Build the Model. Do the Work. Know the Business.
or: It’s not about being right—it’s about being ready
In my last post—Find Your Simple Math—I wrote about how every business has a simple core equation. It’s simple math, and it gives CEOs a high-leverage way to focus, prioritize, and stay calm.
But that’s the top-down view.
This post is about the bottom-up. The work underneath. The part most people avoid. The part that actually builds the business.
Because once you know what you’re trying to drive, you need a clear, detailed map of how it actually works—and how you’re going to make it happen.
After we sold Bitly to Spectrum Equity, one of the first things we did together was build a detailed operating plan. Not a quick forecast. Not a board-ready deck. We built the entire machine in Google Sheets—line by line, cell by cell, lever by lever.
This wasn’t diligence. It was post-sale planning. A new phase. A new world.
And it was exhausting.
We didn’t just model revenue—we modeled everything that led to it.
Monthly sales rep productivity by cohort and ramp time
Marketing channel performance
Acquisition, retention, expansion, and churn assumptions by segment
Cash burn forecasts layered against hiring plans
and every other possible lever.
I was coming from the VC world, where speed was everything. We forecasted because we had to. We managed based on instinct, team velocity, and gut. I didn’t love the idea of getting this deep in the spreadsheet, so far out and at such excruciating detail. I honestly thought it might be a waste of time.
And I said it out loud: “This model is going to be wrong on day one.”
The partner I was working with nodded and said:
“Of course it will be. But when it is, we’ll know where to look.”
That was the unlock.
We weren’t trying to be right. We were building a way to run the business.
Not just to see where we missed—but to map the plan in excruciating detail.
Every step of the funnel.
Every user flow.
Every lever that mattered.
We built the model to answer hard questions before the business asked them.
To stop taking things for granted.
To make thoughtful assumptions about what we believed would happen—and what needed to happen to hit the plan.
Here’s what needs to happen.
Here’s how we’re going to make it happen.
Here’s where the leverage lives.
Doing that work upfront—painful as it was—de-risked execution. It forced alignment. It surfaced trade-offs. And it created a shared truth we could manage against.
It wasn’t fun. But it was one of the most useful things we did as a team. Now I better appreciate and have come to revel in that detail. Doing the real work.
The Work: A CEO Framework for Building a Real Operating Model
When I help a CEO build a model, we don’t start with a template. We start with a blank sheet.
I sit in front of an empty Google Sheet and walk through the revenue journey, end to end. Not at a high level—at the level of how the business actually works.
What happens first?
Where do leads come from?
What’s the next step?
What are the possible outcomes?
What happens after that?
One client and I recently built theirs from scratch, starting with:
How does a prospect become a lead?
When does that lead become a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), a Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO) and then Closed Won.
Then what happens post-sale? Onboarding, implementation, renewal, expansion?
We broke it down by channel. One path for inbound. One for outbound. One for self-serve. Each one has different steps, different drop-off points, different levers.
We didn’t guess. We wrote it all down. Line by line. Until we had a model that reflected the real business—not just the board version.
That’s the work. And it’s the CEO’s job.
Not because the CEO is the one who owns every input. But because the CEO needs to understand the whole system. Where it starts. Where it breaks. Where the leverage is.
This isn’t finance work. This is leadership work.
The best CEOs I know don’t hide from the detail. They live in it when they have to. They know you don’t get leverage by staying vague. You get it by doing the work.
And when the model is built right, it becomes the most powerful tool you have—not because it’s perfect, but because it’s useful.
You don’t build a model to be right.
You build it to be ready.
If this post helped you—or made you think of someone—please forward it to them. And let me know what resonated or missed. I read every reply.
#RealTalk #HowToCEO #operatingmodels #venturetoprivateequity #leadership