Cosmo Tech | The Decision Twin Platform for Supply Chain, Finance & Asset Leaders at Fortune 500 Scale | Simulate Tomorrow. Decide Today.

I specialize in the messy middle of B2B SaaS scaling—taking companies from erratic growth to a disciplined, high-performance revenue engine.

Most sales teams don’t fail because they lack talent; they fail because of ambiguity.
When forecasts can’t be trusted, pipelines move only through founder heroics, and managers report activity instead of owning outcomes, you don’t need another playbook—you need an operating system.

My operating philosophy: Cadence | Ownership | Process

I install a repeatable flywheel of operational excellence:

Cadence
A rigorous Rhythm of Business—daily, weekly, and monthly operating cadence that surfaces execution risk early, before it becomes a board-level surprise.

Ownership
Managers own outcomes, not just activity. Forecasts are built bottom-up so leadership can commit without caveats.

Process
Qualification and execution are standardized before adding headcount, ensuring hiring is tied to capacity and real revenue impact—not hope.

The proof (Ekahau — SVP, Global Sales, 2019–2024)
	•	Revenue: Scaled $25M → $65M ARR in five years
	•	EBITDA: Increased $7M → $32M (margins ~20% → ~50%)
	•	Team: Built a 130-person global organization while reducing per-employee cost 25%

Selected wins
	•	Healthentic: Doubled ACV ($5M → $10M) and drove 10× pipeline growth through GTM transformation
	•	ControlCase: Delivered 34% YoY growth and 300% expansion revenue growth

Currently

Available for VP of Sales or Fractional GTM leadership with B2B SaaS companies $5M–$30M ARR. I also lead SalesGSS (revenue operating frameworks) and DigitalRegIntel (regulatory intelligence for AI/fintech).

The Senator perspective

Two terms as a Washington State Senator taught me the value of high-stakes negotiation and public accountability. I bring that same discipline to sales: clear ownership and execution when the pressure is real.

“Steve is ‘Instant Offense’ for sales—rare and valuable. World-class at creating strategic, data-driven sales teams.”
— Jeff O’Mara, CEO (Healthentic) / GM (Ekahau)

Steve Litzow

If revenue per employee is flat while headcount rises, you’re not scaling. You’re diluting.

Most $10M–$50M ARR teams are measuring the wrong thing.
They celebrate hiring.

Elite teams watch revenue per employee.

Here’s what 2026 is quietly proving:
Growth doesn’t stall because opportunity disappeared.

It stalls because attention fragmented.
New ICP.
New vertical.
New pricing model.
New feature set.
New partnership.
All rational.
All defensible.

Collectively? Expensive.

Revenue per employee isn’t a finance metric.
It’s a focus metric.

Bootstrapped SaaS companies at $1M–$3M ARR average ~$110K per employee.

Equity-backed peers average ~$94K.

Capital didn’t create the gap.

Discipline did.

Fragmentation increases decision latency.

Decision latency expands Signal-to-Action Time.

And once SAT expands, velocity stops compounding.
You don’t lose because you’re wrong.

You lose because complexity expands faster than discipline.

Pressure test your system:
• If you asked three reps to define your ICP, would they say the same thing?
• Do your top 20 deals look similar — or random?
• Has revenue per employee improved in the last two quarters — or are you hiring into flat output?
• When was the last time you killed an initiative?

Elite teams don’t run more plays.
They run fewer — with intensity.

Focus multiplies revenue per employee.
Complexity multiplies meetings.

Week 7 of the 2026 Operating Series.

Link in comments.

VP of Sales | Scaled $25M → $65M ARR | Operating Discipline for Growth & Scrutiny

FinCEN just made compliance easier.

That’s exactly why your documentation burden increased.

On February 13, FinCEN eliminated beneficial ownership verification at every account opening.

The same day, SEC Chairman Atkins testified that current crypto guidance isn’t “future-proof” without legislation.

That’s not regulatory confusion.

It’s the new supervisory model.

Fewer procedural checkboxes.
Higher expectations for documented judgment.

When regulators give you discretion, they’re not giving you a pass.

They’re giving you a decision to defend.

24–36 months from now, no one will ask:

“Did you follow the rule that no longer exists?”

