We cannot keep this rhythm for another 20 years,” sighed Vincent Mioc, Wildvertising’s CEO. Too much firefighting. Too many missed opportunities. Running hard, but not moving forward.

If that sounds familiar, keep reading.

Today I want to share how one of my clients broke through years of stagnation – and in just two years reached 68% revenue growth, 133% EBITDA growth, and nearly doubled their team.

Vincent and his co-founder Benoit Galand had built a great business over 15 years. But they had hit a growth ceiling, unable to capture the opportunities they knew were there.

The bottlenecks

Like many successful founders, they had become their own biggest bottleneck – because they had never upgraded their management approach as the business grew. Three main issues were holding them back:

• Lack of talent in key positions – so they were doing too much themselves: heading business development, managing clients and projects, controlling quality.
• No clarity on the client problem they solved best (“we can solve whatever problems clients throw at us”), or what made them unique in the eyes of their core customer.
• No shared vision, no clear plan to get there, and a lack of accountability to follow through.

First: get the team right

Talent is the #1 growth lever. For Vincent and Benoit, unlocking it required four things: hiring the right people, learning to delegate, developing the team they already had, and growing as leaders themselves.

Right people, right seats.

The first thing we worked on was one specific hire: an account director. Someone who would take client relationships off the founders’ plates – a profile they had never brought in before.

It sounds straightforward. It was not. The role was expensive. And after ten years of managing every client relationship themselves, letting go was not a skill Vincent could just switch on. It is something you have to decide to do, learn to trust, then practice under pressure – often when the stakes are high and the temptation to step back in is real.

Delegating without abdicating.

The hardest part was not finding the right person. It was changing his own behavior – learning to delegate, to let go, and to hold people accountable for their results. It took repetition, discomfort, and a mirror to stay on the right track.

That hire happened. Then another. Then another – and each one bought back something the founders had not had in years: time.

Developing leaders from within.

In parallel, the leadership team started paying closer attention to the people already on their team. Who was ready for a bigger challenge? Who needed honest feedback to get there? Over time, people stepped up, took on more responsibility, and grew into management roles – freeing up even more of the founders’ time.

One example stands out. Benjamin Biemmi, a junior partner, emerged as a natural candidate for CEO – and we started preparing him for when that day comes. Over two years, his growth was remarkable. Like many senior leaders, he had to confront deeply ingrained habits – eg the instinct to keep everyone happy, the discomfort of difficult conversations. Over time, he got significantly better at holding people accountable, giving tough feedback, and leading with clarity rather than consensus.

Increasing leadership effectiveness.

And the senior leaders themselves grew in the process. They started having the honest, uncomfortable conversations they had been avoiding – and made better business decisions as a result.

Second: find out which client problem you solve best

A few years before we started working together, Vincent and Benoit did a prospecting tour in Asia. Two weeks. Meeting after meeting. Polite, engaged prospects – and almost nothing to show for it. Two weeks of their lives, gone.

Why? Their presentation was a collection of great cases for great clients – but it did not answer the only question a prospect is really asking: do you really understand my problem – including the part I may not even be able to articulate myself – and can you solve the root of it?

Every client comes to you with a problem. But most problems have two layers. The surface problem is rational and easy to articulate (eg “I need an ad campaign to grow sales x%”). The root problem is emotional – and the client is not always fully aware of it, and will rarely name it. The companies that identify and solve that second layer win.

In Wildvertising’s case, the root problem was this: their clients wanted to look great internally, grow their business line, and advance their careers. No client walks into a meeting and says: “help me get promoted.” But that was the real problem – and Wildvertising had been solving it for years without fully realizing it.

Wildvertising’s differentiating strength was not ad campaigns. It was internal communication: helping brand leaders win the battles that determine which products get launched and which end up on retailers’ shelves – whether fought inside their own organization, or with distribution partners.

Once they discovered this, everything changed. As Benoit put it: “For the first time in 15 years, we have a clear positioning. Before, clients did not know where to place us. Now, what opens doors is the fact that we truly understand our clients’ problems, and how to solve them.”

Where before prospects were polite but noncommittal, now they were enthusiastic. One prospect said something neither Vincent nor Benoit had ever heard before: “I finally found the agency that can do what I really need.”

The pitch also stopped being a gut-feeling tool only the founders could use. Employees who had never developed new business on their own could now walk into a meeting – and come back with a request for quote.

Third: build accountability as a system, not as a character trait

Lack of accountability is the single most common growth obstacle I see in founder-led and family-owned companies. It often looks like this: people make commitments with great intentions – but the day-to-day swallows them whole.

Accountability is not a character trait. It is a system: a multi-year action plan broken into quarterly priorities, regular progress tracking, and weekly leadership meetings where commitments are reported and course corrections decided.

That is what we built. It replaced the heroic cycle – the crisis, the 14-hour days, the last-minute save – with something far more effective: a steady, systematic rhythm that moved the company forward every single month.

