21 min read

Top 10 Ways We’ve Operationalized Culture and Growth at Builder Funnel

By: Danielle Russell on Aug. 19, 2025

Leadership Business Management Builder Funnel Building Culture

Builder Funnel just made the Inc. 5000 list again. That’s not just a number on a plaque. For us, it’s proof that disciplined execution and a thriving culture don’t just coexist, they fuel each other.

Scaling a business is tricky. Many companies hit growth walls when they start adding zeros to their revenue because they lose the cultural alignment that got them there. Processes tighten, communication changes, and somewhere along the way, the "why" gets blurry.

We’ve avoided that pitfall by taking the 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) out of the textbook and embedding them directly into our core purpose, core values, and business mindsets. It’s not a separate system we run alongside our culture, it’s the engine inside it.

In this post, I’m sharing our top 10 strategies — the exact ways we’ve operationalized 4DX into the DNA of Builder Funnel. You’ll see what’s worked, what hasn’t, and how we course-corrected. I've broken them out into 3 stages of growth: Execution Discipline, Culture as the Operating System, and Scaling the Team.

Because growth has looked so different for Builder Funnel at each stage. And I don't think you can skip any of them to successfully scale the next.

Each section comes with two things:

A real Builder Funnel story (the behind-the-scenes moment that made it work)
A "Steal This" takeaway you can adapt for your own business

If you’ve ever wondered how to hit ambitious growth goals and strengthen your culture at the same time, this is for you.

Set Your Foundation Before You Build
Stage 1: Mastering Execution Discipline to Scale a Business Successfully
Stage 2: Culture as the Operating System
Stage 3: Scaling Your Team Without Losing Company Culture

Set Your Foundation Before You Build

In remodeling and construction, you can’t build higher or scale wider without a strong foundation. You wouldn’t build a second story on a foundation that cracks under pressure, unless you’re filming HGTV drama, in which case, go ahead, it makes great television. If the base isn’t level, the structure won’t stand the test of time, no matter how beautiful the design or how ambitious the plans. Business growth works the same way. Before you can layer on systems, frameworks, and scaling strategies, you need a rock-solid foundation that will hold up under the weight of your goals.

At Builder Funnel, that foundation starts with three things: our Core Purpose, our Core Values, and our Company Mottos. These weren’t just words we picked for marketing. They were the guiding principles that helped us make our first few great hires. Those hires became the crew that built the systems, frameworks, and repeatable success that would later fuel our scalable growth.

Core Purpose: Why We Exist

Our core purpose is to foster growth in individuals and companies. This starts with our team. If you join Builder Funnel, you should expect to change, improve, and grow, so much so that you feel like a new person every 12 months. That commitment to personal development fuels our client work and keeps our culture evolving.

Core Values: How We Operate Every Day

Our values are the rules of the jobsite. They set the standard for how we work together, serve clients, and represent Builder Funnel:

Always Be Learning – We stay curious and keep sharpening our skills.
Achieve More Together – Collaboration beats isolation; the best builds happen as a team.
Do the Right Thing – Integrity in every decision, even when it’s hard.
Deliver Positive Customer Experiences – Clients should feel supported and understood at every stage.
Always Be Teaching – We share what we know to help others grow.
Always Be Pushing the Limits – We innovate and experiment to find better ways forward.

Company Mottos: The Shortcuts to Our Culture

Our mottos are like the quick reference notes taped up on the jobsite wall. They're short, memorable phrases that instantly bring our culture to mind:

“We help builders and remodelers grow through strategic digital marketing.”
“We only grow if you do.”

These foundations (our purpose, values, and mottos) were critical to building the trust and alignment we needed with our earliest hires. With the right crew in place and a clear operating system for how we work, we were ready to move into the next phase: scaling through the systems and frameworks I’ll share in the three stages of business growth.