They’ll ask:

• Why did you reduce controls?
• What risk assessment supported that?
• Who reviewed it?
• Where is the record?

Relief does not eliminate supervisory liability.

It reallocates it.

This week’s DRI Supervisory Brief covers:

→ FinCEN CDD relief and the judgment gap it creates
→ SEC-CFTC coordination that lacks statutory permanence
→ FinCEN’s data-driven enforcement model
→ EU AI Act entering pre-enforcement phase

Link in comments.

No new rule last week.

That’s the risk.

On Feb 13, FinCEN quietly operationalized its whistleblower portal.

Now AML, AI governance, and digital asset supervision gaps can be reported directly to enforcement — before an exam ever starts.

This changes the timeline.

Enforcement is no longer tied to regulatory cycles.

It’s tied to internal observation.

An email.
A Slack message.
A deferred monitoring upgrade.

Those can now become time-stamped federal evidence.

The real shift isn’t rulemaking.

It’s attribution infrastructure.

When regulators look back 24–36 months from now, the question won’t be:

“Did you know the rule?”

It will be:

“Can you prove you supervised in real time?”

Documentation is no longer defensive.

It’s existential.

Full breakdown in this week’s Brief. (Link in comments.)

US enforcement is accelerating through whistleblower infrastructure.

EU regulation is accelerating through statutory documentation and logging requirements.

Different systems.

Same burden.

You must be able to prove:

• What management knew
• When it knew it
• How it assessed applicability
• What action (or deferral) followed

Frameworks don’t fail companies.

Missing chronology does.

Your deal didn’t lose to a competitor.

It died in a conference room.

40–60% of B2B deals end in “no decision.”

Not lost.

Just never aligned.

At $10M–$50M ARR, most teams still sell to a champion.

But the real sale is to the committee.

If a deal is single-threaded beyond day 45, your forecast isn’t aggressive.

It’s structurally optimistic.

This week’s issue breaks down how elite teams prevent ghost pipeline.

Comment PLAYBOOK and I’ll send it.

If your business is making money but still isn’t delivering the upside you expected, you’re likely at an inflection point, not a failure.  Many leaders of established, growing businesses reach a stage where revenue is strong, the company is multi-million, and yet the business still depends too heavily on them to function well. Decisions stall without you. Execution varies. Cash flows, but never quite settles.You didn’t do anything wrong.Growth simply exposed what never fully moved into the system.This is where symptomatic fixes stop working.More sales, new tools, or another leadership program won’t transform a business where judgment, decision rights, and accountability are still concentrated at the top. The result is effort without relief, an itch you can’t scratch no matter how hard you work.That’s where my work begins.I work with leaders of established small and mid-market businesses who are ready to move from personal oversight to organizational reliability.  Performance, people, and profit no longer depend on the owner being everywhere at once.The work is strategic and practical: seeing the system as it actually operates, diagnosing what’s constraining performance, and designing corrections that fit the reality of your business. Nothing is added for the sake of growth, scale, or sophistication. Some of that work we do together. Some is implemented directly. Some requires specialist expertise brought in deliberately for speed and impact.This is not coaching, motivation, or incremental optimization.It’s business strategy at the intersection of performance, people, process, and profit, applied at the moment where growth alone is no longer enough.Most leaders begin by getting clear on what’s really holding their business in place.From there, the right path becomes obvious.If you’re at that point, you’ll know how to start.(Clarity Call available in Featured.)

Frances Strickland

Why does this persist as teams and complexity grow?
 
Because informal decision paths feel efficient — until scale or absence exposes the hidden cost.

“We’re fast because we’re flexible.”

“People just know how things work.”

“It’s quicker to decide in the moment.”

And for a while, it is.

Informal decisions work when context is shared. 
But as operations grow, context spreads unevenly.

Not everyone knows who decides what.
Work pauses while decisions wait for clarity and small delays start compounding into operational drag.

Low volume hides the dependency.

Higher volume reveals it.

And when the person who “just knows” isn’t available, momentum slows — not because others aren’t capable, but because authority never fully moved with the work.

What felt like speed starts to feel fragile.

What felt like flexibility starts to look like dependency.

And over time, that dependency becomes a quiet cost — felt in slower execution, heavier operations, and margin pressure that’s hard to explain from the numbers alone.



