entries. Better root-cause documentation. Better client handoff summaries. Better follow-up discipline. Better escalation judgment.

Build Systems Around Willing Learners

Habit formation also plays a role here. Improvement is usually the product of systems, not bursts of motivation. People do not rise to the level of goals as much as they fall to the level of their systems.

In practical management terms, the high-will, low-skill employee improves faster when you install a system around them: standard operating checklists, templated note structures, shadowing routines, scheduled quality review, weekly skills targets, and measured stretch assignments.

Their will is an asset, but it only compounds when converted into repeatable habits.

Coaching the High-Skill, Low-Will Employee

The high-skill, low-will employee requires a different approach. This person does not need a staircase as much as a mirror.

They may already know how to do the job. What they need is to confront the gap between their capability and their contribution.

This is where many managers get tentative, because high-skill people can be intimidating. They are often the ones who rescue escalations, carry historical knowledge, or solve the problems others cannot.

Your strategy for giving effective feedback is clear: talk about behaviors rather than motivations, elicit the employee’s perspective, probe for the root cause of the performance gap, and close by defining next steps and future expectations.

“Low Will” Is a Symptom, Not a Diagnosis

That matters because “low will” is not a diagnosis. It is a visible symptom.

Sometimes the root cause is boredom. Sometimes it is burnout. Sometimes it is misalignment between strengths and role demands. Sometimes it is a lack of challenge. Sometimes it is a silent conflict of values. Sometimes it is entitlement. And sometimes it is simply that the employee has learned the organization tolerates selective effort.

If you never identify which of those is true, you will end up treating disengagement as though it were a training gap.

Reconnect Skill to Purpose

Research on sustained performance helps again here, but in a different way. Sustained effort depends not only on interest but also on purpose. People remain engaged longer when they experience their work as personally meaningful and connected to the well-being of others.

That is a useful lens because some high-skill, low-will employees are not lazy so much as disconnected. They no longer see their work as meaningful.

They are solving tickets, not protecting client operations. They are patching devices, not preserving uptime and trust. They are documenting changes, not reducing future failure for teammates and clients.

A manager who can reconnect skill to purpose may recover part of the will problem.

Some Will Problems Are Discipline Problems

But, not all will problems are purpose problems. Some are discipline problems.

Behavior is heavily influenced by systems and environment, not just by intention. Desire initiates action, but feelings of success and repeatability sustain it.

In practical terms, if your most capable technician gets rewarded for heroics and never for process discipline, you will get more heroics and less discipline. If documentation is optional until something breaks, the team learns that knowledge hoarding has no real cost. If standards are unevenly enforced for “top performers,” then low-will behavior becomes rational.

This means that coaching the high-skill, low-will employee is not just about conversation. It is about redesigning reinforcement – what gets praised, measured, tolerated, and repeated.

Two Different Systems for Two Different Problems

This leads to a more useful practical distinction. High-will, low-skill employees need confidence-building systems. High-skill, low-will employees need accountability-building systems.

The first group needs support without ambiguity. The second needs clarity without indulgence.

For the first group, managers should slow the work down enough for learning to occur. That means smaller skill targets, observable behaviors, immediate feedback, and visible wins.

The coaching conversation should sound like this: here is the capability gap, here is why it matters to the client and the team, here is the exact behavior to practice, here is how we will review it, and here is what success looks like in the next two weeks. The tone should be firm but optimistic. The employee’s willingness is not the thing to test. It is the thing to harness.

For the second group, managers should make contribution visible and choice explicit.

The conversation should sound more like this: you clearly have the ability to perform at a high level, but these repeated behaviors are below the standard, here is the impact on the team and clients, help me understand the cause, and let’s decide whether you are willing to recommit to the role at the level it requires.

That last part matters. Coaching works when the employee genuinely wants to improve. If that willingness is absent, the manager may no longer be coaching. They may be managing performance, redesigning role fit, or preparing for a talent decision.

Be More Diagnostic, Not Softer or Harsher

What service companies need, then, is not a softer coaching culture or a harsher one. They need a more diagnostic one.

The manager’s first job is to determine whether the employee’s biggest gap is capability or commitment. The second job is to match the intervention to that diagnosis. The third job is to build the system around it.

A good service manager knows that not every ticket belongs in the same queue. A password reset, a firewall outage, and a recurring backup failure may all be “tickets,” but they do not belong to the same response playbook.

Talent works the same way. A willing learner and a reluctant expert may both be “performance issues,” but they do not belong to the same coaching playbook.

If you coach them the same way, you will frustrate both. If you coach them differently, you give each one a fairer chance to become what they are capable of becoming.

And in a service business, where performance is cumulative and operational trust compounds slowly, that difference shows up everywhere: in client confidence, documentation quality, escalation load, leadership bench strength, and ultimately margin.

That is why the smartest managers stop asking, “How do I coach this person?” and start asking, “What is this person missing most right now: skill, or will?”

The answer to that question changes everything.

Five Frameworks for Coaching Different Profiles

The Skill-or-Will Diagnostic. Before coaching, determine whether the employee’s primary gap is capability or commitment. This prevents mismatched interventions and wasted effort.

Confidence-Building Systems for High-Will, Low-Skill Employees. Use structure, repetition, short feedback loops, and clear behavioral targets to convert motivation into capability.

Accountability-Building Systems for High-Skill, Low-Will Employees. Use behavioral clarity, root-cause conversations, visible standards, and consequence-aware management rather than defaulting to more training.

Purpose Recovery for Skilled but Disengaged Employees. Reconnect technical work to mission, client impact, and team value so motivation is linked to meaning, not just task execution.

The Coaching vs. Performance Management Boundary. Coaching is a partnership, not a loophole for avoiding hard decisions. When willingness is missing, managers may need to shift from development to performance accountability.

But here’s the trap: the same skills that launched your business will eventually strangle it.

As you grow, you become the bottleneck. Projects sit waiting for your approval. Good employees can’t make decisions without checking with you first. Your profit swings wildly because you’re guessing at capacity instead of planning it. You’re exhausted, your team is frustrated, and growth feels more like chaos than progress.

The way forward isn’t working harder or getting better at juggling. It’s becoming a completely different kind of leader. It’s moving from being the person who does the work to being the person who builds the team that does the work. That’s the shift from owner-operator to CEO.

This isn’t about getting a fancier title. It’s about building a real management team that can run the business without you being the answer to every question. It’s about creating systems that work whether you’re in the office or on vacation. And it’s about finally getting your life back while building something that actually grows sustainably.

More significantly, the value of your business will increase only to the extent that its dependency on you decreases!

Start By Setting Financial Rules That Force Clear Thinking

A management team can only make good decisions when they understand the boundaries they’re working within. Your first job as CEO is to establish clear financial guardrails, not to make them up as you go.

Two rules are non-negotiable if you want a business that can fund its own growth without constant stress. First, pay yourself a real market wage for the actual work you do. Second, target at least ten percent profit before taxes, calculated after paying yourself that real wage.

These two lines anchor everything else. When you tell yourself you’ll take a real salary “once we’re bigger,” you’re hiding the true economics of your business. You can’t tell which services are actually profitable or which clients are really worth the effort because your personal sacrifice is masking the real costs. 

When you accept profit margins below ten percent and tell yourself it’s “just for now,” you’re teaching your entire organization that profit is optional. Neither of those patterns builds a sustainable business.

Put these guardrails in writing and manage to them every single month. Review your actual numbers against these targets. When you do this consistently, you’ll spot problems early. 

You’ll see which service packages are underpriced. You’ll notice which clients consume way more resources than they pay for. You’ll catch the slow creep of labor costs before they become a crisis.

That labor creep is especially sneaky in IT services businesses. You add a dispatcher “temporarily” to handle the workload spike. Then you need a second tier of escalation. Then you throw more hours at projects to hit deadlines. Suddenly your revenue is climbing but your gross profit per person is falling. That pattern means you’re scaling activity, not productivity. You’re just getting busier, not better.

