Three Finger Salute?

Cale: Alright, hey folks, Cale here today. I'm gonna do something a little bit different. I'm gonna be today showing a little bit more about control alt recover, you know, just just me talking through it, sharing why I why I'm doing this, where it came from, a little bit more detail about you know what control alt recover is about and and who I'm reaching out to help. and and why. Okay. You know, sort of the the product of of where this thing came from in my brain from the last, you know, you know, fifteen years or so. I've been asked, you know, several times by folks offline to dig into more detail, talking about again, you know, the offers and my my targets, if you will, and and you know how I really feel I can I can help people out. So we're gonna do that. So control alt recover is really nothing more than my attempt to take my experience and put it in a in a package where I can can help B2B SaaS organizations in that growth stage where they're fifty to two hundred people, they're in that series B funded stage, and so they're looking to scale and to grow and to get to the place where they can really seize the market but for various reasons they're they're getting stuck, They can't they can't execute against that strategy the way that they would want. And so that's where that's where I come in. what I've noticed over the last several years of my career is a series of signals about what's going on and where you'll see these kind of strategy blockers come up. one of the first is the strategy itself has moved on from where it originally started. especially in some of those small organizations where things are moving at a really rapid clip. things like the the governance, if there is any, or just the routines, the the patterns, the ways of doing business don't keep up with the strategy because the strategy is frankly in that place where it's either trying to do a fast follow the old throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. You know, you name it in that in that place in that scary time of startups life, right? another big one, and this is probably one that plagues most of the time, and you're gonna see this across any kind of business that, you know, it was started as the the love child of, you know, or the passion child of a person, a founder, right? So that person is still the system. That person, too many decisions, too much power, too much of the day-to-day is still running through that one person. So that's gonna be very difficult for that organization to scale. But at the same time, it's also gonna be very difficult for that organization to tell that person that they need to let go. Right? So you're gonna run into a a serious blocker there relatively quickly. the another one is, hey, look, the process is the wrong size. Well, we've got a situation where example that the example I provide here is hey, you've got what worked at thirty people, will not work, it's gonna create drag or friction or just completely shut things down when you get over one hundred, right? And so th we have to find out ways to scale both the organization, the processes, and those sorts of things that enable them to scale the business successfully, right? this is a funny one, sort of. you know this the companies or organizations will find themselves in situations where the status is always green. Well hey status is green, we've got no problems. No. The status could very well be just a a cover, either a misunderstanding, a purposeful obfuscation of the facts, whatever the case is in that situation. But you'll see all the time another pattern where we get decisions that can't get made and leaders can't make those decisions because they're either missing the data they need to make that decision, or the signals they're getting are mixed, and they're they're being told that things are on track, things are on target, and yet everything else that they're seeing in their common sense is telling them otherwise. so that is clearly a disconnect that's going to really hurt an organization to keep them from growing and scaling. and we see that one all too all too often. So the really the the sort of interesting situation about a thing like this is what we see as delays in either execution or growth or scaling or you know just just getting the job done. Very often the things we see that are visible are not really what's going on. And I see this drift, I see this blocking, I see this friction into panels primarily. I see it in w what I call that mechanical setting and I see it in the environment. And so it's the work systems, right? And it's the conditions and the organizational structure around it. So the work system is things like unclear decision rights. Who has the right to make a certain decision about big business or strategy or or needs that are going to move the needle or cost money? Right. if it's not clear who owns what or what the decisions are going to be for critical path items, you've got a problem with decision rights. Very frequent, very common, especially in organizations that are growing rapidly and growing with both internal and external hires, kind of thing, it's normal. It's painful, but it's not uncommon. wrong size governance is another one where either we don't have any governance or We have the wrong kind of governance. We've got folks who are trying to put in gates and trying to slow things down for their own reasons, whether it's for noble reasons or for control reasons or any other. That governance is not serving the need of the system it's trying to it's trying to you know govern. broken cadence and handoffs. Broken cadence here in this case is we don't know when what's happening is going to happen. We don't know when we're going to get a piece of work from this organization over a team over to ours inside the organization. So we're sitting and we're waiting on a predecessor before we can begin our work and and we're watching the clock tick on delivery. Or we don't know when the next steer code is going to be. We're not part of the communication management plan. You know, you name it. Excuse me. Very again, very common. It's just a sign of frankly place where the maturity of the of the governance and and the and the ways of doing