#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

Frances Melvina Strickland 

Turning operational complexity into predictable performance and profit for SMB CEOs

Why does this keep happening?

Because operational discipline rarely grows at the same pace as revenue.

Work expands quickly.
Structure adapts slowly.

At five clients, informal coordination works.
At fifteen, those same habits introduce delay, rework, and hidden cost.

Nothing fundamentally changed.
Volume increased.

The inefficiency that once absorbed a few hundred dollars now consumes 
thousands not through failure, but repetition.

Growth disguises this shift.

Revenue rises, so expanding expenses feel justified.
Hiring accelerates.
Tools multiply.
Overhead accumulates.

But economic control often remains unchanged.

Businesses scale activity before they scale decision clarity, process ownership, 
and delivery discipline.

Growth does not improve efficiency.
It stress-tests existing operations.


Revenue increases.
Complexity increases with it.
Profit sits between the two, under pressure.



#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

Strategic Advisor to Founders & CEOs Navigating Organizational Complexity | Leadership, Structure & Profitability Systems | Creator of Profit Pulse

Business activity increased yet pressure feels unchanged.

Revenue improved.
Stress remained.

More customers arrived.
Financial tension stayed.

Growth feels heavier instead of easier.
You’re unsure where the improvement went.

The work expanded.
The team grew.
Sales increased.

But relief didn’t follow.

What changed wasn’t demand.
It was the complexity.

Processes that worked at smaller volumes begin to strain.
Coordination increases.
Costs accumulate quietly.

Growth doesn’t immediately create profit.
It reveals how the business actually runs under pressure.


Growth exposes inefficiency before it produces profit.


#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

Revenue improved Stress remained

Episode 15: At Face Value - High Stakes Communications

Join me on Tapped In with Verolead Biz Solutions as I speak with Joseph McGuire, founder of Clearsight Communications, about the subtle communication signals that shape trust, credibility, and leadership presence.

Together, we explore how understanding these nuances can strengthen (and sometimes complicate) high-stakes interactions with customers, partners, and teams.

And stay and watch Joseph demonstrate his facial analysis approach live by reading me in real time.

Frances Melvina Strickland and 7 other attendees

Episode 15: At Face Value - High Stakes Communications

Revenue risk rarely announces itself while work is happening.

By the time revenue pressure shows up in the numbers, the problem has been building for weeks.

Activity continues.
Teams stay busy.
But something is quietly off.

Not wrong enough to stop work.

Just enough to feel slightly on edge.

Then the report arrives.

And what feels sudden has been accumulating the entire time.

Surprises show up late, not suddenly.


#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

Helping CEOs of operationally complex businesses build predictable performance & profit | Creator of Profit Pulse Diagnostic

Revenue risk builds quietly before it shows

Why don’t leaders see revenue risk forming early?

Because most businesses notice outcomes, not the conditions creating them.

“We review the numbers regularly.”
“Nothing looked wrong last month.”
“If there was a problem, we’d see it.”

But outcomes lag.

By the time they appear in reports, the conditions behind them have been active for weeks.

Work still moves.
Deals still progress.
Nothing feels urgent enough to question.

Small delays accumulate quietly longer conversations, slower responses, momentum that feels slightly heavier.

Revenue reports eventually reflect those shifts.
They don’t reveal when they began.

So risk feels sudden, even when it wasn’t.

 
#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

Expansion conversations still assume geography is the challenge.

Increasingly, that isn’t what leadership teams are actually encountering.

The friction is systemic.

Exploring this in this week’s Substack essay.

Link in comments.

There was a period in my career when I believed the problem was me.

The work was complex.
The expectations were high.
Nothing appeared broken from the outside.

Yet execution always felt heavier than it should.

Decisions rerouted.
Authority shifted depending on the moment.
Progress paused while alignment was re-established again and again.

Nothing failed dramatically.

But throughput moved slower than the demand required.
Energy drifted into coordination instead of output.
Time went to clarifying authority rather than advancing results.

So I adapted.

I learned how decisions actually moved.
Where approval truly lived.
How risk was informally managed.

From the outside, it looked like professionalism.

Inside, it was compensation.

Work required constant self-monitoring instead of clean execution.
Momentum depended more on navigating relationships than moving the work itself.