Use gross profit per labor dollar as one of your primary metrics. That’s the revenue you keep after paying for the labor to deliver the service, divided by what you spent on that labor. Every manager should be able to explain how their decisions increase this number over time, not just how they’re “keeping up with all the tickets.”

Define the Jobs Before You Fill Them With People

Most business owners promote based on who’s available and likable. Your best technician becomes the service manager. Your most personable engineer gets client success. Someone organized becomes operations. That’s filling slots with names, not designing a management structure.

A real management team starts with defining the seats clearly, understanding exactly what outcomes each seat must deliver, what numbers they’ll be measured on, and what decisions they can make. Only then do you find or develop people to fill those seats.

The Service and Delivery Leader owns the stability and throughput of your operation. They’re responsible for predictable performance on your service level agreements, getting issues resolved on first contact at the right support tier, clean change management that doesn’t break things, and project delivery that hits dates without destroying your support capacity.

Their scorecard includes things like how long tickets sit in the backlog, how often resolved tickets get reopened because the fix didn’t work, whether changes go through successfully without causing new problems, whether projects stay on budget, and critically, that gross profit per labor dollar for delivery work. 

They own the weekly capacity planning. They decide when to hire, when to cross-train people on new skills, when to outsource overflow work, and when to push back on scope that threatens stability.

The Sales and Revenue Leader owns pipeline quality and deal velocity for your ideal client profile. They’re responsible for consistently bringing in new clients that are actually a good fit, expanding revenue with existing clients, keeping discounting under control, and creating a renewal process that surfaces risk before a client walks away.

Their scorecard includes qualified first conversations with potential clients, conversion rates at each stage of your sales process, average deal size without giving away the farm on price, and how long it takes to close deals. They decide which market segments to target, what promises get made during the sales process, and whether a “strategic logo” opportunity is actually strategic or just a money-losing trophy.

Good revenue leaders understand that sales effectiveness is mostly about getting talented people in front of more of the right prospects, using a simple and repeatable system. It’s not about sales heroics or magical closing techniques. It’s about consistent discipline.

The Finance and Admin Leader owns cash, compliance, and clarity. They’re responsible for accurate and timely financial numbers, clean accounts receivable so you’re not constantly chasing payments, a simple forecasting model that managers can actually use to make decisions, and a cash position that covers taxes, debt payments, essential capital investments, and owner distributions without drama.

They maintain those operating guardrails you set, highlight when actual results are drifting from targets, and help managers understand the financial impact of their decisions. They’re not just the bookkeeper. They’re the steward of truth in your business.

Your early win as CEO is publishing these seat definitions clearly, interviewing candidates against these explicit expectations, and establishing the scorecards that will measure success. When confusion or conflict comes up later, and it will, you point back to the seat and its responsibilities, not to the person’s personality or history. That’s how clarity protects your culture from turning toxic.

Create an Operating Rhythm That Turns Intentions Into Habits

A plan sitting in a document is just an intention. An operating rhythm is what turns plans into habits. Your management team needs a simple cadence that connects strategy to the actual daily work people do. This rhythm is less about having meetings and more about creating accountability and continuous learning.

Start with a weekly leadership session focused on outcomes and exceptions. Each leader brings their scorecard, their three priorities for the coming week, two wins from the past week, and the one red flag risk that could derail a customer relationship, a project, or a quarterly target. 

Keep the conversation anchored to commitments. 

What did we say would be true by today? What’s actually true? If there’s a gap, why? And what specific thing will happen by what specific date to close that gap?

The language of accountability isn’t about blame. It’s about precision. It’s about connecting strategy with reality, aligning people with goals, and making sure the right connections exist between people, strategy, and operations so results actually happen on schedule.

Next, create a monthly financial forum where managers walk through the sections of your profit and loss statement that they influence and explain what they’re going to change to move a specific number. This is where your delivery leader talks about reducing rework and increasing first-contact resolution. 

Where your sales leader shows how they’re improving conversion rates without discounting. Where your finance leader shows the cash impact of those operational improvements. Treat it as practice for making great decisions together, not as a courtroom where people get punished.

Finally, hold a quarterly review that resets priorities and strengthens systems, not just sets bigger goals. It’s tempting to declare more ambitious targets and tell everyone to “stretch,” but organizations don’t rise to meet ambitious goals through willpower alone. They either have systems that make the goals achievable or they don’t. 

The point of the quarterly review is to strengthen the handful of routines that produce results without requiring heroics from any individual.

Make Decision-Making Clear So People Stop Waiting for You

Owner-operators often answer every difficult question because they can. The unintended result is learned helplessness across the team. Nobody makes a call because they’re waiting to see what you’ll say. A management team learns faster and develops better judgment when you give them explicit decision rights and clear escalation rules.

For each leader, define three tiers of decisions. 

Tier A decisions are fully delegated. They decide and then inform you what they decided. 

Tier B decisions are consultative. They develop a proposal, you challenge their thinking and ask questions, and then they make the final call. 

Tier C decisions are either collaborative, where the whole leadership team weighs in together, or reserved for you as CEO.

Put specific examples in each tier and revisit them monthly. Over time, you should see more decisions moving from Tier B to Tier A, and more from Tier C to Tier B. This is how you get your time back and how you grow managers who can truly carry the company forward.

The only way this works is with timely and respectful confrontation when commitments break. When a leader doesn’t deliver on something they said they would, you have a conversation using what you might call “gap language.” Here’s what we agreed would happen. 

Here’s what actually happened. Here’s the impact that gap created. And here’s the new plan going forward. Then you check whether the leader has both the motivation and the ability to meet the next commitment.

If motivation is high but ability is low, you add training or remove obstacles that are making their job harder. If ability is fine but motivation is low, you work to connect the task more clearly to things they care about or make the consequences of not doing it more real. If neither motivation nor ability is present after fair support, you either renegotiate what this person is responsible for or you replace them in the seat.

These accountability conversations are essential acts of management. They’re not personal attacks. They’re about identifying disappointments clearly and rebuilding the ability and motivation needed to move forward.

Build a Capacity System So Your Team Stops Living in Constant Panic

IT services businesses slip into chronic firefighting mode because work intake, resource planning, and change management are handled informally. A Service and Delivery Leader becomes truly effective when they own a capacity system that stabilizes workflow and raises productivity.

Start by forecasting demand simply. Look at recent ticket volumes by category and time of day. Look at project workload broken down by phase. Look at planned changes categorized by risk level. Translate all of that into hours needed by support tier, then into the number of people you need.

At the same time, sharpen your supply side. Cross-train people so you have flexible coverage on the most common issue categories. Reduce rework by creating checklists and building in peer reviews before work goes out the door. Protect focused project time so your engineers aren’t constantly whiplashing between deep analytical work and instant-response support tickets.

The point isn’t to build a perfect model. 

No model will be perfect. 

The point is to build a consistent one that helps you make earlier and better staffing and scheduling decisions. The payoff shows up as higher throughput with less strain on your people, which you’ll see in rising gross profit per labor dollar and fewer emergency escalations burning up your calendar.

Strong execution discipline matters enormously here. A change calendar that everyone trusts because it’s maintained well. An approval process that people actually follow because it’s clear and fast. A feedback loop from post-change reviews back into your standards and procedures. All of that is the connective tissue that makes a mature IT services business work. It’s where strategy, like “we’re moving more clients to standardized monthly maintenance windows,” becomes operational reality.

Treat Behavior Change as a Design Problem, Not a Motivation Problem

New tools, new processes, and new standards only create value when people actually use them in their daily work. That means your management team will spend a surprising amount of time leading change, both inside your company and with your clients. 

The reliable way to make change stick isn’t through inspiring speeches. It’s by adjusting the personal, social, and structural forces around the behavior you want.

Let’s say you want to increase first-contact resolution on Tier 1 support. Make the skill easy to acquire by creating job aids and running “watch me do this” demonstration sessions. 

