In a world obsessed with frameworks and five-year forecasts, I’ve watched as smart founders rework their strategy decks while their teams quietly lose steam. Vision isn’t the problem. Urgency is.
Strategy alone doesn’t move the needle. Execution does. And not just any execution, but fast, focused, relentless execution.
What’s kept my hiring platform, Howdy.com, afloat wasn’t the brilliance of our plans. It was the speed, consistency, and laser focus with which we executed them.
Why speed beats smarts
I like to joke that an MBA can create a really good spreadsheet that shows your company is making a bunch of money, but that spreadsheet can’t do the work for you.
Want to find product-market fit? Talk to 100 customers. Then talk to 100 more. Want to scale revenue? Make 20 discovery calls a day, not 20 a month. Do that, and you’re suddenly playing a very different game.
And yet, so many founders stop too soon and blame their strategy. The truth is, they simply didn’t do enough. They didn’t ask if they’ve had enough at-bats to test their plan.
The beheaded chicken strategy
In 2022, my company was severely impacted when the economy tanked, with layoffs everywhere. Progress stalled. Energy cratered. Strategy didn’t matter. We were trying to keep our heads above water as we’d lost $8 million in several weeks—half our business at the time.
We were forced to get scrappy. We leaned into something we jokingly called our “beheaded chicken strategy:” a frenzy of action. Email everyone. Call everyone. Post on LinkedIn. Send DM after DM.
And the wild part? Within weeks, opportunities came out of the blue. Old opportunities resurfaced. New deals landed. Momentum returned. All because of the law of motion—output begets input.
The beheaded chicken strategy continues to work for us. Every. Single. Time. Whenever there’s a downturn, it’s my go-to response.
Drive urgency in a remote world
How do you drive intensity when your team’s on Zoom across five time zones? For us, the answer is data, clear communication, and energy.
For sales, we track everything: the number of contacts made, opportunities opened, placements created, time-to-response, time-to-deployment. We know what “good” looks like. If the opportunity numbers dips below that, alarms go off. If it surges beyond, we celebrate.
It’s not just about dashboards—it’s about turning those numbers into meaning.
When I tell the product team we haven’t deployed anything in 7 weeks, I don’t say, “That’s a long time. I’m not happy.” I say, “That’s $100,000 in salary spent with no output.” It’s not emotional or judgmental. It’s just real.
And people get it. Because they’re not working in a vacuum. They see the impact. They see what matters.
Leadership means feeling the pulse
As a leader, I stay close to the action. If I’m feeling burnt out, chances are my team is too. If I’m feeling hopeful because I’m seeing early signs of progress, I make sure they feel that hope too.
When we were in survival mode, everyone was exhausted. I started noticing early positive signs. So I said, “Let me show you what I’m seeing. The numbers say we’re turning a corner even if the results aren’t here yet.”
That energy shift matters. Sometimes, people just need to believe again. And to know they can trust and believe me, because when things are bad, I don’t sugarcoat. I tell them things are bad and will be rough for a while.
People don’t always need to be inspired. They want to feel confident in their leadership team that they will always give them the real, raw reality.
Execution doesn’t have to lead to burnout
Intensity doesn’t have to mean grinding your team into dust. It means knowing when to hit the gas and when to hand out bonuses. It means understanding that if your sales team just hit a stretch goal for the first time, now is notthe time to raise the bar again. Celebrate. Cement the win. Build trust.
I’ve seen leaders sabotage momentum by continually shifting the goalposts whenever the team succeeds. That’s demoralizing. My approach is simple: Targets only rise when resources increase. If we hire more, spend more, or grow capacity, we’ll raise expectations. Otherwise, we stay the course.
The power of radical ownership
The founders who win aren’t just sharp; they take radical ownership. Not in a performative, hustle-culture kind of way. They take responsibility for everything: the good hires and the bad ones, the successes and the screw-ups.
If a sales hire flopped, what in your process failed to spot the red flags? If a product feature flopped, why didn’t you get more user feedback earlier?
Owning the outcomes forces you to learn, and learning fast is the only sustainable edge.
Bootstrapping: The ultimate intensity teacher
In my early founder days, I had $400 in the bank and was 8 months pregnant. When you’re where I was, you will care deeply about whether your team is executing.
Every dollar flowing into the company was mine or came from revenue. So if I was paying someone to do a job, it needed to get done. I didn’t have the luxury of wasted time or the fuzzy lack of accountability that comes with seed funding. My bootstrapping experience shaped how I lead.
Even today, I ask myself: Was I clear? Did I set this person up to succeed? What would make me not angry about this result? That clarity lets me course correct with compassion, and with speed.
Crank things up to 11
There’s no magic framework. No silver bullet. The founders who win are the ones who out-execute their competition.
So if you’re sitting on a plan that looks good on paper but hasn’t delivered results, ask yourself: Have I done enough? Have I gone fast enough? Chances are, the answer isn’t “change the strategy,” it’s “turn up the intensity.”
This article originally appeared on Inc.com