A Founder’s Guide to Navigating Difficult Decisions

Angie Franks is the CEO of Kalderos and the former CEO of ABOUT and RetraceHealth. This guide, derived in part from insights during Angie’s talk on “What It Means to Be a CEO” at Mercato’s 2023 Investor Offsite, offers advice from Angie for first-time CEOs, seasoned CEOs, and investors, on how to be more effective in the CEO role and in support of CEOs.

Sean Lane is the former Head of Revenue Operations at Drift and a founder of BeaconGTM, providing scalable revenue strategies for start-up and scale-up companies. In this guide, Sean walks through the steps to build a strategic and tactical plan for the new year including building an operating plan, quota and headcount planning, territory planning, and compensation planning.

Greg Warnock, Ph.D., is a co-founder and Managing Director of Mercato Partners, where he has served as a Director on the boards of Skullcandy, Stance, Fusion-io, Goal Zero, Mediconnect, Domo, Cradlepoint, and others. In this guide, Greg walks through setting entrepreneurial strategy, informing your strategy with customer insights, and making strategic adjustments.

LifeLabs Learning is a leadership skills accelerator that’s served 2,300+ companies, including CapitalOne, TED, Reddit, Spotify, and The New York Times. This guide walks through key skills in the manager toolkit, including offering question-based coaching, providing specific and actionable feedback, prioritizing with limited resources, and holding developmental 1-on-1 conversations.

Daniel Montgomery is the Founder and Managing Director of Agile Strategies, a boutique OKR consultancy that helps companies achieve transformative results in growth, innovation, focus, alignment, and engagement. In this guide, Daniel explains how to create strategically aligned and well-crafted OKRs, create an effective management cadence that translates OKRs into weekly action commitments, and integrate OKRs into the operating model of the organization.

Companies don’t make money by planning, they make money by executing. This is something you may have heard from a mid-level manager, a front-line operator, or even an entrepreneur founder who has become impatient with long and boring planning and budgeting sessions. And they’re right! Company success is a direct result of execution: making the sale, delivering to your customers, hiring the right people, and operating effectively. However, planning is a crucial part of that execution. The plan defines what success means to the company and lays out a framework for how it intends to succeed. Central to the overall company plan or strategy is the exercise perhaps most dreaded by managers: the financial plan or the budget.