Stage 1: Mastering Execution Discipline to Scale a Business Successfully

At Builder Funnel, we treat execution as both an art and a science. It’s not just about having the right ideas. It’s about building the structural practices that keep us laser-focused on our Wildly Important Goal (WIG) and aligned across every team.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX)

The 4 Disciplines of Execution, developed by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, provide a framework for turning strategy into consistent results:

Focus on the Wildly Important – Identify the one or two goals that matter most right now. Everything else is secondary.
Act on Lead Measures – Prioritize the activities that influence the outcome, rather than obsessing over the lagging results.
Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – Make performance visible and engaging so the team knows exactly where they stand.
Create a Cadence of Accountability – Build regular check-ins where teams commit to actions and hold each other responsible.

We’ve taken these disciplines off the page and into our daily rhythm so they aren’t just a quarterly exercise. They’re part of how we work, think, and make decisions every day.

Scaling Up and the Rockefeller Habits

While 4DX gives us the focus and accountability to execute, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish provides the structure and rhythm to support it.

Harnish's "Rockefeller Habits" are a set of proven practices designed to keep companies aligned, healthy, and growing:

Meeting rhythms that keep communication flowing
Clear priorities for the company, teams, and individuals
Metrics that track progress in real-time
A culture of learning and improvement

Scaling Up expands on these habits with four decision areas (People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash) that guide how we set goals, solve problems, and invest resources.

Business Mindsets as Cultural Anchors

Over time, we’ve built our own collection of business mindsets. These are core ideas we’ve borrowed, adapted, and made our own from books, leaders, and experiences. These mindsets create a common language and way of thinking about growth.

Two that have been especially powerful for us are (I’ll share more at each stage as they are most relevant):

Theory of Constraints – The belief that our growth is only as fast as our biggest bottleneck, and that removing constraints unlocks exponential progress.
Open Book Management – The practice of sharing financials, metrics, and goals company-wide so every team member can make smarter, more informed decisions.

By blending these concepts, we plan growth with precision. We look at the data, identify the constraints, and equip the team with the financial and operational visibility to solve them. It’s this mix of disciplined execution, proven habits, and adaptive mindsets that keeps us moving toward our WIG without losing the culture that got us here.

How does it all work together at this stage? Let’s dig in!

Growth Tip #1: Pick a Wildly Important Goal (WIG) Everyone Can Actually Impact

We’ve experimented with a lot of different Wildly Important Goals over the years. Most didn’t work the way we hoped. The biggest lesson? If your WIG isn’t something every single person in the company can directly influence, it’s the wrong WIG.

Early on, we picked goals that sounded exciting but didn’t connect clearly to everyone’s daily work. One year, we tried a WIG around growing our community membership. It was a good idea in theory, but it quickly became a distraction. It pulled focus from revenue-driving activities, and many team members weren’t sure how their work tied in. The result: slower progress on both the WIG and our core business.

When we shifted to top-line revenue as our WIG, everything changed. Using Open Book Management practices, each team began managing their own Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and mini profit-and-loss statements. This gave them a direct, numbers-driven view of how their work impacted the company’s overall financial health. The scoreboard wasn’t just for leadership; it was for everyone.

This approach also made the Theory of Constraints a natural part of our planning. As revenue grew, new constraints emerged: capacity limits, onboarding speed, client activation point bottlenecks. Because each team owned their numbers, they could spot constraints early and plan solutions before those issues slowed growth. Every stage of growth came with its own “next problem,” and we were ready for it because we could see it in the data. Suddenly, everyone could see how their work tied to moving the needle, like switching the team from playing Minesweeper to Mario Kart. Everyone knew where the finish line was, and we all wanted the blue shell.

Steal This: If not everyone can influence the WIG, it’s the wrong WIG. Give teams visibility into their own revenue and profitability, and equip them to anticipate and solve the constraints that come with each growth stage.

Growth Tip #2: Teach Teams to Choose the Right Lead Measures for Business Growth

One of the hardest parts of implementing 4DX wasn’t agreeing on our Wildly Important Goal: it was figuring out the right lead measures to get there. The challenge was aligning lag measures (like MRR or client retention) across departments while giving people enough freedom to set lead measures that actually worked in their world.

We found the sweet spot by blending leadership direction with team autonomy. Leadership sets the overall direction and provides the context including how the WIG ties to revenue and retention, the current stage of growth, and the constraints we’re facing. Then teams select or adjust their lead measures based on real-time insight from the work they’re doing.

