Lesson 1 · Overview
None of these four questions are difficult. Almost no chief executive can answer them without opening a spreadsheet, and that is not a personal failure.
5 minutes · No tool · Artifact: your baseline score
Not this year’s budget. The level of earnings this business has to reach by the date it matters.
Expressed as the yearly rate of improvement required, not as a total.
What share of your customers produce all of it, and what the rest cost you.
Whether spending on growth right now would compound or amplify a loss. Four numbers. Most leadership teams cannot produce any of them inside an hour.
Here is what usually happened. You were handed a budget, a headcount plan, and a set of initiatives someone else drafted. What you were not handed was the number the whole thing was built to reach, or the arithmetic behind it.
That is how most handoffs work. The number lives in a model somebody built before you arrived, and nobody thought to walk you through it because they assumed you had seen it. You had not. Neither had your predecessor.
So if you cannot answer the four questions, that is a reporting failure upstream of you, not a competence problem in you. It is also entirely fixable in about ninety minutes, which is what the rest of this course is.
Day One is not the day you took the job. It is the day you decide to fix the business.
A chief executive four years in, running hard, hitting most of his budget, can still be sitting at Day Zero — the day before that decision. Most are. The clock that matters started when you stopped accepting the business as handed to you, and for a lot of people that clock has not started yet.
This is not a motivational point. It is a scheduling one. If your remaining time is shorter than you think and the work has not started, the order of what you do next matters far more than how hard you do it.
It will not fix anything. It will tell you where you are, in four numbers, with your own figures. That is worth more than it sounds, because every wasted year I have watched a leadership team spend started with a gap nobody had sized.
There is no pitch in the next eight lessons. There is a decision in lesson ten, and you will have earned enough information by then to make it yourself.
Answer these three honestly. Give yourself one point for each yes. Write the score down — lesson ten asks for it, and the change between then and now is part of the result.
Or was it handed to you and never defended, questioned, or renegotiated?
Or does everything on the list still look important?
Or are you the only person carrying it?
A score of 3 is rare and usually means the business already has a working operating rhythm. A score of 0 is the most common answer I get in a room of fifty chief executives, and the people who score it are running large, respected companies.
Next — lesson 2