Make it matter personally by telling specific stories about how better first-contact resolution saved time for both the tech and the customer. Surround people with peers who model the behavior well through brief daily huddles where people share what worked. And change the environment so the right knowledge base article and diagnostic tool are just a click away while the old workaround is now harder to access.

When you align multiple sources of influence like this, the odds of adoption multiply dramatically. 

As CEO, you should expect managers to bring you influence plans alongside their initiatives. What specific behaviors are they targeting? Which levers will they use to encourage those behaviors? What early indicators will show whether it’s working?

Reward managers for designing environments where the right choice is easier to make, not for giving motivational speeches that everyone forgets by next week.

Make Hiring, Onboarding, and Coaching Systematic Strengths

A management team becomes real when it can hire well, ramp new people quickly, and coach consistently without depending on the founder’s gut instinct. You need simple, repeatable mechanisms.

In hiring, start by defining the outcomes the seat must deliver and the two or three behaviors that reliably predict success in your specific environment. Ask behavioral questions that surface actual evidence from their past, not hypothetical opinions about what they might do. 

Coach your interviewers to probe deeply. “Tell me about a time you inherited a messy support queue and made it predictable. What specifically did you change? What numbers improved? What did your peers notice about the difference?”

You’re testing for ownership mentality, not for charisma or for saying the right buzzwords.

In onboarding, design the first thirty days like you’d design a product experience. Create a clear narrative on day one about what success looks like in this role. Give them first tasks that create early wins and build confidence. 

Define the two standards they absolutely must master. Introduce them to the peers who will model those standards well.

Then coach with short cycles. Weekly one-on-one conversations that focus on a commitment they made last week, what actually happened, what they learned, and one specific skill to practice in the coming week. 

Over months, the compounding effect of these small, consistent improvements creates a team that does the right things without constant drama. The system carries you forward, not periodic pep talks.

When someone’s performance fails to improve after you’ve provided fair support, return to accountability done well. Name the gap between expectation and reality. Explore whether motivation and ability are both present. 

Align consequences and support clearly. Then decide whether to continue investing, adjust responsibilities, or part ways.

You’re building a culture where adults make and keep commitments to each other.

Deliberately Move Yourself Out of the Critical Path

The transformation from owner-operator to CEO is complete when you’re no longer the single point of failure for clients, employees, or cash. This requires an explicit plan for offloading responsibilities.

Start with a time audit for two weeks. Track what you’re actually spending your time on. Look at what only you can do versus what you simply happen to be doing because you’ve always done it. Group these tasks into themes, then assign each theme to the relevant leader with a measurable outcome and a specific date when your involvement ends.

If you’re still the primary rainmaker for sales, build a simple sales motion that others can run. Create a short list of right-fit target prospects. Develop a talk track anchored to your real differentiation. Design a standard first-meeting agenda. Establish a weekly review of attempts made, meetings held, and next steps planned.

Resist the temptation to chase every possible logo. Say no to deals that will strain your delivery capacity or force you to compromise on pricing. Sales is less about heroics than about consistent behavior in front of the right prospects, executed by competent people who genuinely believe in what you offer.

If you’re still the final escalation point for every tough problem, equip your Service and Delivery Leader with clear thresholds for when they truly need to pull you in. Then actively celebrate when they resolve difficult issues without you. 

The point isn’t for you to be needed for everything. The point is for you to be available for the few decisions that genuinely require the CEO’s judgment and authority.

Cut Out Work That Destroys Your Team’s Health

Even a great management team will struggle if you force them to carry clients, projects, or commitments that violate your operating principles. Establish a quarterly review of your bottom ten percent of clients measured by profitability, payment behavior, and fit with your systems.

Attempt rehabilitation with a brief, clear plan. State the gap between their behavior and your standards. Set the new rules around intake processes, approval workflows, and payment terms. Provide support to make the new behavior easy for them to adopt. Give it a concrete timeframe to see if things change.

If the situation doesn’t improve, exit the relationship respectfully and redeploy that capacity to better-fit clients. Protecting your managers from chronic exceptions and problem accounts is one of the most caring things you can do as CEO. It keeps your operating system intact so the good habits you’re building can compound into results instead of getting constantly disrupted.

Understand Your Real Job: Keeping the System Healthy

At some point, all the tools and templates give way to a simpler understanding of your work. The CEO’s job is to ensure the essential connections between people, strategy, and operations stay intact as the business grows. That means choosing a few clear priorities rather than trying to do everything. 

It means aligning your leaders and teams to pursue those priorities together. 

It means checking regularly that your operating mechanisms are actually turning those priorities into daily behavior and weekly progress. 

It means removing friction that slows good people down. It means confronting gaps quickly and respectfully. And it means insisting that your systems be strong enough that good outcomes don’t depend on individual heroics.

When these connections are healthy, results follow predictably. You can forecast with confidence. Your team operates smoothly. Clients get consistent value. When these connections start to fray, you feel it as surprises, drama, and constant rework.

The work of being CEO is less about charisma than about consistency. Professional management isn’t a posture you adopt. It’s a cadence you maintain.

Hold to your financial guardrails every month. Let your managers truly own their seats and their numbers. Expect influence plans, not wish lists, for every change initiative. 

Strengthen a handful of core routines until they run reliably without your attention. And keep pruning anything that drags the organization back toward the old pattern of you personally rescuing everything.

What a Year of This Work Produces

If you commit to this approach for a full year, the business you own will be recognizably different. You’ll still be the visionary for your company. You’ll still be the person who sees where the market is going and where your business should head. But you’ll have a team that can carry the weight of getting there.

Your clients will receive more consistent value with less drama and fewer emergencies. Your employees will have a system that actually lets them succeed instead of constantly requiring them to improvise. 

Your cash position will be sufficient to fund growth opportunities instead of every month feeling like you’re standing at the edge of a cliff. And your calendar will finally reflect the work that only you can do: choosing the next challenge to tackle and building leaders who can take the organization there.

That’s the difference between being trapped in your business and actually leading it. Between working harder every year for diminishing returns and building something that compounds in value over time. 

Between being the person who does everything and being the person who builds the team that does everything better than you ever could alone.

The path from owner-operator to CEO isn’t easy. But it’s the only path that leads to a business that can grow beyond your personal capacity, a team that can thrive without your constant intervention, and a life where you’re finally doing the work you’re uniquely equipped to do instead of all the work that simply needs doing.

Execution drift is what happens when a team’s ambition gradually outpaces its operating system. It’s rarely about effort or talent. It’s about clarity, rhythm, and money: the three levers that keep promises moving from ideas to outcomes.

This is a practical playbook for identifying drift early, diagnosing what’s really causing it, and installing habits that get the work flowing again. You won’t find heroics here. You’ll find the kind of small, repeatable moves that build into momentum.

What Execution Drift Looks Like from the Ground

People describe it in different ways. A project manager says timelines feel “squishier.” Engineers say they’re “switching between tasks more.” Account managers say customers are “less responsive” to review invitations. Finance flags longer payment collection times and invoices waiting for approvals. The service desk sees more tickets being reopened. None of these signals alone prove a problem. Together they reveal a system that has started to run on hope instead of method.

The first step is to give the drift a shape. That means reducing the swirl of stories to a handful of trend lines: time to first response on the service desk, time to resolution, delivery in full and on time for projects, backlog age and reopen rate, governance meeting adherence like quarterly reviews held with a decision-maker present, and payment timeliness. When those lines bend the wrong way together over a period or two, you’re not in a bad week. You’re in drift.

Why Drift Happens Even in Good Teams

In healthy organizations, demand grows because the quality of work establishes trust. Trust generates more work. If your operating system doesn’t evolve alongside that demand, subtle delays accumulate. Leaders feel the weight and try to compensate with effort: more meetings, more email, more personal involvement. For a moment, it helps. Then it frays, because effort can’t substitute for missing structure.

