In this solo presentation, Layla (Speaker A) shares a practical framework for creating high‑performing, $100 million‑scale teams called the Accountability Formula: Expectations + Measurement × Feedback. She begins by explaining how to recognize when an organization lacks accountability—when tasks are assigned but results aren’t delivered—and why adding more marketing or sales alone won’t fix the problem. The core formula is broken down into three components. 1. Expectations – clear, written definitions of what “good looks like” at both the organizational level (mission, values, brand promise) and the role level (role‑specific expectations derived from the org’s expectations). Layla stresses that job descriptions should be living documents that articulate these expectations and be revisited each quarter. 2. Measurement – concrete, quantitative ways to judge whether expectations are met. She recommends at least two metrics per role: a “push” metric (e.g., sales closed, activation) and a “pull” metric (e.g., retention, churn). These metrics become the KPIs listed at the bottom of the job description. 3. Feedback – the amplifying element that turns expectations and measurement into accountability. Feedback should be frequent, specific, and delivered in multiple channels (weekly one‑on‑ones, instant messages, Slack/ClickUp notes). Layla argues that you can never give too much feedback; it continuously tells employees where they stand on a 1‑10 accountability scale. She illustrates the impact of the framework with a case study: a portfolio company that, after implementing the accountability system, lifted revenue by roughly 30%. Throughout, Layla emphasizes that accountability is the glue between action and result, and that leaders must be willing to have hard conversations and consistently coach their teams. The talk concludes with a call to audit one’s own organization for missing pieces of the formula and to apply the three‑step process to achieve scalable growth.
Chapters
My formula for managing $100 million teams. Most people come to me and they're like, Layla, can you tell me like the systems, the processes that makes this all work? And people are usually asking that because there's some sort of pain. It's an art and a science. If you feel like you can't get the results you want in your business, if you feel like things are kind of painful, if you feel like you're needed for most things, I want to share with you my formula behind how I actually get things done with a team. So the formula I want to share with you is called the Accountability Formula, and I'm going to get to that in a second. But what I first want to explain is how I know a company's lacking accountability. If you have people in your organization and they have jobs and and you have assigned them things to do, but you're not getting the result, you lack accountability. Accountability is essentially the glue between an action and a result. And so if you feel that way and you feel like you're not getting the results you want in your business, it's probably because you are lacking that accountability. More marketing, more sales, that's not what you need more of. You need more accountability. And the reason people don't like to do that is because it requires hard conversations. Being someone that's constantly encouraging your team, coaching your team, giving your team feedback. Like I am the reason why my team does or does not execute. Am I holding them accountable? Because if I'm not, people are always going to fall to the standard that I set. And if the standard I set is I don't hold people accountable, then why would they be held accountable? They wouldn't. We had a portfolio company that came to us and they were super successful in terms of revenue, but the operator of that business basically came and he was like, Layla, I feel like nobody is getting anything done. This whole business is run off my brain and this one other person's brain, which was the co-founder. Every time he brought me an issue with a coworker or an employee, he basically pointed to that person. It was like, they're not doing their job. I should probably fire them. I think before you fire them, we should walk through this framework to understand if you've done everything properly to hold people accountable. That particular operator has just implemented having accountability in the team and his team has brought their revenue up by almost 30%. If you have people sitting in your company, but they're not actually doing the job that you're paying them to do because you lack accountability, they're not gonna drive the results for the company and the company's not gonna grow. So the formula for accountability, expectations plus measurement times feedback. Expectations, so telling people how something should be done plus a measurement, How are we going to measure if that expectation is met? Times feedback, letting them know how they could better meet that expectation or that measurement next time. And so feedback is an important piece because it's the only piece of this that can be amplified. And so I wanna break these down one by one so you can look at your company and say, what am I missing right now? And then how can I fix it? Expectations are, tell me what good looks like. And I could get fancy with it, but that's really what it means. When you bring someone into the team and you put them in a role and you give them a job description, that job description at a different company means something completely different. And also that boss that they had in another company wants something completely different than you want. And so you have to reset expectations for them. It doesn't matter how experienced this person is. Maybe they're older than you. They have more experience than you. It doesn't matter. What do you think good looks like in the role? How do we set expectations? There's really two levels of expectations that we want to set. There's organizational expectations, which then shape the role expectations. Organizational level expectations. You've got the mission or the vision, the values. You've got a brand promise. What those all encompass are the expectations of the business. Those are expectations that you as the founder should be setting for the whole company. The mission is basically the expectation of the company. What does good look like for the company? The values are the expectation of how we will behave in order to meet that mission. And then a brand promise is taking the internal pieces of the company and facing them externally. The customers now know what good looks like. Geico, it's like, you know, in 15 minutes or less, or, you know, your car insurance back to you. I don't even remember what it was. That's an expectation that now they're giving as a brand promise for that customer. And so I want you to think about your organization. Do you have a clear mission? Do you know what good looks like for the whole company? Do you have clear values? Does everyone understand what good looks like in terms of how we behave to reach that mission? And then the brand promise is the same as the values, except for it's in terms of how we deliver to the customer. You can deliver to the customer fast, you can deliver good. The question is, which one is fit for this company? So if you