ShannonSusko Susko

Chapter 1

Alex drove into the office that Monday morning with a heaviness in his gut, dreading the day ahead of him. He hadn’t slept much over the weekend. He also hadn’t spent much time with his wife, Lisa, and their two daughters. No, he’d been at the office. As usual.

It wasn’t that his SaaS company, OpenDoor, wasn’t doing well. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the 10 years since 48-year-old Alex had founded OpenDoor, he and his small leadership team had grown from a bootstrapped bank balance to $10 million in annual revenue and $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. This past year, they’d landed a huge Fortune 500 client, and the resulting attention had required hiring a dedicated sales team for the first time. Now, with a 5-member leadership team and steady growth, the company finally started to feel less like a 10-year-old startup, and more like the big time.

The only problem? Alex and his leadership team were exhausted. In the first 3 years of the business, Alex had been full of energy, goals, and endless ideas. Now, he felt ground down into dust. He was tired. He was burned out. He still had big goals, but he could not see a path forward to achieve them.

Worse, he felt like his leadership team wasn’t on board with his vision. They didn’t seem to be aligned around a clear plan or direction forward. They were constantly coming up with great ideas, but those ideas would fizzle. Execution just wasn’t happening. There was zero momentum. It felt like they were just continuously driving around the block.

A friend at a mastermind group had recently asked him about his company’s strategy for the year. “Strategy?” Alex had laughed. “We can barely see two feet in front of us. I wish we had time to think about strategy. We’re just trying to keep our heads above water.”

Pulling into the parking lot, Alex looked around; there were no other cars there. He was the first one in—and he’d been the last one out the previous night.

This isn’t what I dreamed about when I started a company, and now we are 10 years old.

At his desk in his office, he flipped on his laptop. His inbox immediately dinged. The red badge seemed to laugh at him—he’d just hit inbox zero less than 12 hours ago, and yet he was already back up to double digits! He sighed and got to work.

It was only about 20 minutes before his CMO, Chris, popped his head through the office door with a light knock. “Hey, you’re here early!”

“Yeah. And I was here until six last night—on a Sunday, no less,” Alex grumbled.

Chris came into the office and sat in front of Alex’s desk. “I feel the same way—I was here past 8 p.m. most nights last week. It’s like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

Alex paused his inbox grooming and sat back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Chris. “Answer me this. If you could identify our biggest problem as a company, what would it be?”

Chris frowned, thinking. After a moment, he replied. “Honestly, our biggest obstacle is that we don’t have time to plan into the future. We can’t see where we’re going. We have no strategy. We are all just reacting, putting out fires every day.”

Alex nodded. “Agreed.”

“I’m in marketing. I see what our competitors are doing. I hate to admit it, but they’re beating us to market with new features, sometimes at double speed.

This wasn’t news to Alex. In fact, it was the deepest fear nagging at his gut: they were falling behind in the market. They couldn’t keep up—because they couldn’t seem to get anything done.

At noon, Alex and his leadership team held their weekly sync meeting. It was the first one in a couple of weeks, actually; they skipped these meetings about half the time because everyone was so busy.

Usually, Alex led the agenda. But today, he asked his COO, Jen, to lead the team through the discussion topics. He watched.

Watched in growing disappointment as his leadership team reinforced his fears about the company’s direction.

Three of them—Chris, the CMO, Jen, the COO, and Andrew, the VP of Sales—had all the traits he knew would keep moving the company forward. They were results-focused. Even if they didn’t always work well as a team, they were optimistic, highly intelligent, and low-ego.

But the other two members of the leadership team—Daniel, the CTO, and Alison, the CFO—were the opposite. They shot down ideas pessimistically and interrupted the others. They never seemed to bring new ideas to the table. Now that he was thinking about it, Alex realized that when the leadership team skipped their weekly sync, it was usually because either Daniel or Alison had requested it. They constantly claimed to be “underwater.” Aren’t we all? Alex thought.

A nagging feeling was starting to take up residence in his gut. Daniel and Alison had been with OpenDoor from the beginning, and he felt a tremendous amount of loyalty to them. But he was seeing now that they didn’t belong on the leadership team anymore. They weren’t going to be able to take the company past $10 million. Worse, they were holding everyone else back. He could feel the frustration in the room as though it was hot, stuffy air.