For example, in one quarter, our client churn lag measure was under pressure. Instead of leadership dictating every action, we asked the team delivering services directly to clients if they were seeing any trends. We firmly believe that clients stay with us when they’re growing their revenue, their results with us, and their relationships with our team. What changed? Our Strategists were empowered to review our Daily Metrics spreadsheet (from Scaling Up) to identify a few key metrics for client results that were consistently declining across the board. Then our team was asking the right question: what was happening to website traffic? Enter the AI revolution stage right, but that’s not what this blog is about! Our team was able to identify the problem and adapt our strategies to help clients continue to grow, cutting our churn lag measure.

Open Book Management was the key to making this work. When teams see their own monthly recurring revenue (MRR) trends and mini P&Ls, they naturally choose lead measures that move those numbers. And because we’re always scanning for the next constraint (whether it’s capacity, conversion rates, or onboarding time) lead measures evolve alongside our growth stages.

Steal This: Don’t just teach lead measures. Teach the thinking behind them. Embed lead measure selection into onboarding and train teams to adapt them as the business grows and constraints shift.

Growth Tip #3: Use Memorable Scoreboards to Boost Execution and Engagement

Numbers matter, but people remember stories, visuals, and jokes. The best scoreboard we’ve ever had was our taco scoreboard. Every deal sold earned a taco on the board, and the spice level represented the retainer value. It wasn’t just fun; it was personal, tied to an inside joke about Spencer’s love for Chipotle.

Why did it work so well? It was physical, themed, and culturally relevant. People wanted to see tacos added. They’d joke about hitting “spicy” status for a big sale. And because it was sitting in plain view, the scoreboard was impossible to ignore.

We’ve also had scoreboards that flopped. Complex digital dashboards with dozens of data points were accurate but uninspiring. Without an emotional hook, people checked them out of obligation, not excitement.

The real magic happens when we combine these fun, memorable scoreboards with the Scaling Up meeting cadence. At Builder Funnel, Mondays and Wednesdays are our pulse checks, quick, focused reviews of our dashboards to make sure there are no red flags or emerging constraints. Every other Monday, we bring all dashboards together in our bi-weekly All Hands Meeting to share updates across the company, reinforce transparency, and celebrate wins. And during our quarterly business reviews, we go deep by reviewing all financials, progress on lags and WIGs, and identifying the next constraint to solve.

This rhythm ensures scoreboards are not just compelling, but also accurate and actionable. Teams know exactly where we stand, have a clear line of sight into how their work impacts the numbers, and can respond quickly when constraints pop up.

Steal This: Make your metrics memorable and your review rhythm unmissable. Pair culturally relevant scoreboards with a consistent meeting cadence so the data stays accurate, the team stays aligned, and action happens fast.

Growth Tip #4: Let Market Insights and Team Capacity Guide Your Growth Strategy

Our 2025 Wildly Important Goal is 25% growth. On paper, we could chase it aggressively, but we’re pacing ourselves on purpose. For us, how we grow is just as important as why we grow.

It’s easy to let spreadsheets set the tempo. The numbers will always push you toward more - more sales, more clients, more revenue. But growth without capacity, alignment, and cultural health is a shortcut to burnout. You can't drag a cell across 12 months of projections and get a real number if you're ignoring outside factors.

Recently, we hit a point where demand was strong and our sales pipeline was ready to run. Instead of flooring it, we paused. We made sure our onboarding process could handle the volume without straining the team, refined the client experience so it matched our brand promise, and confirmed that our people had the tools, training, and bandwidth to deliver. That short pause kept us from creating bottlenecks later and made sure every new client would get the same high-quality Builder Funnel experience.

Steal This: Let cultural health and operational capacity guide your growth speed. The market will tell you what’s possible, but your people will tell you what’s sustainable.

With disciplined execution in place, the next step was making sure the “how” of our growth matched the “why.” That meant moving beyond metrics and frameworks to focus on the culture driving them, because the best systems in the world can’t thrive without the right operating system behind them. And if culture is what happens when you’re not in the room, then we wanted to make sure our culture supported continued growth and accountability, not just virtual happy hours and silly memes.

