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​In my previous article, "Is your executive team executing efficiently?", I laid out the four proven business practices that bridge the gap between executive team commitment and disciplined follow-through. You've already seen how getting your team aligned around an annual plan is absolutely essential. But, as we talked about, the real drama starts when you try to move from a committed plan to disciplined execution. 

That's why I wanted to dive into the book Metronomics: One United System to Grow Up Your Team, Company, and Life by my colleague, Shannon Byrne Susko. This book is a powerful resource because it offers a proven, prescriptive system that ties together people, cash, strategy, and execution, including the business practices you need to break down those execution bottlenecks.

Let's see how the Metronomics framework reinforces the four critical practices we discussed for moving from alignment to drama-free execution:

1. Monthly Operating & Financial Forecasts
In my previous article, I stressed that a Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast is a non-negotiable tool. It forces your team to break down expected changes in volumes, revenues, costs, and cash, and track actual results against the forecast monthly. This is how you make frequent, necessary decisions to stay on track.
Metronomics reinforces this beautifully through what it calls the Cash System. It emphasizes forecasting and monitoring financial results and cash flow to manage performance effectively. It's not just about tracking; it's about validating that your annual targets are financially feasible. A feasible plan is an executable plan.

​2. Quarterly Targets & Priorities
You know that breaking your annual plan into Quarterly Targets and Priorities is the most effective way for small to mid-size companies to execute. Your financial targets come straight from your monthly forecast. The key, as we talked about, is selecting the priorities that must happen in the next 90 days, assigning accountability, and creating a plan to make it happen.

Think of it as a shared platform. It means no hiding, no confusion, and no wasted time finding numbers. This extreme transparency is what holds the whole system together and is the ultimate support for accountability. When everyone can see what’s on track and what’s stuck, it forces proactive problem-solving.

​While our focus here is specifically on execution, Metronomics is a more complete operating system for growth. It goes deeper into elements that often precede or enhance the execution phase:

Cohesive and Human Systems: Metronomics adds depth and breadth around building trust, managing conflict, fostering commitment and accountability across an executive team (drawing on Patrick Lencioni's work), and getting the right A-Players in the right seats (drawing on Brad Smart's Topgrading).

Clarity and Strategy: The Metronomics system helps you go beyond the 'Annual Plan' column of the One Page Strategic Plan to solidify the first three columns: your Desired Culture, Strategy, and Longer-Term Goals. Articulating these "strategy fundamentals", including creating a unique market position (drawing on Michael Porter's work) is a non-negotiable foundation.

The Full Team Cascade: My article briefly mentioned that over time, teams need to cascade these practices down into their departments. Metronomics provides the structure for this organizational maturity, ensuring not just the executive team, but all teams, are operating with forecasts, quarterly plans, and a disciplined meeting rhythm. This is how you strengthen execution company-wide.

For CEOs, Metronomics provides a complete, connected framework. If you've got executive team alignment, you’ll find in this book the tools that offer the discipline and accountability to drive the results and growth you’re aiming for.

Does getting your executive team executing efficiently seem impossible? It totally is. We see it all the time with companies we work with. I’ll share the story of one of those clients in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip. 

How can you and your executive team move from alignment around a plan to executing without drama?

In my recent articles,”Is Your Executive Team Aligned?”, “The Alignment Playbook: Scaling Up”, ”How one CEO doubled business with aligned execs”, and “Your One Page Strategic Plan for Aligned Growth” I discussed how to get an executive team on the same page and going in the same direction, so they can help the CEO lead the company to grow profitably, predictably and sustainably.

While the first three columns of an executive team’s One Page Strategic Plan captures their desired culture, their strategy and longer term goals, the annual plan column is what they will tangibly execute to make it happen.

Being aligned around an annual plan is one thing. Executing on it with discipline and accountability is another.

Don’t get me wrong. An aligned executive team that is committed to their annual plan is a great starting point. And it’s a critical one for supporting accountability. Because accountability starts with commitment.

But the discipline to follow through on those accountabilities is where things often break down.

