The companies built for change.

If you’re an investor worried about whether parts of your portfolio will still be viable in two years because of AI, that’s a reasonable concern.

But there’s also a more basic question to ask: can the leadership team execute?

Nobody knows exactly how AI will affect every market. Leadership teams will need to adapt as things change. The companies best placed to do that will be the ones that already know how to set a direction, choose a small number of priorities, get important work finished, and adjust when the evidence changes.

That comes down to the company’s operating rhythm.

I was reminded of this recently while running a session with a group of GTM leaders. The session was about building an operating rhythm for execution, and I started with four statistics that framed the problem.

Only 52% of GTM teams had successfully executed their projects during the previous year. That means nearly half of their product launches, campaigns, plays, and other GTM projects either didn’t happen or weren’t executed well.

Only 37% defined GTM as aligned. That surprised me because we’ve spent years talking about sales and marketing alignment, but many SaaS and AI companies still operate through functional focus rather than as one GTM team.

Another 85% said they were drowning in too much activity data. They could see that plenty of work was happening, but they struggled to put it into context or understand whether it was producing the right outcomes.

The final statistic was the most interesting. While 82% of leaders believed their teams were aligned, roughly two-thirds of the operators beneath them said they were not.

I see this all the time during due diligence. We speak to the CEO, CRO, or CMO, and they believe the company is aligned. Then we speak to the people below them and hear several different versions of the strategy.

Nobody is necessarily right or wrong. Leadership has spent so much time discussing the strategy that it feels obvious to them. The rest of the team has received fragments of that conversation and is trying to work out what matters from the projects and requests arriving each week.

Alignment cannot be assumed because the leadership team agreed on a plan.

It has to show up in execution.

The Four Problems Behind the Execution Gap

The first problem is that objectives are often too abstract.

The board has its priorities. The chair may add another perspective. The CEO has a set of objectives, and the rest of the leadership team adds its own priorities underneath them.

What you end up with is a large pot of objectives that makes focus and accountability difficult. “Improve pipeline,” “fix the data,” and “align sales and marketing” all sound sensible, but none of them tells the team what it needs to finish.

The second problem is that too much enters the “now.”

Everything is urgent. The website needs rebuilding, the CRM needs cleaning, sales needs new collateral, marketing has campaigns to launch, and the board wants better reporting.

Because every request is reasonable, the leadership team avoids choosing between them. The company starts everything, spreads its resources across too many projects, and makes incremental progress without finishing much.

The third problem is that projects drift because there is no clear endpoint.

Data is a classic example. A company says it needs to “fix the data” as though there will be a point when the job is finished forever. There won’t be. Data is an iterative, always-on problem.

You have to break it into smaller parts, with each part solving a specific problem and having a clear start and finish date. Otherwise, the project continues for months because nobody can say what “done” means.

The final problem is the meeting cadence.

Are the company’s meetings helping it execute? Or are they simply being used to report what happened?

A meeting that removes a blocker, creates accountability, or produces a decision can improve execution. A meeting where everyone describes what they did last week normally produces more activity.

Four Questions That Expose the Problem

After discussing the execution gap, I asked the group four questions.

Can you name the three things your GTM team is trying to finish this quarter?

If you asked four or five people in the team, would they give you the same three answers?

Has any work started that does not serve a clearly stated objective?

Does somebody own a weekly scorecard meeting covering execution and project progress?

The answers were revealing.

One person described having too few resources, too many requests, data that was not aligned with the strategy, and a strategy that kept changing.

Another had recently hired a new head of sales and head of marketing. Things were improving, but he thought people beneath the leadership team would still give broad or vague answers about the company’s objectives.

Someone else believed the leadership team understood the goals, but admitted the execution of those goals was not clear across the wider team.

The final person described a company evolving so quickly that things appeared to change from one week to the next. That made it difficult to build any continuity of process.

These companies did not have an effort problem. People were busy, meetings were happening, and plenty of work was being done.

The problem was that activity and execution had become blurred.

Activity Is Not Execution

Sending emails is activity. Rebuilding a demo flow is execution.

Attending an internal meeting is activity. Fixing a handoff process that was dropping deals is execution.

Launching a campaign is activity. Creating qualified pipeline from the right accounts is execution.

Execution creates momentum, and momentum comes from getting meaningful things done.

One of the most common complaints I hear during due diligence or process reviews is that companies have too many internal meetings. That may sometimes be a standard complaint people make about any business, but it often points to a real problem.

Salespeople should not spend half their week in internal meetings when they could be speaking to customers. The same applies to marketing leaders. If they are constantly stuck in the weeds internally, they have less time to stay close to customers and the market.