But the memes work really well, honestly.

Stage 2: Culture as the Operating System

Culture isn’t something we work on after the “real work” is done. It’s the operating system that runs every part of the business. Execution gives us structure and cadence, but culture gives us the energy, alignment, and resilience to keep going.

Our core values and core purpose act like a compass, guiding how we approach goals and how we handle challenges along the way. They’re the reason our execution frameworks actually stick, because the “how” is always connected to the “why.”

We also keep growth engaging and sustainable with quarterly themes that turn goals and growing pains into something fun and memorable. Whether it’s Top Gun’s “need for speed” for speed or Moneyball for “knowing our numbers,” these themes give the team a shared story to rally around.

Builder Funnel Culture

And because winning together matters, we’ve built in gamification and a culture of celebration. Big wins, small wins, personal wins, they all get recognized. That constant reinforcement keeps the team motivated, focused, and moving in the same direction.

In the tips ahead, I’ll share exactly how these cultural elements show up in our day-to-day, and how they’ve helped us grow without losing the things that make Builder Funnel a place people want to work and clients want to work with.

Business Mindsets: The Shared Language of Growth

Over time, we’ve built a set of business mindsets that give us a shared way of thinking about leadership, accountability, and purpose. These ideas didn’t come from a single book or framework. We’ve pulled from the best concepts we’ve found and adapted them to fit our culture:

Radical Candor – We care personally and challenge directly. Feedback is a gift, and we give it in a way that strengthens trust, not erodes it.
Extreme Ownership – We take full responsibility for results, good or bad. Accountability and leadership aren’t titles: they’re mindsets.
Start with Why – We always connect work back to purpose, making sure every project has meaning beyond the task list.
Leadership is a Relationship – Trust and connection are the currency of leadership. If we’re not building relationships, we’re not leading. Caring about our people (team, clients, and partners) helps us lead with intention.
Lead Yourself First – As president, I believe my words and actions carry amplified weight. Leila Hormozi calls it being “seen under a microscope and heard through a megaphone.” That’s why I focus on self-leadership first.

By rooting everything in our core purpose, living our values daily, and speaking the same language through shared mindsets, we’ve created a culture that doesn’t just survive growth: it drives it.

Growth Tip #5: Bake Core Values and Mindsets into the Execution Process

Core values and core purpose aren’t just posters on our wall, they’re filters for every action we take. At Builder Funnel, our purpose is to foster growth in individuals and companies, and we live that through our values: Always Be Learning, Deliver Positive Customer Experiences, Always Be Teaching, Do the Right Thing, Achieve More Together, and Always Be Pushing the Limits.

These values aren’t abstract. They show up in real, measurable ways through our business mindsets. We host an internal book club where we read a new book every quarter (hand selected by Leadership Team) and discuss monthly as a whole company what we want to implement from what we’ve learned.

We’ve built many of our decision-making frameworks and leadership habits from books and podcasts we’ve read and discussed as a team. Some of the most influential have been:

Growth Mindset – Carol Dweck: We can all grow—skills and results improve with effort and learning.
Grit – Angela Duckworth: Resilience in life and the workplace is the ultimate long-term advantage.
Dare to Lead – Brené Brown: Vulnerability builds trust and purpose.
Radical Candor – Kim Scott: Care personally and challenge directly to build trust and accountability.
Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink: Commander’s Intent helps us disperse leadership—clarity on the “what” and “why,” with freedom to decide the “how.”
The Goal – Eli Goldratt: The Theory of Constraints teaches us to find and fix bottlenecks to unlock growth.
The Great Game of Business – Jack Stack: Understanding how everything ties to the financials is key to making smart decisions.

From Alex and Leila Hormozi, we’ve also integrated practical frameworks that help with decision-making and talent management:

6” Putt Method from Leila Hormozi – Set your team up for success by teaching them how to bring well-considered solutions instead of problems with no thought to your desk.
STAR Method from Alex Hormozi – Build star players by holding them accountable and aligned without micromanaging.

When your team has this mix of values, mindsets, and decision tools, they don’t get stuck waiting for permission. They make decisions that are consistent with the company’s purpose and goals, and everyone can move faster because of it.