That compensation carries a cost.

Cycle times stretch.
Work queues stack.
Revenue conversion slows.
Margins absorb friction no one formally designed.

Eventually I moved into a different environment.

The work was still demanding.
The pace was still real.

But authority was explicit.
Decision rights were clear.
Responsibility and accountability aligned.
Execution felt lighter immediately.

Not because people worked harder. 
Not because mindset shifted.

Because decision flow matched the operating design.

That experience reshaped how I see organizations.

Many performance slowdowns aren’t effort problems.
They are structural ones.

When authority lives in relationships instead of systems, people compensate to keep work moving.

Over time, that compensation becomes invisible overhead.

And businesses produce exactly what they are designed to produce —
including the speed of their revenue
and the weight of their margins.

Professional headshot of a business advisor in a navy blazer and muted rose blouse, facing the camera with a calm, composed expression against a softly blurred office background.

What began as a service discussion became an advisory moment.

On the surface the topic was performance pressure.
The real issue was something else entirely.

The company was navigating a transition.

Patents had expired.
New competitors were entering quickly.
 
Customers were demanding stronger value justification while pricing pressure increased.

Historically, they managed costs by moving labor expenses into Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) to protect overhead.

It worked, until it didn’t.

At one leadership meeting, the CEO announced cuts.

Eyes rolled.
Low groans moved around the room.

Not resistance.
Fatigue.

Were they reducing cost — or reducing capability?

As the CEO described the situation, a pattern became clear.

There was no consistent way to implement decisions across the business.
Only principles used to decide that action was necessary.

Execution depended on memory that lived inside individuals.
If certain people left, parts of the business would stall.

And beneath it all sat a deeper issue.
They had a fractured selling system.

The business structured customer relationships centrally around a clear strategy.

Execution in the field followed strong local autonomy shaped by operational realities that were often minimized.

Strategy and execution were both moving.
They just were not translating.

When one district sales leader confidently outlined how to meet the target,  no one challenged it.

Not because people agreed, but because the broader implications were hard to see in the moment.

Polite agreement filled the room.

They communicated and decided.
Shared understanding of consequences never traveled.

Systems rarely fail because people disagree.
They fail because the meaning of decisions changes as decisions travel.

Alignment isn’t agreement.
Alignment is knowing what a decision will cost and who must carry it afterward.

As February closes, it’s worth asking:
Where did conversation feel aligned while clarity lagged?

Two professionals seated at a conference table in a modern office, engaged in conversation with notebooks and coffee cups in front of them.

If risk only appears in reports, it’s already operational.

Most leaders believe visibility equals control.

“We track our numbers.”
“We know where we stand.”

But knowing where you stand today doesn’t tell you where momentum is heading.

Reports show outcomes.
Outcomes reflect conditions that were already forming weeks earlier.

So when risk finally appears in the numbers, it feels new even though execution has been shifting for some time.

Risk doesn’t start in spreadsheets.
It starts in small changes to how work moves forward.

If the first signal is a number on a page, the pattern has already taken hold.

If this challenges how you think about visibility, some leaders choose to talk 
it through not to solve it immediately, just to see it more clearly. 

Link in comments.



#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

For one week, notice where execution slows not because the work is unclear, but because decisions have to stop and reroute.

Watch how often progress waits for a checkpoint that isn’t built into the system.

Projects pause.

Work queues up.
Costs keep running while decisions wait.

At lower volume, this feels manageable.
At higher volume, it becomes operational drag.

The issue isn’t capability.

It’s dependency built into how decisions move through the business.

When authority lives in relationships instead of structure, growth adds friction faster than it adds output.

Nothing looks broken on the surface.

But throughput slows, timelines stretch, and momentum feels heavier than it should.

Sometimes the most disruptive realization isn’t that people need to work harder, it’s that the business is producing exactly what it was designed to produce.


And that design often stays invisible until scale puts pressure on it.



#strategy #business #creativity #innovation #richbutbrokenomorewithfran

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The Battle

Steve Litzow

Frances Strickland

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taplio

The Battle

Steve Litzow

Frances Strickland

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Steve Litzow's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreFrances Strickland's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSteve Litzow's LinkedIn Performance