The answer is not to remove every meeting. It is to make sure the meetings that remain are helping the company make progress.

If a leadership team can create consistent momentum by finishing important work, the company is already operating at a much higher level than most. It is also in a better position to respond when its market changes.

The Five Parts of a Strong Operating Rhythm

I’ve worked in businesses with a strong operating rhythm, which made it much easier to execute at the functional level.

I’ve also worked in businesses where the leadership team believed it was aligned with the board, but the execution beneath that level was poor. In those situations, I built a structure for my own function and connected it to the company’s wider process.

The framework has five parts: direction, priorities, execution cycles, cadence, and agentic support.

1. Set the Direction

At the top level, the company needs three to five objectives and a consistent framework for organizing them.

That might be OKRs, V2MOM, a value creation plan, EOS, or something the company has built itself. The exact framework matters less than having one that people understand and use.

I’ve never been a huge fan of OKRs. They can work, but there are two problems I see regularly.

The first is the way companies use stretch goals. I’ve worked in a business where the CEO was adamant that we should not hit our OKRs because, if we achieved them, they were not ambitious enough.

Leadership understood the logic. The wider team didn’t. People saw an objective they could not achieve and found it demotivating.

The second problem is timing. I regularly see companies agree on their OKRs halfway through the quarter. By the time they are communicated, only a few weeks remain before the retrospective starts and everyone begins preparing the next set.

At that point, the framework designed to improve execution has become another thing the company is failing to execute.

I personally prefer V2MOM. I worked with it for around ten years and found it more inspiring because it starts with the vision before moving into values, methods, obstacles, and measures.

The company creates a top-level V2MOM, which then cascades into departmental and team versions. You still have the measures required for accountability, but the work is connected to a clearer explanation of what the business is trying to achieve.

A value creation plan can serve a similar purpose. The company defines its strategy, ranks the initiatives that will create value, and makes clear what needs to happen.

The risk is that the company completes the exercise, creates a good-looking plan, and then does not use it. Six months later, the plan is reviewed and very little has been implemented.

For an investor, that distinction matters. The quality of the plan is one thing. The company’s ability to turn it into work is something else.

2. Organize the Work Into Now, Next, and Later

Once the direction is clear, the next step is to organize the work into now, next, and later.

“Now” contains the most important projects receiving immediate attention. “Next” contains the work that should follow them. “Later” contains valuable work that should not distract the team today.

We use this approach regularly after due diligence. A review normally produces a long list of problems and possible projects. Trying to address everything at once would create more drift, so we prioritize the work and organize it into a sequence.

The sequence is important. A company may need to fix part of its data before it can improve reporting. It may need to repair the sales handoff before it generates more leads. It may need to clarify its ideal customer profile before rebuilding outbound.

Those projects should not all begin at the same time.

I normally recommend putting no more than three priorities into each horizon.

A quick tip from completing more than fifty due diligence reports: investors appreciate simplicity of a 1-page, now, next, and later slide. The conversation always becomes more focused when we reach it because it turns a long list of findings into a clear discussion about priorities and sequence.

If limiting the work to three priorities feels impossible, another useful approach comes from 37signals. They divide work into a “Big Batch” and a “Small Batch.”

The Big Batch contains the high-priority work that must be completed. The Small Batch contains important but less critical work where there is more flexibility.

The point is the same: the leadership team has to decide which work matters most.

3. Execute in Six-Week Cycles

After setting the direction and priorities, the work needs to be placed into an execution cycle.

I have used twelve-week cycles, two-week sprints, and several models in between. The one I eventually preferred was a six-week cycle, normally divided into three shorter sprints.

Six weeks is long enough to complete something meaningful, but not so long that projects drift for an entire quarter.

The cycle begins by confirming the priorities and outputs. Execution runs through the first five weeks, with a weekly review of progress. The sixth week closes the cycle and establishes what was completed.

The most important part is to keep the team focused on outputs rather than activity.

When you introduce this way of working, people will naturally arrive at the weekly meeting with a long list of things they have done. You have to coach them back towards what they achieved, what moved forward, and what output the work created.

When I first introduced sprints to one of my teams, it took six to nine months to change that mindset properly.

At the board and leadership level, nobody wants a list of activities. They want to know what worked, what did not work, why it happened, and what the team is doing next.

If you can encourage that way of thinking throughout the company, you get better execution because people are already working in the language of outcomes.

4. Build the Cadence Around Decisions

The execution cycle then needs to be mapped into a weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence.

That can sound overly structured, but structure is important. Each meeting needs a clear purpose, the right people, a scorecard, and a defined set of decisions.