Steal This: Train decision-making frameworks alongside job skills. A team that can think like leaders will execute like leaders.

Growth Tip #6: Use Quarterly Themes to Keep Goals Sticky (and Fun)

At Builder Funnel, our quarterly themes aren’t just decorations—they’re strategic tools disguised as fun. Each one connects directly to a growth priority, but in a way that makes it easy for the team to remember and rally around.

We’ve had some great ones:

The Mandalorian: “This is the way” – Focused on updating and standardizing our playbooks so our delivery was consistent across every client.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour – Reflected on our past “eras” as a company and used those lessons to reinvent ourselves for the next stage of growth.
Getting NSYNC: “Say Bye Bye Bye to Misalignment” – Streamlined our handoffs and communication from discovery to delivery so every new client and new team member started off aligned and stayed that way.

The fun side of themes is what keeps them sticky. We work in memes, themed email signatures, Slack statuses, and even virtual happy hours tied to the quarter’s concept. For a remote team, these touchpoints add energy and connection we can’t get from sitting in the same office.

But the real impact is strategic. Quarterly themes give us a shared language and a clear rallying cry. They make it easy for everyone to connect daily work to the big-picture goal, row in the same direction, and have fun doing it. We even build challenges and incentives into each theme so hitting targets feels like part of the game, not just another task.

Steal This: Tie your quarterly theme directly to your strategic priority. If it’s not connected to where you need to grow, it’s just a party (fun, but not forward-moving).

Growth Tip #7: Gamify Company Culture to Boost Engagement in a Remote Team

Quarterly themes give us the creative wrapper, but gamification is what keeps people actively participating. We’ve found that simple rules, visible progress, and personal rewards are the sweet spot for keeping a remote, asynchronous team engaged.

Some of our favorite tactics:

PTO rewards for challenge winners: because time off is one of the most valued prizes you can give.
Swag for BFversaries: custom Builder Funnel gear to celebrate work anniversaries and mark milestones.
Meme challenges: funniest tie-ins to our quarterly themes win bragging rights (and sometimes prizes).
Custom Slackmojis: inside jokes and quick visual recognition that show up in our daily communication.
Virtual water cooler moments: casual online spaces for connection beyond project work, because who doesn’t want to drop their favorite boy band concert they’ve attended while we work on getting in sync together? (Pics encouraged.)
Spot bonuses for case studies: recognition and rewards for writing case studies on client results and ROI, helping the team see how their work drives down our cost to acquire a client and fuels growth for everyone.

Why does it work? Visibility and simplicity. Everyone knows the rules, can see progress, and feels the impact when they win. This keeps energy high without creating complex bonus structures that end up being more work to track than they’re worth.

BF Culture

And for us, it’s more than just engagement, it’s culture glue. Fun quarterly challenges and celebrations make growth pains easier to push through. They give us a shared experience to remember the goals by, even when we’re all working on different clients and projects. In a fully remote and asynchronous environment, they create space for the team to show up as their whole selves (not just the “work version” like something out of Severance).

Steal This: Gamification works best with simple rules, public recognition, and rewards that feel personal and valuable.

With our culture acting as the operating system, we’re ready for the next stage (Scaling the Team) so we can take on more growth without losing the personality, unity, and quality that make Builder Funnel unique.

Stage 3: Scaling Your Team Without Losing Company Culture

Sustainable growth doesn’t just depend on having the right systems. It depends on having the right people in the right seats. At Builder Funnel, that means hiring well, promoting intentionally, and making sure our leaders are leveling up alongside the company.

We approach this with the same discipline we bring to client work. First, we’re intentional about attracting top talent by sharing content that communicates who we are, what we stand for, and why someone would want to be part of our team. That way, we’re not scrambling to hire when growth happens. We already have a warm bench of aligned candidates we can re-engage when it’s time to expand.

Then comes our rigorous interview process. (One of my favorite interview questions our Director of Client Service asks every candidate is “If you were to be let go in 90 days, what would be the reason?”) We’re looking for more than just skills; we’re looking for values alignment, growth mindset, and the ability to thrive in a fast-moving, fully remote environment. And once someone joins, that’s just the beginning. Preparing to scale successfully means training, onboarding, and developing our people so they grow with us, not just in their roles, but as leaders in their own right.