And someone asking, every single month, without fail: where are you on this? Not in a punishing way. But tenaciously enough that the question could not be ignored. It sounds trivial. In practice, it bridges the gap between a smart plan and actual results.

From stagnation to rapid growth

Two years in – after years of stagnation: 68% revenue growth, 133% EBITDA growth, and a team that nearly doubled in size.

But behind those numbers is a more important story. Vincent and Benoit stopped being the bottleneck in their own company. They learned to delegate – and to make the tough people decisions they had been avoiding. They got clear on the client problem they solve best – and built an accountability system to ensure follow-through. And for the first time in years, they could focus on growing the business – instead of being consumed by it.

And as Vincent put it: “We would not have been able to do this without Xavier. He forced us to have the conversations and reflections we were avoiding. Without Xavier, we would have taken the comfortable path and kept doing what we were doing.”

The work was not magic. It required a clear methodology, hard conversations, and consistent follow-through – with someone holding up a mirror, and refusing to let go of the priorities that mattered.

Want to hear Vincent tell the story in his own words? Watch the full interview here.

What about you?

If something in this story sounds familiar – the growth ceiling, the unsustainable firefighting, the business opportunities you are not quite capturing – I have two slots open in my schedule right now.

Not ten. Two.

If you want to grow faster and with less pain, reply to this email or book a call to explore whether we are a fit.

 

Vincent Mioc and Benoit Galand co-founded Wildvertising, a communication agency specializing in the fragrance and cosmetics industry, with offices in Belgium and Switzerland, and clients across Europe, the US, and Asia.

 

I work with growth-minded CEOs who are frustrated by the way their business is growing; often they spend their days fighting fires – typically a sign that their company has outgrown their management approach. I know the feeling: I have been in their shoes when I was running a business that we turned around from sales decline to double-digit business growth.

As a business coach my passion is to help leadership teams define their actionable business growth strategy, create a culture of accountability and effective strategy execution, and become better leaders – so they can grow faster and with less pain. I work with clients in the US and in Europe (mostly in Belgium, The Netherlands, and France)

If you too want to grow faster and with less pain, contact me now: Xavier@AmbroseGrowth.com.

“My company has lots of potential, but I just feel my employees are not engaged. If I don’t push, nothing seems to happen. I’m working night and day and we’re still missing 40% of our targets. I once dreamed of being a firefighter, I guess that dream has come true. All I do is put out fires, I have no time to focus on my business.”

Sound familiar? CEOs and leadership teams can change this picture, it’s all about accountability. Creating a fierce culture of accountability starts with the CEO and leadership team.

Why is accountability important?

Accountability is about owning a problem. You want employees to behave as if they own the piece of business that they are running. When you are accountable for a specific result, you will do whatever it takes to achieve it – and you would like your team to perform this way as well.

Carlos Brito, the CEO of brewing company AB Inbev, summarizes his views on accountability in these words: “We always compare that to a rental car: you drive a rental car in a different way than your own car. With a rental car someone else will live with the consequences of your driving. With your car, you know that it will be yours the next days, months, and years, and you know that you will be living with the consequences of your driving. Employees who behave like owners are here for the long term, and they will live with the consequences of their decisions – good or bad – and that builds a great company.”

Why am I having accountability issues?

Accountability issues are very common among growing companies. When you founded your company, you were personally accountable for everything. As your company grew you started delegating the responsibilities for some results – e.g. production, customer service, or sales. However, you may not have created the communication channels required to hold your teams accountable. Why would you? You didn’t need any of this yourself, and yet you grew your business successfully. Why would these smart managers need anything different?

For one, your employees are not you. If they were, they would not be working for you: they would start their own business. Second, your company is now more complex than we you started: it has more people involved, and all these people now need to be on the same page. Third, when you started your company with a few employees, you could be on top of each of them and had short communication lines: you knew what everybody was doing, all the time. Now that your company has more employees it is impossible for you to manage them the same way: this would soak up all your time.  This is exactly why you need to put a system in place that will achieve what you want (ie create accountability), without you spending all your time on it.

In the book “Creating a Culture of Accountability” Gravitas Impact business coach Mark Green describes ways to increase your team’s accountability. This article outlines five of them

1. Lead by example

Like many aspects related to company culture, accountability starts with you and your leadership team. In order to create a culture of accountability you have to model the behaviors that you want to see in your organization. When it comes to accountability the rule is simple: when you make a commitment as a leader, you have to keep it. If you don’t, why should anyone else be interested in doing so? You can’t complain that employees miss their deadlines if you are occasionally late as well. As a CEO “all eyes and ears within your business are focused on you. What you say and what you do are invisibly and constantly observed, scrutinized and evaluated as your managers and employees are looking for clues as to how they should behave,” explains Mark Green.

Leading by example is not only about you sticking to your commitments, but also about your expectations from your team – and your behavior when your managers don’t meet your expectations. If your team members notice that there are no consequences for missing targets, why would they try their best? Similarly, if you tolerate one of your team members to produce poor results, why would other team members feel pressured to produce quality? When you hold your team to a higher standards, you are sending a strong signal across the organization.

