Navigating Turbulent Times with Operational Playbooks

A CEO I worked with once told me, "we just need another $6 million — let's double down and try harder." On Accounting Prose with Enzo O'Hara Garza, I used that line to explain why annual planning fails: a goal without a plan is a wish. That $6 million actually meant ten more salespeople, a hiring and ramp timeline, and a very real dip in productivity before any of it showed up as revenue — and none of that gets decided by trying harder.

We talked through the rule of 40 — growth percentage plus profitability percentage — as the real health check for a private equity-backed business, especially in a volatile market where growth alone isn't always available to you. I also walked through the weekly flash report I run with every team: a committed number, a best-case number, and a forecast in between, because if I tell my board a million and deliver three, that's real money they could have spent on hiring sooner, and if I promise three and deliver one, that's a much worse conversation.

We got into the Peter Principle too — the tendency to promote a great individual seller into management and expect the same instincts to transfer, when the job is actually almost the opposite: instead of taking every deal yourself, you're teaching other people to run the plays and building the systems that let you see across the whole team.

Whether it's private equity metrics or the process of scaling a business through a J-curve, the throughline is the same: bad news doesn't get better with age, so you're better off surfacing it in June than in November.