In the tips ahead, I’ll share how we’ve built a talent pipeline, set up promotion paths, and developed leaders from within so we can scale the team without losing the culture and quality that got us here.

Growth Tip #8. Hire for the Culture You’re Building, Not Just the Skills You Need Today

When we hire, we’re not just thinking about who can do the job today. We’re thinking about who can help us become the company we’re aiming to be. That’s why our recruiting and onboarding process is values-first. We look for cultural alignment before we look at technical skills, because skills can be trained, but values rarely change.

From the start, we integrate culture into recruiting, onboarding, and training. New hires can interact with our Onboarding GPT, which gives them a sense of our systems, expectations, and even our personality as a team. Once they start, they step into structured Asana boards for role-specific onboarding, supported by role leads who guide them through training and integration. And yes, we have our own little “easter egg” in the process to filter for the candidates who really pay attention (and are excited to be here).

We’ve learned the hard way what doesn’t work: rushing to fill a seat just because we need hands on deck. Misaligned hires almost always lead to rework, wasted time, frustration, and cultural drag. The good news is that a strong culture will weed out bad fits quickly, but it’s far better to avoid that churn altogether by taking the time to hire right in the first place.

Our Interview Question Flow

To make sure we’re bringing in the right people, we follow a consistent interview flow that connects every conversation back to our purpose, values, and growth goals:

My Why – I start by sharing our core purpose and core values, and highlight exactly how this role fits into them.
My Expectations – I outline my top three expectations for how this role should solve a problem, plus a “bonus fourth” that would blow my mind if they accomplished it.
Candidate Questions to Gauge Fit – I ask questions to understand their expectations for the role, their hard and soft skills, and whether they can help solve the current constraint in that position.
Growth Path Discussion – We pause to talk through what growth in this role could look like, so they can see how they might evolve with the company.
Core Value-Based Questions – I ask questions designed to reveal whether their behaviors and decision-making naturally align with our values.
Open Q&A – We leave the last 15–20 minutes for the candidate to ask me anything—because a great fit is a two-way decision.

Steal This: Treat recruiting as culture-shaping, not gap-filling. The people you bring in today will define the company you have tomorrow.

Growth Tip #9: Promote from Within to Strengthen Culture and Accelerate Growth

Promotions at Builder Funnel aren’t just rewards for tenure. They’re intentional moves to grow leaders who already understand and live our culture. We believe in caring deeply about our people while challenging them directly to reach their potential.

We also believe in our motto: “We only grow if you do.” That means career development isn’t just about the individual. It’s about growing in a way that fuels Builder Funnel’s growth, too. We push our team to think beyond their own role and consider the bigger picture of how their development impacts our success as a company.

There are only five real ways to make Builder Funnel money:

Sell new clients.
After proving ROI and identifying growth opportunities, upsell existing clients on additional products and services.
Extend client lifetime value (LTV) by improving retention through strong results and relationships.
Increase team capacity to take on more clients with the same overhead (empowering productivity and role mastery).
Decrease cost to acquire a new client (through case studies, testimonials, reviews, and referrals).

Everyone at Builder Funnel can contribute to these five areas, even if their role influences some more than others. A strategist might directly impact retention and upselling, while a content writer could help reduce client acquisition costs through case studies and SEO wins. At the end of the day, every role contributes to our revenue, profit, and growth through one or more of these buckets.

Our growth-from-within approach includes:

Performance reviews that go beyond metrics to assess alignment with values, contribution to the WIG, and impact on one or more of the five growth levers.
Weekly or bi-weekly 1:1s to address roadblocks, celebrate wins, and talk about skill development in real time.
Business mindsets in action like Extreme Ownership, Radical Candor, Open Book Management, and Theory of Constraints to frame growth in a way that’s actionable and aligned with our operating system.
Leadership training for hard conversations, so leaders know how to deliver direct feedback while providing high support.
A leadership team committed to pouring into their departments, ensuring each person has a mentor, not just a manager.