After the meeting, which concluded with a weak rundown of that week’s “action plan”—which Alex knew would only come about halfway to fruition or be forgotten by their next meeting—he excused himself and took a walk outside in the sunshine.

He thought back to that past Saturday night at home. He’d dragged himself home from the office just in time to shovel down some dinner before what was supposed to be their family movie night, something his kids looked forward to more than anything. He’d fallen asleep 15 minutes into the flick.

After his wife, Lisa, had put the kids to bed, she’d jostled him awake on the couch. “Come up to bed.”

“Sorry,” he’d told her. “I’m sorry I fell asleep. I’m so tired.”

“Honey, I know work is busy, but this isn’t sustainable. We hardly ever see you. At least when you worked for someone else instead of yourself, we got to have time with you.”

Now, as he strolled around the busy street block, his stomach starting to rumble for lunch, Alex knew Lisa was right. In becoming a CEO, he’d been trying to build the life he’d always dreamed of. But despite his demonstrated success, that life was still out of reach.

Something big was missing in his company. And he had no more hours to give to figure out what.

As much as he hated to admit it, he was starting to wonder if all this was worth it. He was starting to think about giving up.

That afternoon, he went along to his YPO monthly forum. The forums always energized him and gave him great new ideas. He was feeling particularly desperate, and in a shift in pace—he was traditionally a listener, not a sharer—he opened up to his forum mates about his struggles with OpenDoor.

“I just feel like I can’t get any traction, no matter what I do,” he said. He noticed a dozen faces in the room nodding. “I’m so frustrated. The company is making money. We’ve got a huge client list. I should be working on scaling our success. But I can’t get out from under the daily grind. I’m exhausted.”

The amount of commiseration that immediately surrounded him took him aback. Apparently, many—no, most—of his cohort had been feeling the same pain in their own companies.

“Have you read Scale Smooth?” another CEO recommended. “They have a great system for scaling execution in that book.”

“Yeah, and also The Ego-Free Team. That’s a great one.”

“I loved that one. Lost Leaders is amazing too. It really shifted things for me.”

Alex resisted the impulse to take a huge, dejected sigh.

He’d read all those books. And then some. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a book out there he hadn’t read. He listened to audiobooks obsessively while driving, sneaking in his daily run (okay, maybe he only squeezed it in 3 mornings a week), walking the family dog, and any other spare moment he could find. His nightstand was stacked five books high.

It wasn’t that the books didn’t give him good ideas. They were all great. But for some reason, as many times as he’d tried to bring those ideas into the business, they’d never caught on. He couldn’t seem to make anything stick.

The last thing he needed was another book recommendation.

At home that evening, his inbox dinged. He clicked into it; it was an email from a YPO forum mate, Mark, who had been at the afternoon’s meeting.

Hey, Alex! I figure you’ve already read all those books people spoke about. I was right where you are about 6 months ago. I got introduced to a business team coach who knows this great system. Ever since things are moving in the right direction. I finally feel like I have my head above water. I wish I’d gotten a business team coach 5 years ago, honestly—would have wasted a lot less time! My coach’s name is Lee, and she coaches this system called “Metronomics.” Do you know it? Do you want to meet her? I can’t recommend her highly enough.

Alex read over the email two more times. Then he clicked Reply.

Hey, Mark! You know what? Yes. Please. Introduce me. I’ve tried everything else. I’m willing to try anything at this point.

Two days later, Alex had an appointment on the calendar with Lee. It was time to go in a new direction.

METRONOMICS

Every great company is founded upon a CEO+Leadership team that wants to achieve their goals with the least amount of effort, time, and investment. This is not to say that CEOs and their leadership teams are lazy or don’t want to put the effort in. Quite the contrary. They are gritty, committed, ready, and willing to achieve their goals, and they’re eager to gain the greatest efficiency, ease, speed, and confidence to do it.

So many business leaders, including myself, start out this way, excited by the vision of figuring out how to do it. And so many—again, including me— slowly but surely get disillusioned and conclude the opposite: that there just isn’t an easy way.

What I was looking for was a structured process that would be successful in growing up our company with ease, speed, and confidence, with great returns to shareholders.

At the time, I thought this would be easy to find. There had been so many great CEOs and leaders who built such incredible companies with huge success. Surely they had written their systems down for others to learn and leverage?