business have just not caught up or kept kept up pace with the business itself. most of the time the other thing we'll deal with is in that mechanical sense is we're gonna deal with lagging indicators being measured versus leading indicators, when we see at the end of the quarter did we hit our number that we targeted on our way to that year end strategy? well, that's not gonna do you a lot of good. If your KPI in the middle of that quarter is not tied to something that you can measure right now you're gonna have a problem where you're always chasing the data to know if you hit it or not. not really a way to do business in a way that's going to allow you to grow and scale in a predictive way. couple of things here on the environmental side that that are they're pretty common sense and you see them all the time as well. I won't really drain them too much here, but you're you're gonna run into competing competing incentives, competing priorities. we oftentimes see sponsors beginning to check out whether it's a sponsor for a particular initiative, a particular product, an offer, or a sponsor who brought funding. or I might even say that at some point you lose the attention and the and the support of your champion. that's bad. I clearly. political gridlock, very common, very normal. I think we all hate it, but politics really do come into play across the board. And so The unclear decision rights are not quite the same as authority. So in this case, it's who has the right to make a decision, Where does the right to hire and fire lie, for example? who's got the right in the case of capacity gaps to do that hiring? who's the person who will veto or can veto getting resources on on the table? And then that of course would cause some political gridlock there, right? And it might all be tied back to you know things like competing incentives or the person who was the adult in the room, if you will, has has stepped away. and so the output of all that, once you measure and you find out how far you're how far you've drifted from your strategy, or just how how blocked and and friction filled you are, the leadership at that point has a choice. They can start working through and chipping away at the things that are causing them to drift away from the strategy and keeping them from growing or scaling. they can literally just stop the whole thing, right? Or they can, you know, continue along, you know, continue along like they have been and just take their chances. obviously in a situation, most situations you don't really want to stop what you're doing and and can the whole thing unless you've got some more cash waiting for you in some you know bag somewhere. you've got to work with what you've got and you've got to get it back on track. When I find myself engaging with clients in this kind of situation, I see it, I see them coming to me or me finding them in one of three paths. Right? We've got a customer or a client coming in and they're on a certain journey coming from this organization that we were just describing. I could have a situation where if I'm being reached out to by an executive who's wants to sponsor someone to come in and help them recover, that person has got the organizational wherewithal and the purview to bring a person in and they're going to they're going to have me come in and we're going to look and see at that high level what is keeping them from hitting their strategy and what's keeping them from from really getting it done. that could take the cake could take the shape of things like workshops, working through some of my program recovery process, and even having me come in and engage in in short stints in a in a fractional support type scenario perfectly feasible thing to do if you're coming in as that particular kind of client on that path. another thing I'll I'll see is a person, let's call them like a peer of mine where they're coming in in that, you know, that director, senior director, they're coming in that that level where they've got some authority, but they've got constraints on that authority and they've and they're being their ability to deliver is is being hampered. and they just don't necessarily know quite why yet. I wouldn't have them take a look at the field guide and get a sense and run and run a drift check, which is what we were sort of talking about there with those environmental and mechanical factors, capture you know some very real metrics on where they're going wrong and where things are stuck. And then they can make a decision based on what they find, you know, from those from those outputs. They can then dig into my strategy alignment playbook either with me in a guided way, or they can or they can dig into it, you know, buy it and dig into it themselves and and work their way through the the processes and the steps that get them to a solution. and I'm also in a situation where I would I put myself in a place where I will train them on how to apply these techniques and these and these standards and these approaches that I've built again from, you know. a long from long years of experience. And then lastly, we've got a situation we we've had situations I've you know I've seen and engaged where you've got a person who they are stuck they are constrained in that ability to lead. They've got a leadership capacity constraint. Either they are in above their heads, let's say they are a first time leader and they want to get to that you know that senior manager middle you know mid management level and they don't quite know what to do to get there and then to expand their ability to to lead and influence. Or they're in a situation where they are being overlooked for a director, let's say they've got all the boxes ticked and for whatever reason they keep getting passed over. I have that same sort of diagnostic approach that I use for organizations. I've got that same sort of intake and and measure process that I help guide that person through to help them figure out, hey, when I talk to Cale, which of the of the sort of predefined paths that he's built over the years that he that he's got ready to help me with, is he going to ask me to to follow, right? Or do I want to talk with him about putting together my own sort of choose