We have five years before our target exit but our leadership team is still bogged down in client delivery. What is the single biggest operational change we must make right now to shift our focus from daily survival to enterprise value?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Five years sounds like a long runway, but it disappears quickly if you do not shift your focus immediately. The single most important operational change you must make is to apply the Pareto principle to your leadership team tasks. You need to identify the one thing that drives the majority of your company enterprise value and ruthlessly eliminate or delegate everything else. This starts with restructuring your Accountability Chart. Look closely at who is occupying the seats responsible for client delivery. If your senior leaders are still hands on in day to day execution, you have a structural bottleneck. You must delegate and elevate these leaders out of the tactical weeds so they can focus on building scalable systems. Use your weekly Level 10 Meeting to monitor this transition. Set quarterly Rocks that are strictly focused on documenting core processes and building operational redundancy. If your leaders spend their time firefighting, they are not building a business that a buyer wants to purchase. A buyer is looking for a self sustaining machine, not a collection of talented individuals doing manual labor. By forcing your team to step out of delivery and into system building, you create a business that is both highly profitable today and incredibly attractive to institutional buyers when your five year runway ends.