It’s all on you.
You need to be out making deals happen with investors, customers and partners. But the people you hired to solve problems and move things forward keep pulling you back into the day-to-day.
I help teams struggling to execute navigate an uncertain future.
Create a plan your people actually own.
You’ve tried to get your people to take ownership, but nothing works. Together, we’ll create a strategy everyone can run with.
- Everyone builds a bigger picture.
- People stop running to you.
- Progress feels less chaotic.
How do you get your people to take accountability?
Nothing’s getting done.
You’ve tried making it clear what has to happen. But every time you turn around, people are working in silos, building what they think is needed instead of what you promised customers and investors.
It feels like failure.
Your people are smart, but they aren’t delivering. And you can’t keep jumping in to fix everything. You start blaming yourself. You don’t want to be the reason the business falls apart.
Why this happens
People can’t take accountability when strategy is a moving target.
Your people can’t operate without you. In a fast-moving industry, the story changes every time you talk to customers or investors.
They only seem to care about the work in front of them. You’ve told them over and over, but without you watching what they’re doing and telling them what to do, the plan falls apart.
How I help
I’ve been where you are. You know you need a plan. If you write it yourself, nobody picks it up. If you ask your people to write it, it doesn’t get done. So we build it together.
- Spot when someone doesn’t get it, even when it seems like they do.
- Ask the questions nobody has asked you or your team.
- Show when people aren’t on the same page without blame.
- Build one plan with your key people, and keep it alive as things change.
What you get
Your people can finally say, “Now I get it. Here’s where I fit in.” Your team knows what’s going on and feels safe making their own decisions.
You get a written plan that helps you and your team understand what your customers value, what’s happening around your business, and how you plan to win. It shows what you know, what you think you know, and what you still have to figure out.
Hi, I’m Roy Naquin
I’ve spent my career managing high-reliability electronics systems integration programs for such organizations as NASA, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and L3.
What I’m really good at is taking information out of people’s heads and turning it into something usable: plans people can actually run with. Most people are afraid to ask questions they don’t already know the answer to. I’ll help you get the information out of everyone, and I’ll make sure I fully understand it and can translate it before I walk away.
Most of the time, I get brought in after things have already turned into a mess. I’ve learned the hard way how to find out what people really understand. Once we see how each person sees it, we can work through the pieces that don’t line up.
I’m most valuable when the strategy is obvious to you and still invisible to your people. A few weeks of planning now can save you months of cleanup.
How to work with me
Strategic Planning Sprint
6 weeks
$5K
Six sessions with you and your key people.
You get a written plan that puts your team on the same page about where you’re going and how you’ll win.
Customer Discovery Sprint
8 weeks
$15K
We talk to 5 to 10 of your customers, suppliers and partners to test what your plan is betting on.
You get requirements, risks and diagrams your team can build from.
Rescue Mission
90 days
From $50K
For when the plan is already moving and things are out of control. I come in and get everyone clear on what needs to happen.
Then I check the work as it comes in, so your team gets back on track.
FAQ
We paid for AI tools, so why aren’t people getting their work done?
Plenty of output is getting generated, but the real issues aren’t being solved. AI helps people build faster, but doesn’t help you make sense of the situation. People feed unfiltered information into the AI and it spits out an answer.
You need people to have insights, not feed a slot machine. To do that, they need to actually think. I help teams do the hard thinking that reframes their challenges into opportunities that prioritize solving the real problem.
Why do my people seem to be going in wildly different directions?
When people peel off, each person feeds their own assumptions and data points into their AI. The AI doesn’t know how the rest of the team sees the situation, so it builds solutions based on each person’s version of the problem. In meetings, everyone seems to be on the same page. But, they leave with completely different pictures of what needs to get done.
By the time people start turning in work, those misunderstandings turn into a tangled mess of deliverables that don’t fit together. You can’t completely stop this drift. However, getting clear on what gets fed into the models i.e. the starting point, and building a clear picture of what “done” looks like makes a difference.
My people are hitting their KPIs, so why isn’t the company moving forward?
Hitting a number won’t get you to the next level. Instead of looking at the big picture, people focus on gaming their scorecard. Dashboards tell you what happened. They don’t tell you whether it actually mattered or if customers even care. Real momentum comes from finding real problems, listening to what customers are saying, and giving your team room to learn.
Shouldn’t my team already know how to make a plan?
What most people think is planning is actually “strategy theater.” They take yesterday’s results and mash them into a slide deck that assumes an imaginary, predictable future. It might pass the sniff test in a board meeting, but it won’t prepare anyone for the surprises that inevitably jump out and bite you.
You have to do the hard work of thinking about different scenarios so your team notices early warning signs and knows when to change directions. From there, your job isn’t to hand out a static plan people read once (if you’re lucky). It’s choosing a clear direction and giving people the freedom to adapt as things happen.
How can I plan when I don’t have time to slow down?
You already have the time, but you’re letting your team put all their monkeys on your back. That “busy” often looks like endless meetings where people sit around wondering what to do next. Because they don’t know where the company is heading, they keep coming back to you to finish their work. You pick up their slack and become the bottleneck. By the end of the week you’re exhausted from doing everyone else’s work while your real priorities sit untouched.
The fix isn’t to slap a metric on people and watch them sink or swim. It’s giving them a clear map of where things are heading. Once they know where the lines are, you can finally put the monkeys back on their backs. They stop waiting to be told what to do and you stop thinking through their problems for them.
How can we plan when things are changing this fast?
Things are changing fast, and they aren’t slowing down anytime soon. This is exactly why traditional planning fails. When you try gathering more data to keep a fixed plan updated, you wind up paralyzed while everyone around you keeps moving. You can’t move fast when you’re busy updating policies and procedures.
Real strategic planning isn’t about creating a fixed plan based on scripted storylines. It’s about building a team that knows how to learn together in real time. Set clear expectations, run small tests that produce feedback, and update the organization’s goals as the situation plays out.