At 10-100 people, most companies don’t have a strategy problem.

They have an execution system problem.

In B2B SaaS and marketing agencies it’s the same pattern: everyone is busy, everyone is delivering, but the business is harder to steer than it should be. Priorities drift. Teams interpret urgency differently. Meetings multiply because they’re the only way to get alignment back.

At some point I realised I’d become the company’s operating system. If a priority wasn’t repeated by me in three different contexts, it didn’t happen. We even had elements of a system - quarterly planning, weekly leadership meetings, dashboards - but they were ad hoc and not joined up. Not company-wide. That’s when it clicked: tools aren’t an OS. A cadence is.

A simple operating system fixes that. Not more process. Just a repeatable way to:

• set priorities that actually stick
• align teams without talking it to death
• measure what’s working (and what isn’t) early
• surface issues while they’re still cheap to solve

I’ve rolled out OKRs in the past and seen the upside clearly. I’ve also seen how they can quietly pull teams toward the wrong behaviours. Based on that experience - and what I’ve seen work for scaling founders - I recommend EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) as the execution backbone for most 10-100 person companies.

One nuance: I haven’t implemented EOS end-to-end as a company-wide system yet. But I’ve done plenty of the component parts - quarterly planning, weekly leadership cadence, dashboards - and I’ve seen first-hand that doing them piecemeal isn’t the same as running a joined-up operating system. It looks like “maturity.” It doesn’t behave like one.

What I mean by a “company operating system”

A company operating system isn’t a tool. It’s the handful of routines that stop execution relying on heroics.

It answers the questions founders are dealing with every week:

• What are we prioritising this quarter?
• How do we reduce cross-team thrash and escalation?
• How do we know early what’s working - and what isn’t?
• How do we keep focus when pipeline, clients, and markets move?

Without an OS, your company still has one. It’s just informal: priorities decided in the loudest meeting, execution shaped by the latest escalation, and progress judged by sentiment and busyness.

That works at 10 people. It breaks at 50.

The OKR chapter: what it solved (and what it didn’t)

When I implemented OKRs, the biggest win was simple: alignment across teams, and clarity on each person’s priorities for the quarter.

In SaaS and agencies, misalignment isn’t usually dramatic. It’s polite divergence:

• Sales optimising for this quarter’s number
• Marketing optimising for measurable volume
• Product optimising for roadmap commitments
• Delivery/CS optimising for today’s fires

OKRs forced the quarter to become legible: what matters, who owns it, and what success means.

But here’s the bit people gloss over.

Key Results create gravity. And that gravity pulls teams toward what’s measurable. “Quantitative over qualitative” sounds academic - in reality it means you get less experimentation, less flexibility, and more work that looks good in a spreadsheet.

Patterns I’ve seen:

• The measurable becomes the mission (activity metrics crowd out judgement)
• Adaptability drops mid-quarter (pivoting starts to feel like failure)
• Without cadence, OKRs become quarterly theatre (set, forgotten, explained later)

The takeaway isn’t “OKRs are bad.” It’s this:

OKRs are a goal-setting framework. They are not, by themselves, an execution system.

The trap: rituals without a system

This is the trap scaling companies fall into.

Quarterly planning without weekly cadence becomes wishful thinking. Weekly leadership meetings without a scorecard become status updates. Dashboards without ownership become passive reporting.

None of these are bad. Piecemeal, they don’t compound.

A company operating system is what makes them reinforce each other.

Why EOS (as the execution backbone)

EOS appeals to me because it’s built around the mechanics of traction:

• a weekly cadence that drives decisions
• a short scorecard of leading indicators
• quarterly priorities with real ownership
• a consistent way to surface and solve issues

Not “more meetings.” Better ones. Not “more metrics.” The right ones.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Changing execution

1) A weekly scorecard (not a dashboard)

A scorecard is a weekly early warning system. It tells you you’re drifting before revenue or churn makes it obvious.

For B2B SaaS, examples (pick 10–15):

• New pipeline created; pipeline coverage (60–90 days)
• Win rate; sales cycle time; stage conversion (SQL → Opp → Closed)
• Activation rate; time to first value
• Weekly active usage of a key feature (or key action count)
• At-risk accounts (usage drop / renewal proximity / NPS flags)
• Support tickets per 100 customers (or response time)
• Onboarding cycle time / implementation backlog (if relevant)

For agencies, examples (pick 10–15):

• New pipeline by service line; proposals sent; proposal-to-close rate
• Gross margin (rolling); effective hourly rate (blended)
• Utilisation (billable %) by team
• Projects “at risk” (late/over budget/under-resourced)
• Scope change rate (how often you’re working for free)
• Cash collected / AR days
• Top accounts health (simple red/amber/green)

Rule of thumb: if it can’t be reviewed in 5-10 minutes, it’s not a scorecard. It’s a dashboard pretending to be useful.

2) Quarterly priorities (“Rocks”) that are owned and binary

The biggest failure mode is vague priorities (“improve marketing”) with no owner and no definition of “done.”

SaaS Rocks examples:

• ICP v2 + messaging refresh shipped and adopted across website/outbound
• Improve SQL → Opp conversion from X% to Y% (sustained 4 weeks)
• Reduce time-to-first-value from X days to Y days (median, 4 weeks)
• Churn risk system live + used weekly by CS
• Onboarding redesign shipped with activation uplift sustained

Agency Rocks examples:

• Package + price 1–2 flagship offerings (live + used in proposals)
• Improve gross margin from X% to Y% (rolling 4 weeks)
• Reduce “red” projects from X to Y (sustained 4 weeks)
• Resourcing cadence implemented + capacity forecast baseline established
• Scope control process adopted + tracked (change requests measured)

Rocks are how you stop saying yes to everything and then wondering why delivery suffers.

3) An issues list that prevents recurring problems becoming culture

EOS becomes valuable because issues don’t float around as background anxiety. They get named, prioritised, and solved.

Typical issues it flushes out:

B2B SaaS:

• Lead quality disputes (definition + handoff)
• Priorities changing weekly (decision hygiene)
• Churn surprises (leading indicators missing)
• Enterprise deals stalling (process + enablement)
• Shipping without adoption moving (outcome ownership)

Agencies:

• Selling bespoke work that can’t be staffed predictably (packaging)
• Thin margins despite busyness (scope + pricing discipline)
• Free work creeping in (scope control)
• Pipeline panic cycles (cadence + planning)
• Delivery issues hidden until escalation (ownership boundaries)

The point of an operating system is freedom, not control

When execution is predictable, you get freedom:

• freedom to innovate without chaos
• freedom to pivot based on evidence
• freedom from the founder being the operating system

OKRs helped me create alignment and priority clarity. But I’ve also seen that you can do the “right” rituals - planning, meetings, dashboards - and still not get the compounding effect if they aren’t joined up and company-wide.

That’s why EOS is my recommended execution backbone for founders in B2B SaaS and marketing agencies who feel the early symptoms of scale.