Underneath the surface, five forces typically drive execution drift. The first is scope ambiguity. When promises aren’t framed as clear outcomes with acceptance criteria, work inflates to fill the energy available. The second is role blur. Intake, escalation, project leadership, and account strategy overlap so handoffs turn into back-and-forth. The third is standardization gaps. Exceptions to the standard technology stack or way of working multiply, so each task is slightly custom and throughput slows. The fourth is governance decay. Executive meetings slip or become ticket reviews, so decisions wait for “later” and projects stall. The fifth is financial mismatch. Pricing or billing mechanics don’t cover the true cost of the promised service, so the team is asked to deliver premium outcomes on a lean budget. Over time, each force erodes schedule confidence, and the erosion looks like “people just need to focus.” They don’t. They need a system that makes focus the default.

Rebuilding Clarity Around Outcomes

The fastest way to stop drift is to make the promise clear and measurable. Replace task lists with outcome statements and acceptance criteria that a non-technical executive can understand. Instead of “migrate mailboxes,” try “all 220 users sending and receiving on the new platform with successful cutover validation and rollback plan retired.” Instead of “improve endpoint security,” try “all endpoints at or above the standard image, security software active and reporting, high-risk exceptions listed with owners and remediation dates.” Clear outcomes shrink debate and create a shared definition of done. They also change how you schedule. Work is sequenced by outcome dependency, what must be true before something else can start, rather than by who shouted loudest.

When you adopt outcome framing, you can right-size project oversight. Weekly or twice-monthly checkpoint meetings stop being status theater and become short outcome reviews: planned versus actual, blockers, next decision needed, and a single-page forecast that shows whether the delivery date is still believable. If the date isn’t believable, you either adjust scope or add capacity now, not after three more “let’s push a week” updates. Drift hates clarity.

Tightening Handoffs Where Work Actually Moves

Most delays don’t come from doing the work. They come from handing it off. Intake hands to engineering. Engineering hands to escalation. Projects hand to support. Presales hands to delivery. Account strategy hands decisions to the customer. The seam is where things leak. Fixing a seam doesn’t require reorganization. It requires a checklist and explicit decision rights.

For the service desk, write down the intake standard: mandatory fields, documentation to collect, severity rules, and a visible fast lane for true priority-one incidents. Give intake authority to unassign and reassign to hit response service levels, and measure reassignments per ticket as a leading indicator of sorting quality. For escalation, make validation part of “done.” If a fix reveals a pattern, it must produce something reusable: a procedure entry, a monitoring rule, a standardization task, or a change proposal. For projects, insist on a formal “go live to business as usual” transition with clear acceptance criteria, documentation links, and verification steps. Tickets created during transition aren’t noise. They’re the work of finishing well. For presales to delivery, stop tolerating verbal handoffs. No project should start without a written assessment, scope, and a funded plan to close known gaps.

When handoffs stabilize, completion time drops without asking anyone to work later nights. The team begins spending time on the work instead of on finding the work, understanding the work, or redoing the work.

Restoring Governance That Makes Decisions

One hallmark of execution drift is the “vanishing quarterly review.” Either the session didn’t happen, or the wrong people showed, or it became operational details. That’s a path to stalled projects because budgets go stale, risk conversations never happen, and new priorities arrive via side email. Governance should be the drumbeat that keeps the story coherent.

Rebuild quarterly reviews as decision meetings with executive attendance. Prepare as if you were asking for capital, because you are. Bring a simple risk heat map, lifecycle forecast, and roadmap with projects phased over the next four quarters. Present indicators that matter to the business: responsiveness and resolution trends, on-time delivery for projects, major incidents and lessons learned, standardization progress, and payment timeliness. Then ask for the next decisions: approve project A now and B next quarter, accept or remediate these three exceptions by these dates, and endorse the budget envelope.

Two things happen when you treat governance this way. First, projects stop stalling because every quarter includes a fresh “yes” or “not now” with an owner. Second, customers understand the link between your price and their outcomes. That connection makes it easier to hold the line on scope and easier to renew.

Funding the Engine You’re Asking to Run

It’s fashionable to treat execution problems as process problems only. Many are finance problems in disguise. If you’re delivering premium outcomes at economy prices, the schedule will slide because you don’t have enough staffed hours to keep promises. The fix isn’t to encourage diligence. It’s to price like someone who knows the costs, bill like a professional services firm, and control discounts as if quality depends on it, because it does.

Calculate the true cost of the work, including all delivery labor, tools, and the recurring governance time for quarterly reviews and roadmap management. When you discover the real number, you’ll likely find that your mature service’s cost is higher than early estimates. Adjust your price to fund the standard. For recurring services, invoice in advance. For projects, bill at milestones that reflect real value delivered, not just “percent complete.” Treat payment collection time creeping past a month as a relationship and an execution signal, not just an accounting note. Late payment is often a sign of perceived value drift or friction in how you communicate fees. Fix it at the source.

Equally important: put discount control in the part of the organization that lives with delivery consequences. Individual discounts feel harmless and relational. In practice, small cuts at the top line destroy a large share of your profit and remove the resources that pay for the people and tools that keep schedules. When exceptions are truly justified, adjust scope or timing before you adjust rate. That’s how you protect both the promise and the team.

Reducing Variance with Standardization and Catalogs

Execution drift thrives on exceptions. Every one-off tool, unique workflow, or custom promise creates drag. Standardization is not stubbornness. It’s the way you make good on dates. Choose a standard technology stack per layer and a standard way of working per service. Route exceptions through a simple approval that includes an owner, an expiration date, and the remediation path. Publish a service catalog that describes what’s included in your “complete package” and what requires a separate project. Catalogs are boring by design. They give sales and delivery the same language, prevent accidental scope creep, and speed up both quoting and staffing.

If you’re shifting from pick-and-choose to complete packages, expect friction. Resist the urge to compromise the standard when pushback arrives. Instead, offer timing and financing options that help the customer say yes without breaking your system. As compliance rises across your base, you’ll feel throughput increase and surprises fall. That’s the point.

Reinstalling Execution Rhythms That Add Speed, Not Meetings

Rhythm is to execution what breathing is to running. Without it, you sprint, gasp, and stop. With it, you cover ground steadily. The trick is to keep rhythms short and real.

Daily, the service desk runs a top-of-day queue review and an end-of-day “no ticket sleeps without a note” rule. Escalation reviews new escalations and ensures validation documentation is attached before closure. Projects run a ten-minute stand-up focused on blockers and next decisions. Weekly, a delivery review ties three threads together: service desk service level attainment, project on-time delivery, and upcoming governance milestones. The purpose isn’t to admire charts. It’s to make one or two system changes that remove friction. Monthly, account strategy checks roadmap variance and prepares the next quarterly review with decisions framed and budgets tied to outcomes. Quarterly, executives meet, decide, and endorse the next stretch of work.

If your rhythms feel like overhead, it’s because they’re not connected to decisions. Aim every recurring meeting at a single question: what decision must we make this week to keep promises on schedule? When you run the calendar that way, meetings get shorter and execution gets faster.

Making the Work Easier to Do Right Than Wrong

Systems win when the path of least resistance is the right path. That means designing tools, templates, and defaults that remove thinking from repeatable moments. Pre-load onboarding tasks from a standard template so the first 60 to 90 days are already planned. Provide ticket shortcuts that request the correct documentation in one click. Give intake a “do not start” lane for tickets waiting on prerequisites so engineers aren’t tempted to begin. Populate quarterly review presentations from a shared outline that forces risk, lifecycle, and budget to the front. Automate “definition of done” checks where possible. If time isn’t captured and validation fields aren’t filled, the ticket can’t close.

This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s how you protect the team from the costs of improvisation. People are creative. Let them invest that creativity in improving the system, not in remembering which step comes next.

Handling the Human Side of Drift

Behind every missed date is a person who feels they’re letting someone down. Blame makes drift worse because it pushes truth underground. Replace blame with visibility and coaching. When someone repeatedly struggles to meet commitments, ask whether the system made success likely. Were they given work with ambiguous scope? Were they forced to hunt for information in disconnected tools? Were they assigned to a project that was sold underfunded? Fix those system faults first. Then coach the behavior, communication, planning, and follow-through, with the confidence that you aren’t asking people to overcome structural obstacles by force of will.