The weekly meeting should focus on progress against the current priorities. The monthly meeting should review the wider operating performance and decide what needs to be adjusted. The quarterly meeting should reconnect the work to the company’s direction and agree on the next priorities.

Do not let those meetings get pulled into whatever happens to be top of mind. A structured monthly review can easily become a forty-five-minute conversation about one deal. That deal may need a separate discussion, but it should not take over the meeting designed to manage the wider operating rhythm.

Scorecard leadership is useful here. Each leader owns a particular metric or outcome, and the weekly meeting is organised around progress against those scorecards.

One of my former CEOs gave me a simple annual requirement: produce a plan that delivered 20% growth. If I was missing the plan, we met every week until I was back on track.

The conversation was built around four questions:

• What got done?

• What worked?

• What didn’t work?

• How do we know it worked?

It was quite a harsh way to be managed. There was not much “How can I help?” in the process.

But it gave me a strong sense that I had to get things done and understand the evidence behind the result.

I later used those questions as an adjustment loop with my own team. We started with the growth plan, identified the three initiatives most likely to deliver it, built the cadence around those initiatives, and regularly assessed what needed to change.

5. Use Agents After the Structure Is Clear

The fifth part is the new one: agents.

Once the operating rhythm is working, an agent can remove some of the manual work around it. It can review Asana before the weekly meeting and explain what happened, what is behind, what is on plan, and how the work connects to the current priorities.

It can prepare the scorecard or create the first draft of a board update.

I used to spend half a Friday gathering that information before a Monday meeting. That work can now be prepared automatically.

But the human structure has to come first. Set the direction, priorities, owners, cycles, and meeting cadence. Then use agents to make the process more efficient.

Every Project Needs One Owner

Whether a project sits inside a core objective or alongside it, the same rules apply.

It should support a stated objective, sit in the appropriate now, next, or later horizon, and have a clear outcome, timeline, and owner.

Several people can contribute, but one person must be accountable.

I saw this recently with a company rebuilding its website. When I asked who was responsible for finishing it, I was told two people had split the responsibility. When I asked who was doing what, nobody could give me a clear answer.

The project was already behind.

Giving someone clear ownership is not about being harsh. It helps that person understand that they are responsible for moving the project forward and escalating anything preventing completion.

Why Operating Rhythms Fail

Operating rhythms fail when the company sets too many objectives. Five or ten immediate priorities are too many unless the work has been clearly separated into something like a Big Batch and a Small Batch.

They fail when meetings have no stated decisions connected to the objectives or scorecards.

They fail when tools are introduced before anyone has defined the process they are supposed to support.

And they fail when projects have several contributors but no accountable owner.

The result is drift.

That is one of the main reasons growing companies hit a ceiling. The operating rhythm that helped a business reach $4 million in revenue may not be strong enough to take it to $10 million or $15 million.

As the company grows, the leadership team has to become more deliberate about how it sets priorities, creates accountability, and maintains momentum.

What I Would Do as an Investor

Pick one portfolio company and ask the CEO to name the three things the GTM team is trying to finish this quarter.

Then ask the CRO, CMO, RevOps leader, and a few people beneath them the same question.

If the answers are different, you have found the execution gap.

From there, ask the leadership team to produce one now, next, and later view of the work. Every current priority should have a clear outcome, one owner, a timeline, and a scorecard measure.

Put those priorities into a six-week cycle. Use the weekly meeting to review progress and remove blockers. Use the monthly meeting to decide what needs to change.

Then keep asking the four questions: What got done? What worked? What didn’t work? How do we know?

If you’re worried about whether a portfolio company will remain viable in two years, the strategy still matters.

But the company will almost certainly need to adapt that strategy as the market changes.

A strong operating rhythm is what gives the leadership team the durability to do it.

This Week’s Tangible Prompt

Run this on a portfolio company

If you want to test a company, here is a prompt you can run against its objectives, projects, owners, metrics, and meeting cadence.

First, questions:

• What are the three things the GTM team is currently trying to finish?

• Are those outcomes clear, measurable, and connected to the company’s objectives?

• Does every current project have one accountable owner, a timeline, and a defined finish line?

• Are the weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings producing decisions or reporting activity?

Then produce:

• A Now, Next, and Later view with no more than three priorities in each horizon.

• A six-week execution cycle for the current priorities.

• A scorecard for the weekly operating meeting.

• A list of unclear objectives, missing owners, blockers, and projects that should be stopped or moved out of the “Now”.

• The questions an investor should ask the leadership team at the next board meeting.

Do not invent missing information. Flag anything that requires clarification.

Here is the portfolio company information:

[Paste the objectives, projects, owners, metrics, and meeting cadence here.]

That’s all for this week.

See you next Saturday.

Cheers,

Ed & Josh