Before you spend a quarter fixing a bad month, find out whether you caused it.

TL;DR: A falling metric triggers an immediate hunt for fixes, which is the wrong first move. The question that comes first is whether the cause is internal or external, because a problem you did not create is usually one you cannot solve. Naming the actual force behind a bad month, rather than shrugging at the season, is what separates a decision to let something burn from an excuse to.

Our head of sales flagged something a couple of weeks ago. Show-up rates had gone rough, and he came to the call the way good operators do, with a list of fixes ready to go.

We didn't take the list. We asked a different question first: why do you think show-up rate has been bad?

Is this caused by internal forces, something we did, something we broke, or is it an external thing? Because all too often, if you didn't break it, you probably can't fix it.

And here is the part most people drop: that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. It means you should know which kind of problem you have before you decide how much of the quarter to spend on it.

Here is where I'd push the test one step further, because "it's summer" is not an answer. It's a shrug with a calendar attached. If the cause really is external, you should be able to name the specific force, and if you can't name it, you haven't finished diagnosing.

Take the last two months. There was a World Cup, and it did take over for a whole lot of people. My read is that it pulled a fair number of higher-income people, which is exactly the target market for most of what we sell, out of their normal appointment-setting and business focus. On top of that you had the country's two hundred fiftieth anniversary, with all the travel and the sense of occasion around it. My guess is that between those two things, the deeper slump that normally shows up in August got pulled forward into July.

That is a different statement from "summer was slow." It is falsifiable. It tells you the shape of the recovery. And it tells you the thing you actually needed to know, which is that nobody on the sales team broke anything.

Once you have that, the response gets calm and unglamorous. It's a bit like what airlines do. If show-up rates are down, book more calls. If half the people who book don't turn up, you have to book a whole lot more to get the same number of shows.

Then immediately ask the operator's question, which is the one that keeps this from being advice: is that volume available? Because if it isn't, overbooking is not a plan, it's a wish, and you've just handed your team a target they cannot hit through no fault of their own.

There's a second cost to misreading the cause, and it's the one I care about most.

A bad month is the worst possible time to run an experiment on people. If you've just moved a setter into an account executive seat, and the month you chose happens to be the month the volume falls off a cliff, you will not learn anything about that person. You'll learn about the month. And you may conclude someone can't do a job when the truth is they never got enough shots to show you.

My partner Ryan argued the other side, and it's a real argument. A down month is arguably exactly when to experiment, since the damage is smallest if it doesn't work. His point was that you fix things when they're broken, and that the person in question had earned the shot, so making them wait would have been uncool. He's not wrong. I don't think this one resolves cleanly, and I'd rather leave it open than pretend it does.

What I would not leave open is the reallocation. When our head of sales came off that call, the useful thing he said was that he could take the effort and the resources he was about to spend fighting the dip, put them somewhere else, and close the gap faster while building something that would still be there in the recovery months.

That's the move. Not resignation, redirection. The effort was always going to be spent. The only question was whether it went into a fire you didn't light and can't put out, or into something that compounds once the month turns.

And if you're keeping score properly, this is what your metrics should already be telling you. We run a simple version across our companies: red means we're behind and we don't know how to fix it. Yellow means we're behind and we have an idea. A number going the wrong way isn't the emergency. Not knowing why is.

— Roland

The biggest hiring mistake isn't choosing the wrong executive.

It's making it too hard to replace them if you do. Most founders spend months negotiating compensation.

Almost nobody spends time defining what success looks like or what happens if it never arrives.

Great executive relationships aren't built on optimism.

They're built on clear expectations, measurable results, and an exit plan if the fit isn't right.

The best operators welcome accountability because everyone knows what winning looks like.

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