Recognition matters too. Celebrate quiet, uneventful launches. Praise the update that exposed a blocker early rather than the last-minute heroics that saved a date that shouldn’t have been at risk. When you reward the behaviors that prevent drift, you’ll see fewer “rescues” and more on-time, complete deliveries that no one tweets about but everyone remembers at renewal.

A 30-Day Reset Plan You Can Run Now

If you need to stop drift quickly, run this sequence without waiting for perfect agreement. First, write outcome statements and acceptance criteria for the top three at-risk projects. Second, add a ten-minute daily rhythm for those projects that asks “what decision must we make today?” Third, install an intake standard for the service desk with mandatory fields and documentation and give intake the authority to reassign to hit response targets. Fourth, schedule executive-level quarterly reviews for your top five accounts within the next 45 days and prepare them as decision meetings with budgets attached. Fifth, review your billing mechanics and ensure ongoing services are invoiced in advance and that your progress billing milestones match value delivered. Sixth, identify and retire two exceptions to your standard technology stack that create outsized drag.

None of these moves require new software. All of them reduce ambiguity and speed decisions. Within a few weeks, you’ll feel the organization exhale. Projects stop slipping by default. Tickets close more cleanly. Governance meetings make choices instead of apologies. Finance sees fewer invoice disputes and steadier payments. The drift didn’t vanish by inspiration. It receded because the system got tighter.

The Long View: Momentum Is a System

Execution drift is not a character flaw. It is a natural entropy in growing service businesses. The antidote is not a rallying speech. It’s a design. Clarity converts ideas into outcomes because everyone understands what “done” means. Rhythm turns progress into routine because decisions arrive on schedule. Money keeps the promise funded because the economics match the ambition. Standardization reduces variance so throughput increases and surprises decrease. And role clarity makes handoffs predictable so work flows instead of bounces.

Do these things with ordinary consistency and you’ll find that dates stop being negotiations and start being reality. Customers will notice, not because you boast, but because the quiet is back. Projects conclude when you say they will. Reviews are about the future, not the past. The business feels less like a sprint and more like a marathon run at a comfortable, sustainable pace.

That’s what fixing drift gives you. Not just a week of relief, but the return of a normal workday where the calendar matches the plan, the plan matches the budget, and the budget funds the people who keep promises. It’s not flashy. It’s the foundation of a company that customers trust and employees are proud to power, one on-time, complete outcome at a time.

That’s why the most effective owners hire for personal qualities first and skills second. When your team is wired to seek understanding, stick with hard problems, and take feedback on board, almost every other investment you make in them produces a bigger return.

The question is how to see those qualities before you hire.

The answer lies in building an interview system that looks past credentials and into past behavior, because history repeats itself, personal qualities trump skills, gut feelings are not evidence, and credentials are not the same as accomplishments.

Here are three qualities that matter in almost every role: curiosity, grit, and coachability. We’ll translate them into concrete interview questions you can start using this week.

Why Personal Qualities Beat Skills, Especially for Leaders

Effective selection systems are built around two big ideas. First, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Second, personal qualities are much harder to change than skills.

That’s why the recommended process relies on behavioral interviewing, which means specific ways of questioning to elicit past behavior that predicts future behavior, and why it insists that you identify the qualities of your ideal employee, like adaptability, energy, persuasiveness, and communication skills, before you write questions.

The approach reinforces this with five core principles. History repeats itself. Personal qualities trump skill. Gut feelings are not evidence. Credentials are not accomplishments. Know what you want.

This is leadership and management work, not just paperwork. You’re deciding what kind of human system you are building. A team of people who look good on paper, or a team wired to learn, persist, and grow.

Curiosity, grit, and coachability belong in that second category.

Curiosity: Hiring the Investigating Manager

Curiosity isn’t random nosiness. It’s a disciplined habit of asking “What’s really going on here?” It means probing for evidence instead of accepting first explanations, and exploring options before jumping to a solution.

That’s exactly the kind of thinking behavioral questioning is designed to expose: careful, concrete stories rather than polished hypotheticals. The approach explicitly warns against letting candidates drift into hypotheticals and teaches you to keep asking for specific examples and even replaying dialogues so you understand what actually happened.

What Curiosity Looks Like in Stories

Curious candidates tend to notice anomalies and say things like “Something didn’t add up, so I investigated.” They ask questions upstream and downstream, not just in their own lane. They gather data or run small experiments before recommending action. They describe learning as part of the story, not just results.

They don’t have to be extroverted or chatty. You’re listening for an inner drive to understand.

Interview Questions That Surface Curiosity

Use behavioral stems like “Tell me about a time…” and “Give me an example…” and then probe for detail using the Background, Action, Result model.

Question 1: Investigating a Problem

“Tell me about a time you inherited a problem, something that wasn’t working, but you didn’t yet know why. What did you do first?”

Follow up with “What questions did you ask, and of whom?” Then ask “What did you discover that surprised you?” Finally ask “Looking back, what would you investigate differently?”

Question 2: Learning Something New, Fast

“Describe a situation where you had to learn a completely new skill or domain quickly to deliver results.”

Follow up with “How did you decide what to learn first?” Then ask “What resources did you use?” Finally ask “How did you know you’d learned enough to act?”

Question 3: Challenging Assumptions

“Give me an example of a time when you challenged a standard way of doing things because it didn’t make sense to you.”

Follow up with “What was the assumption underneath the old way?” Then ask “How did you test whether your alternative was better?” Finally ask “What ended up happening?”

You’re listening for evidence of structured curiosity, the kind that would make someone walk the metaphorical warehouse and ask “What’s really going on in this system?”

Grit: Passion and Perseverance in Action

Research on grit defines it as a combination of passion and perseverance that distinguishes high achievers from people with similar talent but less staying power. Highly accomplished people are described as paragons of perseverance who keep going after failure, stick with long-term goals, and are satisfied being unsatisfied, driven to improve over long arcs of time.

Historical work found that what separated the most eminent individuals from their peers wasn’t raw intelligence but persistence of motive, meaning working toward distant goals and a tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles.

If you’re hiring leaders or high-impact individual contributors, that’s valuable. You want the person who stays on the field when things get tough, keeps improving even when they could coast, and finishes what they start.

What Grit Looks Like in Stories

Candidates with grit tend to show long arcs of effort in a particular domain, like multi-year projects or sticking with a challenge. They talk frankly about setbacks and how they recovered. They describe boring or painful parts of the work they did anyway.

Be cautious: intensity for a few months isn’t grit. You’re looking for enduring interest and effort.

Interview Questions That Surface Grit

Question 4: Long-Term Pursuit

“Tell me about the most difficult long-term goal you’ve pursued, something that took at least a year from start to finish. What kept you going?”

Follow up with “What were the biggest setbacks along the way?” Then ask “Did you ever think about quitting? What made you stay?” Finally ask “How did you measure progress when the finish line was far away?”

Question 5: Sticking It Out When It’s Not Fun

“Describe a time when the work became boring, frustrating, or painful, but you stayed with it anyway.”

Follow up with “What specifically made it hard?” Then ask “What did you tell yourself in those moments?” Finally ask “What was the eventual result?”

Question 6: Recovering from Failure

“Give me an example of a professional failure you’re willing to own. What did you do in the days and weeks immediately afterward?”

Follow up with “Who did you talk to about it?” Then ask “What concrete changes did you make as a result?” Finally ask “If we called someone who was there, how would they describe your response?”

As with all behavioral questioning, keep pulling on the thread. Ask for a second example if the first sounds too rehearsed, and probe for specific actions and results rather than vague self-descriptions.

Coachability: Growth Mindset in the Wild

Research contrasts a fixed mindset, where success is about proving you’re smart or talented, with a growth mindset, where success is about learning, effort, and contribution. Fixed-mindset people often chase labels. Growth-mindset people look for chances to grow.