have those organizational expectations, then it's really easy to go and look at role expectations. The expectations you have as a singular role are always gonna stem from the department or from the company. What does good look like in customer service? For a company where fast is the priority, say like McDonald's, good looks like we get them their hamburgers in 2 minutes or less. Whereas if you look at Disney, they might say that good looks like we always exceed the expectation of the customers. It might be quality. That's what a role expectation looks like. On an enterprise sales team, it might be that that sale is going to take 5 to 11 months to close the deal. And the whole point of the sale is to help someone make a decision. It's not transaction-based. There's no speed and they're not measuring timelines. What they're measuring is the experience of the person going through the process and then maybe the deal size that you're able to land. Say a B2B SaaS company, what they're measuring is how fast, what's your time to close? Because for them speed is more important than quality 'cause they're not servicing an enterprise customer who's paying $250,000 a year. They're servicing someone who's paying maybe $2,000 to $3,000 a year. If you're thinking of what does good look like, well, if you take someone who's a sales rep at an enterprise company and you put them in a transactional company for a small SMB, do you think they're going to succeed? Probably not. If they still have the habits of serving enterprise, they're probably not gonna be meeting your expectations. And so you have to understand that that person always needs context. And so the best way, if you feel like right now you're listening to this and you're like, Layla, I don't think I have good role expectations within my company. That's totally fine and it's super normal. A job description is essentially a third-party agreement. It is what you look at and your employee look at, and then you look at it and it is agreed upon terms of what is expected by them. And so if you think about it more like that, then you think about it like as this piece of paper that you have to have to get somebody to join your company. You're constantly updating that. Think about how many times you would update a job description if it wasn't a job description, it was a set of expectations for somebody in the role. I think that often people think job descriptions aren't important because they don't understand what they're for. It's so that at the end of a quarter, I can go over your job description with you and say, have you met the expectations outlined here? And if you think about it like that, you're going to write them a lot differently. So the next piece of the equation is measurement. How do we measure what good looks like? What numbers tell me this is good? Typically with any role, you want a minimum of 2 ways to measure. So a good way to frame this is you have a push metric and a pull metric. Onboarding and activation, and then churn. Sales and then refunds or chargeback. There's always 2 measures. The same goes for a role. So if you So if you think about someone, say you have a sales rep that's doing upsells, the first measure might be the number of sales closed. So it might be like percentage close rate. The second measure that you're going to base their performance off of might be something like retention rate of clients sold. Because what you have to understand is that the way that a client sold is going to determine how long they're going to stay with the company. I would say it's good to incentivize off how many sales they make as long as those clients stay. And so a lot of people like to say, well, Layla, they don't have complete control over this number. The reality is that nobody has complete control over any number in the business. But what they need to learn how to do is to be a teammate that cross-collaborates with other departments so they can get other people on board with hitting those numbers that holistically grow the business, not just their one role or their commission check. So if you're looking how you can tactically implement measurement into a role, what I like to do is I like to, on their job description at the bottom, have their KPIs. So essentially it's saying, what results are you responsible for? What KPIs are you measured upon in order to meet my expectations that have been outlined in this role? Realistically today, if you feel like you don't have accountability in your company, you could redo their job description with all the expectations you have of that role and then redo their KPIs. Make sure you have one push and one pull and you're already halfway there. The third piece to the equation and the last piece, and arguably the most important piece, is feedback. You always need expectations. You need measurement, but more expectations and more measurement isn't going to do much incrementally for the amount of accountability you have with that role. But feedback will, because the more feedback you give someone, the more accountable you are holding them. You can almost never have too much of this feedback because feedback, if you look at the definition when it comes to accountability, again, we're gonna get stupid simple here. It's how far or close are you to good? That's it. So if you've got a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of accountability, you'd be like, hey Sally, I just wanna let you know in terms of accountability, in terms of expectations in this role, I feel like you're around like an 8.5 right now, and here's what you could do to get to a 10. So you're constantly telling people where they're sitting in their role. If someone's doing really well, we don't say anything because we're not thinking about it 'cause they're not a problem. But on the other side, If someone isn't doing really well, we also tend not to say anything 'cause we're avoiding a problem. Oftentimes employees don't know the difference. They don't know why you're not talking to them. So you need to be the one that expresses that narrative and tells them why. Well, where do I give feedback? Honestly, you can give feedback everywhere. I think the best utilization is weekly one-on-ones. Having one-on-ones with people, that's the opportunity that you have to tell them this is how good you're doing. What I like to do is I like to let people run the whole one-on-one and then the last few minutes, because I like to let them own that time, I get to give them the feedback. Another way that you can do this is honestly if you have Slack or you have ClickUp or you have Messenger or something like that, is you can just quick shoot them a message. Hey, you did fantastic on this. Hey, I love this, but if you could do this differently next time, that'd be awesome. If you can normalize feedback in your company, you're gonna have a much higher amount of accountability. If you're not getting the results you want, which piece are you missing? If you can put all those things together, that's how you can run a really effective team. It's the boring stuff that's gonna move you forward, and that's often why people aren't able to reach their goals. People ask me all the time, they're like, Leila, why can't I get to 10 or 15 million? I'm like, you have no accountability.