The impact? Promoted talent retains and strengthens our culture, hits the ground running in new roles, and accelerates progress toward our WIG. By tying personal growth to company growth, we’ve created a shared sense of ownership and accountability that keeps our top performers invested for the long haul.

Steal This: Combine direct feedback with high support, and connect personal growth to the company’s growth levers. It keeps top performers engaged, growing, and leading the charge toward your biggest goals.

Growth Tip #10. Learn to Lead at the Next Level (Promoting Myself)

This year, I’ve realized that my own role at Builder Funnel needed a promotion: not in title, but in focus. I’ve moved from managing individual contributors to managing managers and now to leading leaders, and that shift has required me to redefine my own lead measures and let go of responsibilities I once considered essential.

For the first six months of the year, my lead measures felt off. I kept trying to make them work, but they weren’t driving the lag results I cared about (team retention rate and net operating income). But recently I listened to a podcast by Leila Hormozi about what leaders get wrong about goals, and it clicked: the game has changed for digital marketing agencies, and it happened fast. I blinked, and suddenly my carefully crafted lead measures felt like a Blockbuster membership card. With the disruption of AI tools, tech, and results, my lead measures had to evolve if I wanted my lags to hold.

One tool that’s helped me reframe leading through disruption is the “WII FM” analogy - What’s In It For Me? I’m extremely transparent when I teach how business strategy and financials pair with culture and internal initiatives, and I always connect it back to what’s in it for the team if they make changes or grow with me. That bridge between “why this matters to the business” and “why this matters to you” keeps everyone engaged.

As I look ahead, my highest-leverage work will be sharing what I know with our clients, our partners, the industry, and our team. That means pouring more of my time into content, training, and speaking. Knowledge is free, and I have a lot of it to give.

I’m also deepening my own learning, particularly around AI. Every day I’m getting better at using it, and I want to be a thoughtful, ethical participant in its evolution. Part of that means supporting the next generation of workers, many of whom missed out on internships during COVID and now face a tough entry-level job market in the AI era. I see a huge opportunity for the trades to attract and retain this talent through coaching, skill development, and clear career paths. I want to be part of making that happen.

The lesson in all this? Your Lag changes as your role evolves. I can’t play the same game I was playing three years ago (or even three months ago) and expect to get the same results. Promoting myself means focusing on higher-leverage activities, empowering my leaders to lead, and creating more value than I could ever generate alone.

Steal This: As your role changes, so should your goals and lead measures. Holding onto old responsibilities may feel safe, but letting go creates space for you to lead at the next level.

10 Years in and Just Getting Started

Our journey to the Inc. 5000 list (again) wasn’t an accident. It’s the result of applying the 4 Disciplines of Execution not as a standalone framework, but as part of a living, breathing culture. When culture is the execution engine, you don’t just hit growth targets. You create a place where people want to stay, contribute, and grow.

Looking ahead, my focus is clear. I want to share what I know openly with our clients, our partners, the industry, and our team. I want to lead ethically in the AI era, support the next generation of talent, and advocate for the trades as a place where people can build meaningful, well-paying careers. I want to help create workplaces that we, ourselves, would be proud to work in, and I want to connect with more like-minded leaders who believe business can be done better.

If you’re a leader who’s blending culture and execution in your own way, I’d love to hear from you. Share your best strategies, your hard-won lessons, and your biggest wins. Bonus points if it involves tacos, construction metaphors, or Taylor Swift references.

Let’s keep learning from each other, because when we grow, our people grow, and so does the impact we can make.

And if you’re still reading this, a rising tide lifts all ships. We can ALL grow if you do.

Ready to Scale Without Losing What Makes Your Business Great?

At Builder Funnel, we know that hitting ambitious growth goals while protecting your culture isn’t easy... because we’ve lived it. The same 4DX strategies, cultural frameworks, and growth disciplines that helped us land on the Inc. 5000 list (again) are the ones we bring to our clients every day. Whether you’re a remodeler or custom home builder looking to generate consistent leads, streamline operations, or create a culture that can scale, we’ll help you build a foundation that lasts.

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