2. Have the right people on the right seat

Without the right people on the right seat, nothing of what you can do will significantly increase accountability. The key question is: would you enthusiastically rehire everybody on your team? I advise my clients to assess employees on two dimensions; performance and adherence to company values. You will find more information on how to use this tool in this article.

Once you have the right people on your team you need to clarify their area of accountability. This is less obvious than it looks. The key question is: Who is accountable for each of the key functions in your company? As Mark Green explains “the exercise often reveals that there isn’t a single individual accountable for each function. When more than one person is “accountable”, nobody is accountable. It is easy to make assumptions that things will get done, but when there is not a designated person to account for a particular result, chances are, it is not going to happen. In this kind of environment, it is also easy to point fingers – Bob thought Mary would handle it, and vice versa. Other times, you’ll discover that a particular role hasn’t been filled by anyone at all; it is just implied that it will somehow be handled. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t!”

3. Clarify priorities

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” wrote best-selling author Stephen Covey. “Individuals or organizations with too many priorities have no priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of significance,” says Verne Harnish in his book “Scaling Up.” Focus on a small number of priorities that will have the biggest impact on your goals, make sure that everyone on your leadership team is aligned on them – and communicate them broadly.

When employees understand where your organization is going and which role they play in it, they work less selfishly and they tend to make better business decisions on behalf of the company – simply because they can see the impact of their decisions and how they impact overall results.

4. Define clear action plans and metrics

Once you have identified who on the leadership team is accountable for each function and what your top priorities are, the next step is for each of your leaders to answer Mark Green’s key question: “What are the 3 most important results the company expects you deliver in exchange for paying your salary – and how should these results be measured? This step determines the results and metrics for each of your leadership functions. As we all know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you want to increase the speed and quality of a particular service you offer, you should establish specific metrics to gauge those factors and identify metrics and targets for them. You may determine if you reach or surpass a target for three months in a row, you have achieved that objective.” Pick specific metrics, make sure that your leadership team is on the same page and that everybody aims for the clearly defined results – so that the rest of your organization can follow your lead.

Similarly, once you have defined top quarterly priorities, the question becomes: what do you and your team need to do in each of the next 13 weeks in order to achieve priorities? There are only 13 weeks in a quarter – if you do NOT view your quarter as a 13-week race, you will lose weeks and time which you will NOT get back. A weekly plan clarifies what can be expected every week, in order to meet expectations at the end of the quarter. It also makes it much easier for your leadership team to hold people accountable to their own 13-week plan.

5. Establish a metronome-like meeting rhythm

Just as a metronome calls time and sets tempo in a musical performance, so do a small set of consistently executed meetings to hold you and your team accountable, and keep everyone on the same page. The essential regular meetings are:

• Daily huddles (no more than 10 to 15 minutes) to evaluate progress on the very short-term priorities and identify any blocking issues.
• Weekly huddles (no more than 90 minutes) to review the status of the 13-week plan and course-correct if needed.
• Monthly and quarterly meetings to review progress on the priorities, take corrective actions when needed, and identify new priorities for the upcoming quarter.

I often notice that the most impactful meetings to drive accountability are the daily and weekly huddles: they create peer pressure and hence take the heat off your shoulders as the leader. They also improve communication: You won’t need to have the same water-cooler conversation three of four times, as is the case when you rely on chance hallway meetings for communication. And finally they enable collective intelligence to solve problems.

Conclusion

In the end, how much difference do these tools make on accountability? Pretty big, as this example from another Gravitas Impact business coach, Glen Dall, demonstrates in Mark Green’s book “Creating a Culture of Accountability”: “I worked with the CEO of a multi-location dental practice. The CEO had started with one practice that they grew very successfully – and then began expanding. At one point employee turnover rates increased to 200%. The leadership team would plan and set goals, but frequently failed to achieve them. The growth rate was declining. The CEO felt over-extended, frustrated and stressed.”

With the leadership team Glen Dall leveraged these tools to have the right people on the right seat, set priorities and targets, as well as establish a proven system to follow up on them. The result? “After our first 6 months of working together, the CEO told me, “You should be proud of how far you’ve brought the team. I feel that we have accomplished more in the past 6 months than we were able in the last 7 years.” That is the power of accountability.”

As a business growth coach, I work with founders of mid-market companies who are frustrated because their business is not growing the way they want; my passion is to help them identify and remove the growth roadblocks they have been hitting so they can grow faster and with less pain. Often their roadblocks include a lack of accountability: they have no system in place to regularly follow up on their team’s many commitments, or their teams don’t have clear priorities and metrics. I would like to learn about your growth roadblocks; contact me to discuss at Xavier@AmbroseGrowth.com.

What about you? How accountable is your team? How has Covid impacted accountability? Over the past couple of years, how many quarters has your company reached and missed their targets? What were the consequences of hitting targets, and what were the consequences of missing them? Do you have clear metrics and regular meetings in place to follow up on each of your priorities?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.