Coachability is simply growth mindset applied at work. Can you hear hard feedback without falling apart or getting defensive? Do you change your behavior after feedback, or just nod and continue? Do you seek out people and experiences that stretch you?

In a world where jobs, tools, and markets change constantly, talent that can’t be coached is a slow-moving liability.

What Coachability Looks Like in Stories

Coachable candidates typically volunteer stories of mentors, managers, or peers who shaped them. They describe specific feedback they received and how they applied it. They show a pattern of changing course when new information arrives. They avoid blaming language and own their part.

Interview Questions That Surface Coachability

Question 7: Receiving Hard Feedback

“Tell me about a time when you received tough or surprising feedback about your performance or behavior. What was said, and how did you respond?”

Follow up with “Walk me through that conversation. What exact words do you remember?” Then ask “What did you do in the next week as a result?” Finally ask “If I asked that person today, what would they say changed?”

Question 8: Being Stretched Beyond Comfort

“Describe a situation where a boss or colleague pushed you to operate at a level you did not feel ready for.”

Follow up with “What was your first reaction?” Then ask “What did you do to rise to the challenge?” Finally ask “What did you learn about yourself from that experience?”

Question 9: Changing Your Mind

“Give me an example of a time when you were convinced you were right, then later changed your mind. What happened?”

Follow up with “What information or experience shifted your view?” Then ask “How easy or hard was it to admit that change to others?” Finally ask “What would you do differently next time you’re that sure of something?”

These questions make it hard to fake coachability. You’re not asking “Are you open to feedback?” because everyone says yes. You’re asking for evidence that feedback changed behavior.

Turning Attribute Interviews into a System, Not a One-Off

Strong questions aren’t enough. You need a system.

Use a Panel, Not a Solo Interviewer

Effective hiring frameworks recommend using an interview panel of three to four trained interviewers, each conducting one-on-one interviews on the same day. This reduces bias, forces consensus, and produces higher-quality decisions based on evidence instead of hunches.

After the interviews, the panel meets with a candidate summary sheet, rates each quality, discusses differences like “Is this a two or a three?” and comes to a consensus, not by averaging but by looking at the weight of the evidence.

Define What Great Looks Like for Each Quality

It’s imperative that you know what you want. That means defining the qualities of your ideal employee and then building your behavioral questions around them.

For curiosity, grit, and coachability, you might define a scale from 1 to 5. For curiosity, the scale might range from “accepts things at face value” to “regularly investigates systems and assumptions to improve them.” For grit, it might range from “gives up quickly when things get hard” to “has a track record of sustained effort on long-term goals despite setbacks.” For coachability, it might range from “defensive, blames others” to “seeks feedback, applies it, and circles back to show progress.”

Even rough scales like this help the panel anchor their ratings in observed behavior rather than personality impressions.

Listen for Background, Action, Result

The framework suggests listening for three parts in each story. Background or context for the situation, action the candidate actually took, and result of those actions.

Train interviewers to write short notes for each answer capturing these three elements, then rate the strength of the evidence for the quality. Two practical tips make this work in real conversations. Don’t settle for vague or hypothetical answers. Keep asking for one specific example. If a candidate seems over-prepared, ask for a second and third example because most coaching only covers the first story.

Making Qualities Part of Your Leadership System

Finally, hiring for personal qualities only pays off if your culture and management practices reward curiosity, grit, and coachability rather than punishing them.

Research on grit describes leaders who intentionally build cultures around perseverance through countless competitive opportunities and illustrations, constantly teaching people how to persevere and deepen their passion.

Translating that to hiring and management means making it normal to share what you’re learning, not just what you’ve finished, which reinforces curiosity. It means celebrating sticking with hard, important problems, not just quick wins, which reinforces grit. It means treating feedback as a shared practice where leaders ask for it too, which reinforces coachability.

When you do, your interview process stops being a gate in front of the same old culture and becomes the front door to a different kind of company.

Why This Matters More Than Most Leaders Realize

Most hiring processes optimize for the wrong things. They optimize for credentials, years of experience, and polished interview performance. Those things might predict whether someone can start the job. They don’t predict whether someone will grow in the job.

The difference between a team that grows and a team that stagnates isn’t initial skill level. It’s whether people are wired to get better. Curious people find better ways to work. People with grit push through the hard middle of projects where most people quit. Coachable people turn feedback into improvement instead of resentment.

Here’s what changes when you shift from skills-first to qualities-first hiring.

Your training investment pays off faster. When someone is curious, they don’t just learn what you teach them. They go find the answers to questions you didn’t know to ask. Your one hour of training becomes three hours of learning because they’re actively seeking more.

Your hard problems actually get solved. People with grit don’t just work on easy wins. They take on the thorny, complicated issues that have been sitting on the backlog for months. They’re the ones who say “I’ll figure it out” and then actually do.

Your feedback culture improves. When you hire coachable people, suddenly feedback becomes normal instead of threatening. They model how to receive it well, which makes everyone else more willing to give and receive it. The whole team gets better, faster.

Your best people stay longer. Curious, gritty, coachable people don’t leave because the work got hard or because they hit a ceiling. They leave when they stop learning. If you create an environment where those qualities are valued and fed, they have no reason to go.

Bad hires surface faster. When you have clear qualities you’re hiring for and a system to evaluate them, bad fits become obvious quickly. You’re not trying to convince yourself that a difficult person will somehow become coachable. You have evidence from the interview that they won’t, and you can part ways early.

Common Mistakes When Hiring for Qualities

Even with good questions and intentions, implementation often goes wrong. Here are the most common mistakes.

Mistake 1: Accepting Hypothetical Answers

When you ask “Tell me about a time when…” and the candidate responds with “Well, I would probably…” you’ve lost the plot. Hypothetical answers tell you how someone wants to be perceived, not how they actually behave. Interrupt politely and redirect: “I appreciate that, but I’d like to hear about a specific time when this actually happened.”

Mistake 2: Settling for the First Story

Prepared candidates have their best story ready for common questions. That story has been refined over multiple interviews. It might even be partly true. Ask for a second example. Then a third. By the third example, you’re hearing unpolished reality, which is exactly what you want.

Mistake 3: Ignoring the Follow-Up Questions

The initial question is just the door. The follow-up questions are where you actually learn something. If someone says they received tough feedback and improved, that’s nice. But when you ask “Walk me through that conversation, what exact words do you remember?” you find out if it really happened or if they’re giving you a fairy tale.

Mistake 4: Letting One Interviewer Decide

Solo interviewers fall in love with candidates or dismiss them based on one moment in the interview. Panels catch this. When three people interview the same candidate and compare notes, patterns emerge. Two people saw curiosity, one person saw defensiveness. Now you have something to dig into rather than one person’s impression.

Mistake 5: Not Scoring Immediately After

If you wait until the end of the day to score candidates, you’ll forget the details and rely on overall impressions. Score each quality right after the interview while the evidence is fresh. Write down the specific story that led to each score. This discipline forces you to separate evidence from feeling.

Closing Thought

You don’t need a perfect question bank or a psychologist on staff to hire for curiosity, grit, and coachability.

You need a clear view that personal qualities trump skills. You need a behavioral questioning system that digs into real stories, not hypotheticals. You need a panel and scoring process that treats evidence, not gut feeling, as the deciding factor.

From there, the interview questions in this article are just tools in your hands.

Ask them. Probe for specifics. Compare notes. And then hire the people whose stories show curiosity, grit, and coachability already at work.

Those are the people who will grow with your business and help your business grow in return.

Because at the end of the day, you’re not hiring for who someone is right now. You’re hiring for who they’ll become when the work gets hard, when something breaks, when they don’t know the answer. Will they investigate? Will they persist? Will they listen and adapt?

The people who do those things naturally are the ones who transform good companies into great ones. Not because they’re the smartest or the most experienced, but because they never stop getting better.