No was the answer. Hence Metronomics.

Metronomics is the system we have repeatedly utilized with great success, providing exponential returns to shareholders and team members alike. It’s the system I spent years searching for when I became a CEO.

I’m sharing it so you can stop looking and leverage a system that will meet you where you are today, activate the growth you are in search of—and make sure it lasts.

Metronomics is for the whole company. The whole team. It’s a systematized approach that combines the Compound Growth System—the repeatable, structured system that your whole team yearns for—with a known, transparent, accountable, and aligned way for the team to play on the “field” together under the guidance of a CEO+Leadership team coach, an expert at the system who ensures that the company and team grow with the momentum to reach their goals.

At the heart of Metronomics is a CEO+Leadership team that wants to win. They want to achieve their goals and are willing to learn new ways to make it easier for everyone to win. Metronomics is setup for the CEO, leadership, and the whole company. It is a regimen that meets the team where they are today and progressively promotes the best practices of growing a company until they become habits that will endure through the lifetime of the business.

I use the word regimen in the context of a prescribed, methodical course of action to restore or promote positive health—in this case, the positive health of both your business and your life to ensure you can achieve whatever goals you set for yourself. By following the Metronomics regimen over time— evolving in small steps day by day, week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter, year by year—the solidity of your team will be unstoppable.

I’ll explain the steps you and your team can take to implement this regimen easily into your company so that it becomes second nature. The best outcome is that the regimen gets forgotten, and the focus is solely on working on your business for the very best outcome.

Metronomics is about outcomes, and its strength is founded upon 3 key components based on what I learned by being on teams and from studying the greatest teams in business and in sports.

GREAT TEAMS

The greatest teams have 3 things in common:

1. A structured, repeatable process that all team members follow.

2. Clarity of expectations of each other and a willingness to work hard to develop and maintain high cohesiveness to achieve their team goal together.

3. A coach who is an expert at the repeatable process and who ensures the team has clarity of role and position while keeping it highly cohesive and focused on the team result.

High-performing teams are cohesive, meaning that they have a shared bond to achieve the same outcome. The higher a team’s cohesiveness, the higher the self-esteem of its members. Higher self-esteem brings increased morale, leading to increased performance across the whole team, and so on— time and time again.

A high level of cohesiveness drives a team’s collaboration to a level of excellence through a willingness to participate together. Highly cohesive teams have a deep sense of trust; they share a strong sense of team character and have confidence in their team abilities. They also have a great sense of self-accountability, behavioral rules, and an understanding of decision-making within the team context.

Highly cohesive teams are not the result of luck. To build one requires the team to develop emotional competence together as a group over time.

If you’re thinking, “So all I have to do is create a cohesive team to win,” not so fast. Cohesiveness is critical to a great outcome, sure, but it will not guarantee success without a commitment to the team’s organizational goals.

It’s essential that the team’s organizational goals are clear and understood, and the best practice is to develop these goals with the whole team. The metrics—the measurable performance indicators—must be clear, known, and visible. This allows team members to evaluate their own performance and their team’s performance in a way that is clearly visible and connected to the overall metrics of the whole organization.

The team learns together. They’re clear on their decision-making ability to achieve the goals. They’re rewarded for their success in achieving team goals. And there is an open “playing field” and culture that displays to all team members all the relevant information flowing through it.

Metronomics is founded upon the best practices. We have studied and evolved high-performing business teams for over 20 years while striving to implement a dynamic business system for growth and goal achievement. What we found is that you cannot achieve success without having both in place: a highly cohesive, culturally strong team and a clear and simple business (strategy, execution, and cash) system.

We have taken the “what” of all the greatest thought leaders and have pulled it together into one connected system that shows you “how”—“how” to balance your team (the soft edge) and your business (the hard edge).

Most CEOs I know run from the words culture, cohesiveness, and human. Instead, they focus on the business components: cash, strategy, execution. A focus on the business components—what I call the hard-edge systems—won’t make it easy to grow a company over the long term. It needs to be balanced from the beginning with attention to the soft-edge systems (Culture, Cohesiveness, Human) and the hard-edge systems (Strategy, Cash, Execution). Growing up a company is a true balancing act, and Metronomics ensures that you and your team stay in balance with the business.