Thankfully, there’s a handful of proven business practices to resolve this challenge once and for all:

1. A Monthly Operating and Financial Forecast
2. Quarterly Targets and Priorities
3. An Executive Team Meeting Rhythm
4. A Results Tracking System

Let’s discuss them one by one.

4. A Results Tracking System

For any of this to work, results and progress need to be captured, written down, and accessible by everyone on the executive team, and in a consistent format so that everyone quickly and easily knows what to enter and what it all means.

The best way to do this is with a proven results tracking system.

Such a system is where your quarterly plan will be captured. This includes your targets for each company metric, your quarterly company priorities, who’s accountable for each, who’s involved and the action plans.

A results tracking system also captures the actual results for each company metric as well as actual progress on each quarterly company priority.

Seasoned business growth executive team coaches use such systems with their clients. These provide a shared platform to efficiently capture and track results on quarterly plans, supporting the executive team to more easily stay on top of things during and between their daily huddles, weekly meetings, monthly check-ins and quarterly planning.

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We find that executive teams who are new to these kinds of execution practices start with company-level forecasts, quarterly plans and meeting rhythms. Then over time, executive team members develop the capability to forecast, plan and meet with each of their teams. At that point, we encourage them to share and report on their department plans as an executive team so they are all aware of what they’re aiming to achieve in each area and can keep those plans aligned. This is when an executive team, if it functions in a healthy way, can really strengthen execution throughout the company, driving results and progress.

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These aren't just my ideas. They're discussed in the top-selling book Metronomics, by my colleague Shannon Byrne Susko. I'll cover that in the next 5 Minute Growth Tip.

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In the 13 years I’ve been an independent business coach and advisor, I’ve seen many companies that grow to a certain point and, despite all their best efforts, can’t seem to grow beyond that.

I’ve also seen companies that do continue to grow but become less and less profitable, and more and more stressful for the CEO.

Turns out this isn’t just my experience.  It’s a common pattern.

Growth isn’t common

Out of the roughly 28 million firms in the US, only about 1.1 million have surpassed a million in revenue. Only 112,000 have gotten past $10 million. And only 17000 have grown beyond $50 million.

The reason is that companies need to operate differently as they grow. Companies that don’t adapt how they operate will tend to grow to the limits of that way of operating. 

CEOs who have had success getting to a certain point often tend to repeat what they know, thinking “well, it got us here.” But, as the title of a book by Marshall Goldsmith goes, “what got us here won’t get us there”.
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​The systems to manage a growing company
The changes needed for a growing company are driven by the added complexity that comes with having more employees.

Think simply of going from having 2 employees to 3 employees. This makes the number of relationships between individuals increase from 3 to 6. Add one more employee, and there are now 10 relationships. This complexity continues exponentially as the company grows from 10 to 25 to 50, 100 and 200 employees.

​To predictably achieve results within this growing complexity, a certain level of order is needed.

The shift needed is for the CEO to work WITH top level leaders as a team…a leadership team (or management team, executive team, or whatever you want to call it).
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It’s the CEO’s job to assemble that leadership team, and build a plan together that gets them all going in the same direction, moving in lockstep, making the needed changes and improvements to enable the company to grow AND thrive.

​An evolving leadership team and strategy

The challenge of having an effective leadership team and strategy continues through the life of the company. New leaders come and go. Markets evolve. Systems need to change. And so the capabilities of the leaders and the team, and the strategy and plan, need to evolve as well.

The crucial underlying challenge to growing a thriving company is to build, maintain and continuously improve a great leadership team that is highly capable, thinks strategically, is aligned around a clear strategy and plan, executing and leading effectively and efficiently, strengthening collaboration and engagement across the company. Essentially, working as one unit to move the company forward, because it’s too much for the CEO to do it alone, at least not effectively and sustainably.

In the articles ahead, I’ll cover in detail how to make all this happen.

And so what is the CEO's role in all this? And do you have what it takes?

We'll cover that in our next 5 Minute Growth Tip article.