And that’s exactly what you need if you want your business to never stop getting better too.

A strong sales manager turns big goals into daily execution. 

A weak one drains energy, burns cash, and leaves you thinking you’d be better off doing it yourself. 

The good news: you can stack the odds in your favor with a clear, simple approach that doesn’t require an MBA or a deep background in business.

This guide translates the essentials into everyday language. We’ll focus on what matters: getting clear on the role, looking for the right human qualities, interviewing in a way that surfaces real evidence, and setting your new manager up for success. 

We’ll keep it practical and concrete, without buzzwords.

The Two Most Common Mistakes

Mistake #1: Vagueness. Many owners post a generic job ad, meet a few candidates who “seem good,” and make a quick offer. But clarity is everything. 

You need to picture the job six months from now, not just what you need tomorrow morning. Will this person sell while managing, or lead only? How many people will they oversee? Which specific outcomes are they on the hook for – monthly revenue, number of demos, close rate, or new‑logo wins? 

Without precision, you’re rolling dice with the future.

Mistake #2: Worshipping credentials. Shiny logos on a résumé are tempting.

But it’s not the brand names that matter; it’s the attributes – the persistent traits and behaviors that show up when markets change, products stumble, or the team gets wobbly. 

The right attributes travel well between companies. 

The wrong ones don’t, even if the resume looks glamorous.

The Six Vital Attributes (Explained in Plain English)

Resilience. Sales is full of no’s. A sales manager must handle rejection without losing momentum and help the team do the same. Think of resilience as the ability to get back to the phone or the next meeting quickly, with a clear head. Without it, energy drains away and performance collapses after the first tough week. With it, the team bounces back and keeps moving.

Accountability. This is not about barking orders. It’s about owning results (good or bad) and creating a culture where commitments are kept. A manager who practices accountability says, “Here’s what we promised, here’s what happened, here’s what we’re changing.” That kind of clarity is freeing for everyone because the rules are simple and fair.

Influence. A manager can’t force great performance. They have to draw it out of people. Influence shows up when a struggling rep improves through coaching, when targets feel meaningful, and when the team wants to follow the manager even when they don’t have to. Influence multiplies effort across a team in a way control never can.

Adaptability. Markets shift, competitors surprise, and what worked last quarter might stall this one. An adaptable manager can pivot – testing new talk tracks, trying a different channel, or reshaping territories – without losing the team. A rigid manager clings to the old playbook until results collapse.

Planning and Organization. Heroics burn people out. Systems create calm predictability. Great managers build simple rhythms: weekly pipeline reviews that are the same every time, clean dashboards that show the truth, and structured one‑on‑ones that actually coach. These are not bureaucratic boxes to tick; they are the backbone of repeatable results.

Cultural Fit (the deep kind). This is not code for “someone just like us.” It means the manager embodies the values and disciplines that make your business healthy. If your company values honesty, preparation, and respectful candor, your sales manager should model those every day. A brilliant manager who erodes your culture will eventually erode your results.

Turn Attributes Into a Clear Role

Before you start recruiting, write a short role blueprint you can picture in daily life and keep it to a single page. 

Start with the mission in one sentence. For example, “Lead a six‑person outbound team to hit $500k in new monthly revenue by month six while building repeatable systems for pipeline, coaching, and forecasting.” 

Spell out the scope of work so there is no ambiguity about whether the manager will both sell and manage or focus purely on leadership, and whether they are responsible for new business, expansions, or both, including the geographies or industries they will cover. 

Describe the team shape you have now and the hiring plan for the next two quarters so the manager understands the scale and pace of growth. 

Set measurable outcomes in plain terms: targets for pipeline created, meetings held, conversion rates, average deal size, cycle time, and monthly revenue. 

Finally, define the key rhythms that will anchor execution. The weekly pipeline review, weekly one‑on‑ones, the monthly forecast lock, the quarterly territory review, and the monthly training focus – so the working week has structure from day one.

 If you can’t write this, pause the search. A vague role leads to a vague hire, and vague hires create expensive do‑overs. 

A vague role leads to a vague hire, and vague hires create expensive do‑overs.

How to Uncover The Key Attributes (and Avoid Guesswork)

The best way to see attributes is through behavioral interview technique. 

Don’t ask for opinions (“What’s your management style?”). Ask for stories with facts. Use questions that force the candidate to reveal what they did and what happened next. Push gently but firmly for specifics. Here are some examples:

• Resilience: “Tell me about a time your team missed its target by a wide margin. Walk me through the next four weeks. What you did, how you communicated, and the results by week four.”
  
• Accountability: “Describe a decision you made that hurt short‑term results but improved long‑term performance. What changed because of it?”
  
• Influence: “Give an example of a rep who was underperforming. What did you do over 60 days? What metrics moved, and by how much?”
  
• Adaptability: “Tell me about a time when your main channel stopped working. What did you try, in what order, and what was the outcome?”
  
• Planning and Organizing: “Show me a weekly pipeline review agenda you’ve used. How do you keep it consistent? What metrics were on the dashboard?”
  
• Culture: “Describe a hard conversation you initiated to protect standards. Why did it matter, and what happened afterward?”
  

When candidates answer, listen for BAR – Background, Action, Result. 

If you hear only background (“The market was tough”) or only action (“We worked harder”) without measurable results (“Close rate rose from 14% to 21% in six weeks”), keep probing to get the entire story.. The right manager connects actions to outcomes.

Use Multiple Interviewers and a Simple Scorecard

Interviewing improves when it’s shared. Put two or three interviewers on each candidate and give them a short scorecard with the six attributes plus role‑specific competencies (for example, enterprise deal coaching or outbound motion design). 

Use a 1–5 scale and force people to write one sentence of evidence for each score. 

Evidence beats vibes.

Add a Practical Exercise

Talking is easy; doing is harder. Give finalists a short assignment that mirrors the real job. Two good options:

1. Pipeline triage. Hand over a simplified pipeline (you can create a small spreadsheet with fake companies, stages, amounts, and ages). Ask the candidate to prepare a 20‑minute review: what’s healthy, what’s at risk, what actions they’d drive this week, and how they’d keep it healthy going forward.
   
2. Coaching plan. Describe two fictional reps: one with lots of meetings but low close rate, another with few meetings but high close rate. Ask for a 60‑day coaching plan for each – what they’d do, when, and how success would be measured.
   

You’re not looking for clever slides. You’re looking for clear thinking, simple systems, and practical next steps.

After the Hire: Set Them Up to Win

Even a great hire will struggle if the environment is chaotic. Give your new manager structure in the first 90 days so they can build momentum fast without stepping on landmines.

You do not need a complex dashboard to steer sales. A handful of clean measures tells the story. 

Pipeline coverage shows whether there is enough qualified opportunity to hit target; as a starting point, aim for roughly three times your goal for the length of your sales cycle (for example, if you need $100,000 to close next month and the cycle is sixty days, you want about $300,000 in qualified pipeline now). 

Meeting flow tracks the number of first meetings each rep books each week; if first meetings are light, results will arrive late. 

Win rate reveals how well qualified opportunities convert to closed‑won and is often where good coaching shows up first. 

Cycle time measures the days from first meeting to close and tends to fall as systems improve. 

Forecast accuracy compares what you said would happen at the beginning of the month to what actually happened; as the manager installs rhythm and better stage hygiene, this number tightens. 

Use these few metrics to guide coaching and to spot where the process is breaking. Celebrate small, steady improvements so the team sees what works.

Red Flags to Watch For

Watch for patterns that point to future headaches. Blame without data is the first: if every story credits failure to marketing, product, or “the market,” you may be hearing excuses instead of leadership. 

Vague answers are another warning sign; managers who can’t recall numbers, time frames, or specific actions may not be driving outcomes. 

Be cautious when a candidate celebrates heroics over systems, talking about late nights and “hustle” but not about the rhythms that make the average rep better. 

Finally, beware of logo chasing; a famous past employer matters less than what the person actually built, improved, and measured.