your own adventure approach? The point here is at the end of the day, all of that is captured in what I've been calling my leadership operating system. And that's where I will literally over about a six week period walk them through hand in hand in a guided way, walk them through how to get through each of these particular modules that show them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and to and basically to help start chipping away at either the barriers they've got to being promoted, the barriers to getting to the next level, or you know, really finding out why they're not as effective as they would like to be in their leadership capacity. the the thing that makes me and what I bring to the table different than w what you would see in some of these larger consulting practices that we're all familiar with, you know, the the big four and and McKenzie's and all you know, all those guys, is a couple things. I'm not coming in or wanting to come in and spend months or years embedded in an organization. I don't want to become indispensable even for a period of time at several hundred dollars an hour. I want to come in with my operator experience so I know immediately what I can do to help them help themselves get unstuck. Okay. I'm coming in using that experience I've got from leading enterprise work under pressure. But I'm not going to embed myself in the organization. I come in and I ask them, I work with them to help them identify and isolate the issues in both that mechanics and that environment in those mechanics and environment settings we were talking about, in that drift check, just to really kind of get a sense again, an audit check and an audit of where they're at so they know how to how to proceed. What they're going to get from me again is a verdict. They're going to get my professional opinion based on experience and based on signals and based on on just basically having been there. They're gonna get a verdict from me on what they should do to proceed to to get healthy again in that organizational sense. They're not just gonna get some kind of report where I spit back at them a bunch of things they already know. I want to leave behind for them or leave behind with them. them knowing what they need to stop, what they need to start doing, or what they need to continue doing that works, right? that classic stop, start, continue that we talked about. The as most people have probably figured out by now by working with me in the past or seeing and during this little chat here, a big part of what I bring to the table that is a differentiator is the fact that I teach folks how to work through things that block them the strategy recovery process without me being there. My goal is to make it so that, hey, I come in, I help them solve the problem, I teach them how to do it, and I leave them with the knowledge, the tools, and the techniques so that they can do it the rest of their lives and the rest of their professional careers by themselves. They don't need to re-engage me. They don't need to have me come in for six months and drive the team or bail them out. They certainly don't need to but to pay for one of those white glove you know big consulting companies that come in and charge way too much money f to tell you what to do. let's give them let's give them that fishing pole and let's let them let them lead themselves to success once they know how. And again, that's just based on the number of years I've been doing this, how I've been l using my experience in learning and development in the corporate and the university sides. you know, in Fortune fifty SAS, in it back way back in the United States Air Force as well. You know, this experience of mine has a lot of roots and goes way back. anyway, there's really not much more I want to share about control out recover today. just wanted to kind of hit the high points and and help people understand a little bit more about where this came from and and why I feel so strongly and why I'm pushing to get this business off the ground. I think the one thing I as I'm talking, the one thing that kind of popped into my head was this all came to me in a in something of a of a of a a rush at one time during the Christmas break that we just had at the end of 2025. I was sitting in what is now the family property, if you will, in rural Maine, left to the family trust by my uncle, my cousin's dad, and you know, basically the guy who has owned that piece of property for the last, you know, thirty-five or y years or so, and a piece of property that's been in the family for over one hundred years, 120 years, let's say. I'm sitting in that I'm sitting in that that house you know, looking at a lot of old things, looking at a lot of new things and just really taking stock and thinking about who's gone and who's been there and what am I gonna do with what's left of my life and so forth. And I was thinking about life and work and everything else. And as I was preparing myself mentally for getting started with two thousand twenty six, I started asking myself, what did I know? What was I going to do with that knowledge and how was I going to bring it to people? And that's when the the the core element of control alt recover came about. You know, I told myself, look, as a as a as a Gen X guy who grew up using computers, you know, the the idea of a of a reboot, control alt you know control alt delete, you know, hey that's a that's a perfectly good metaphor, but I didn't want my customers to think that they or my clients think that they had to completely reboot their strategies and start over when If all they've got to do is take a look and see where they where they are and why they're stuck, they may find that they can make what I would call tactical and practical fixes to then get themselves back on track without having to completely throw the thing out and start over and burn through more cash in the process. Anyway, so that's that's it in a nutshell. if you have any questions after you've watched this particular episode with without without Mindy on it, you know, reach out to me, give me a give me an email, Cale at control altrecover dot com and I'd love to talk with you more about this here. All right. Thank you, thank you.