Joshua Fraser explains why startups fail: not bad ideas, but broken execution. He presents the 4 Disciplines of Execution framework. A Harvard Business Review study found 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. Companies using this framework are 3.5 times more likely to hit their goals.
Why do great strategies fail? Not because they're bad ideas, but because nobody executes in the real world. The challenge isn't coming up with goals, it's finishing what you start. Today we're going to be diving into one of the most practical and powerful frameworks in business. The 4 disciplines of execution or 4.
Dx execution is harder than strategy. The kind of execution that's really hard is the kind that requires a change in human behavior. The trick is, can we execute that goal in the middle of a 100 mile an hour whirlwind?
It's how high growth teams actually hit their goals and how you can too. The 40x method was created by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Houling. According to of Franklin Covey, it's been used by startups, Fortune 500 companies, schools and even NASA. Why? Because it bridges the gap between strategy and day to day action. It helps teams cut through the noise, the daily whirlwind, the roller coaster, the highs and the lows, and stay laser focused on what moves the business. As Chris McChesney says, execution doesn't just happen, it must be deliberately and consistently driven. I couldn't agree with this more. You're going to see me talk about okrs and scorecards and blue sky strategies in the everyday entrepreneur and in everything we've done with data nerds and the success we've had with the stated I think that strategy and being able to drive it home is one of the most important things you need when you're building a startup or a company or running a business that you own. According to the Harvard business review study, 67% of well formulated strategies fail to due to poor execution, not because the ideas were bad. And the Franklin Covey research shows that organizations using 40x are 3.5 times more likely to achieve their key goals compared to traditional goal setting. So let's break it down. Discipline number one Focus on the wildly important Most teams have too many goals. Discipline the one about focusing on just one or two wildly important goals or wigs. These are the game changers. For example, for Grow your MRR from 20k to 50k by December 31st. Reduce churn from 6% to 3% by the end of Q2. Without this focus and having data driven results, you're just going to be busy. You're not actually going to be effective. The second discipline act on the lead measures. This is really where the magic happens. Lag measures are the results you want revenue user growth, but they lag behind. Lead measures are predictive controllable actions you can take to influence those outcomes. So here's, here's a couple examples. ConvertKit, an email SaaS company, they set up a wildly important goal to grow their mrr, but they didn't obsess over the revenue itself. They focused on the lead measures, how many demo calls they booked, how many partner promotions they launched, and how many videos they published. Lead measures drive the outcome. You want to be looking forward into these ones. The third discipline is to keep a compelling scorecard. If your team can't see the score, they lose interest. A simple visual scorecard makes the progress tangible and energizes your team. You can picture this, a live dashboard showing all your key metrics, traffic light indicators, weekly trends, the ownership of all of these goals. You want to keep this public, you want to keep it simple, and you want to review it every single week. And then number four is you have to create a cadence of accountability. So often in the startup world, you're running around with your head chopped off and you forget about accountability and then it just never feels like everything's actually getting done. You have to have some rhythm to this. Each week the team should make one to two specific commitments tied to the lead measures and then report back to the CEO in a quickly 15 minute meeting. Everyone answers, what did I commit to last week? Did I do it? What's my commitment this week? Now you're going to start building momentum, trust and results over time. Remember, what's get shared gets done. Now let's talk about just some really good startups that have executed on this loom, the video messaging startup. When they were scaling, they didn't just look at user numbers, they obsessed over the lead metrics like new onboarding sessions, activation within seven days, and their support response time. That discipline helped them scale to 14 million users and $1 billion valuation right before Atlassian acquired them in 2023. That's the power of executing with focus and rhythm. I have another example for you too, one that you probably use every single day. Slack, Fantastic example. When they were scaling really quickly, they focused not just on signups, but on the activation, the number of teams actually sending messages daily. Their lead measures included the number of new team invites, number of messages sent per team, and response time to any support requests. You can see how important support is for all of these successful examples. I think in today's terms, you should be able to rapidly respond to support requests and take care of your customers. Your customers are going to, what are going to be like your guiding light of how your company can be successful. And that discipline took them from 8,000 daily users to a million daily users in just 18 months, ultimately leading to a $27 billion acquisition by Salesforce. Another one, a tool that we use all the time, is HubSpot. They never really chased revenue. They focused heavily on content and lead generation. Their key lead measures were number of blog posts published, number of gated content downloads, and number of free trial signups from inbound. That discipline focus on consistent high leverage actions helped them to grow to a $25 billion public SaaS company that has dominated the inbound and outbound marketing space for many, many years now. The Execution Gap this is why it matters even more. Research shows that most teams only spend about 20% of their time over on high impact goals. The other 80%, where does it go? It's just daily chaos. 40x helps you shift that balance. When you focus even 5 to 10% more on your wildly important goals, you're going to accelerate the progress exponentially. Execution isn't just about doing more, it's about doing the right things consistently and over and over and over again. So to recap on all of this, number one, focus on wildly important goals, act on lead measures, keep a compelling scorecard, and create a cadence of accountability. And now, if this lesson has added any value, I would love to hear about what you're working on within your company. Come join us at the Everyday Entrepreneur. We have a school program. We post absolutely everything on it. We share all the templates of how we built this out to lead to an eight figure acquisition in 2022 and arguably one of the biggest moments of my life. But also using these tools for us and okrs and 40x, it allowed us to scale a team to 30 and 40 people at times. It allowed me to like not freak out as a CEO all the time. And my job here is just to make sure that you're actually enjoying your job and you love going to do it every single day. So check me out on all the other platforms and please stay tuned. These videos are coming out every single Friday. We'll see you in the next one.