A Simple Hiring Checklist (Use This Before You Decide)

Before you make an offer, confirm that the basics are in place. 

You should have a one‑page role blueprint that spells out the mission, scope, team, outcomes, and rhythms. At least two interviewers should have scored the candidate against the six core attributes with written evidence for each rating. 

A practical exercise such as pipeline triage or a 60‑day coaching plan should have been completed and discussed live. References should have been checked using attribute‑based questions rather than generic confirmations. 

A 90‑day success plan should be drafted, shared with the candidate, and agreed in principle. 

Finally, the compensation plan should be simple and aligned with team results.

If you can’t answer yes to these points, slow down; a careful hire is cheaper than a fast replacement. A careful hire is cheaper than a fast replacement.

What “Good” Looks Like in Practice

Picture this. You hire a manager who is steady, coachable, and clear. 

In week two they clean the pipeline and set a weekly review. 

In week three they run short, focused one‑on‑ones. 

By the end of month one, meetings per rep are up because the team is spending time in the right places. 

By the end of month two, win rates tick upward as discovery improves. 

By the end of month three, the forecast is within striking distance of reality, and you’re no longer surprised on the last day of the month.

None of this is magic. 

It’s the compounding effect of resilience, accountability, influence, adaptability, simple systems, and cultural alignment. 

Small, boring habits turn into stable revenue. The manager is not a superhero; they are a multiplier who makes the average rep better and the process cleaner.

The Cost of Discounting

Discounting is a common yet costly practice. Each price concession erodes gross margins, often more than anticipated. For example, a 10% discount on a service quoted at 50% gross margin reduces gross margin dollars by 20%. Best-in-class providers mitigate this risk by:

• Setting Strict Policies: Disallowing unauthorized discounts and tying sales commissions to gross margin thresholds. By creating clear rules, organizations ensure that discounts align with strategic goals.
• Starting High: Quoting higher initial prices to allow room for limited, strategic concessions. This strategy positions discounts as exceptions rather than expectations.
• Educating Teams: Helping sales teams understand the financial impact of discounts. Detailed training sessions and financial modeling exercises can illustrate how small discounts significantly affect profitability.

Enhancing Scope Control

Poor scope management is a silent profit killer. Projects that exceed their original scope often result in unbilled hours and strained customer relationships. To regain control:

• Define Clear Scopes: Ensure all projects have detailed, accurate scopes approved by knowledgeable managers. A thorough scoping process minimizes misunderstandings and sets clear expectations for both the team and the client.
• Enforce Change Orders: Charge for any additional work beyond the agreed scope. Documenting changes formally ensures accountability and profitability.
• Conduct Post-Mortems: Regularly review project outcomes to refine future scoping processes. Post-project evaluations provide valuable insights into what went well and where adjustments are needed.

Time Tracking: The Cornerstone of Efficiency

Accurate time tracking is essential for understanding costs and improving billing accuracy. Top-performing teams adhere to strict time-entry policies, requiring:

• Daily Entries: Engineers record all hours worked by the end of each day. Prompt entries reduce errors and enhance billing accuracy.
• Detailed Descriptions: Entries must be useful to finance teams, managers, and customers alike. Clear and comprehensive descriptions reduce disputes and build trust.
• Consistent Coding: Proper categorization ensures accurate cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) tracking. Standardized codes simplify analysis and enable better decision-making.

Leveraging Tiered Response Times

Introducing a priority-based billing structure for emergency responses incentivizes customers to use services more judiciously. For instance:

• Standard Priority: Routine issues billed at standard rates.
• High Priority: Urgent issues incur a premium charge.

This approach not only boosts revenue but also reduces operational chaos by aligning customer expectations with service realities. A tiered system helps customers assess the urgency of their requests, leading to more efficient resource allocation.

Building a Culture of Accountability

Operational discipline requires a culture where accountability is valued and rewarded. This involves:

• Empowering Leaders: Managers must lead by example, enforcing policies and celebrating successes.
• Recognizing Excellence: Reward teams for adhering to best practices and achieving operational goals.
• Continuous Improvement: Regularly review processes and solicit feedback from staff to identify areas for refinement.

Operational discipline is the multiplier that transforms price increases into sustainable profitability. By minimizing discounting, managing scope, and enforcing accurate time tracking, businesses can optimize their margins while maintaining high service standards. 

These practices, combined with strategic pricing, pave the way for enduring success in competitive markets. 

When operational excellence becomes part of the company’s DNA, it not only drives financial performance but also enhances customer satisfaction and employee engagement. The journey to profitability is not a one-time effort but a continuous commitment to improvement and value delivery.

Why does this happen?

1. They are focused on revenue, not profit
2. They do the high-risk/high-cost things first
3. They have unrealistic expectations
4. Lack of preparation and follow-through

In the following article, we will explore each of these so that you can avoid this situation in your business.

Revenue versus profit.  While it is true that increasing revenues can increase profit it is by no means a guarantee.  In fact, most MSP’s that try to fix their profit problems by growing revenues end up exaggerating their profit problems.  Why?  Because generating leads, hiring salespeople and acquiring new clients is expensive and unpredictable and doing it well is hard even when you are good at it.  Even if new clients are acquired, the cost is typically so great that the ROI is unacceptable.  Our mantra, and the wisdom of the ages, indicates that profitability should be fixed first.  

High-Risk/High-Cost vs Low-Risk/Low Cost.  Creating an effective lead generation and sales system in an MSP is costly and unpredictable and most efforts fail.  So what is low risk and low cost?  

• Increasing prices 
• Improving pricing structure 
• Expanding your share of the IT wallet within your clients, 
• Eliminating bad clients that suck time, energy and resources from your organization 
• Improving your sales process so you land more of the leads you are already getting.  

While all of these require some work and bring their own challenges, they are not expensive and are guaranteed to work if you copy those that do it well.  

How much would a 2% price increase add to your bottom line?  The typical $4,000,000 MSP could increase its profit by over 50% if they could achieve 5-7% growth via these methods.  And, that compounds forward because you build these solutions into everything you do!

Unrealistic Expectations.  

Our high retention rates as an industry are part of what makes this business very attractive to us and potential buyers.  However, that works against us as we look to grow because only 5-7% of companies are actively looking for a new MSP.  Even those prospective customers that are poorly served are reluctant to change because of the pain of doing so.  

Why should we expect to be able to grow sales just because we make some noise in the market?  

Do you have a value that is so compelling that it will push people to change?  

Are you that much better than the competition that you should expect a higher-than-average win rate?  You may enjoy a 50% win rate on the referrals that come to you now but, when you start to create leads from other sources, that rate will typically drop to 10-15%.

Can you ever win at this game?  Yes!  But the companies you see who are doing it well did not get there overnight nor without effort.  Which brings us to the last point…

Lack of Preparation.  When it is time to grow, you must be very deliberate and thorough in your approach.  Each preparatory step is critical and includes some or all of these:

• Identify your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) by industry, application or solution, size, attitude towards tech, etc.
• Create a good, clean list of the 500-1000 companies that fit your ICP and the key contacts that you want to target. 
• Carefully craft your value proposition and unique selling proposition and manifesting those in your web site, Linkedin profile, sales presentations and other marketing assets.
• Develop a content marketing system to establish your firm and principles as thought leaders for topics relevant to your target audience.
• Get out in the marketplace to speak to and connect with your ICP executives at their associations and organizations where they gather.  This will produce high quality leads!
• Hire/Designate the right team members to execute the sales and marketing plan and set up the right accountability and compensation systems to ensure results.

Does this seem a little overwhelming?  It can be if you attempt to do too much too fast or do things in the wrong order.

What should you do?  Go back and read about Revenue vs Profit and lets focus on profit first!  We will do the easy (er) things first and get your profits up nicely.  This will help you to build up a little “war chest” for when you are ready to make some investments in growth and, most importantly, allow you to be patient and methodical and move at a pace that you can handle!