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The Signal Report

A biweekly bulletin for leaders who have outgrown founder-led hustle and are ready to build systems that sustain their vision and scale their business. Each issue decodes one “signal” — those subtle patterns that reveal friction, bottlenecks or untapped leverage. You’ll learn what it means, why it matters and how to fix it, all in 5 minutes or less, so you can shift from signal to system and from vision to velocity.

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Featured Post

Stop being the default decision-maker

Last week, we dove deep on Decision Filters -- the guardrails that help your team internalize your tradeoff calculations and make decisions the way you do (without asking first). This week, we’re expanding on the natural next layer: Escalation Triggers. Even with strong filters in place, your team still needs to know exactly when a call is no longer in their lane. Without that clarity, fear and decision paralysis creep in, putting everything back on your plate. The Signal: Your clue that...

A pedestrian signal shows a white walking figure.

Until your team has internalized the tradeoffs that matter most for your business, you either need to be in every decision or you need to be ready for a lot of unintended consequences. Decision Filters close the gap by giving your team practical guardrails to make aligned, confident decisions at scale. The Signal (your clue that there's work to do): You’re still the go-to for every signficant decision because your team can't confidently navigate the tradeoffs that keep coming up as you scale....

THE SIGNAL You thought you delegated clearly: “Can you pull together a quick deck on X for next week’s meeting?” Three days later, you’re reviewing a 40-slide masterpiece that took your best strategist and a graphic designer the better part of three days to build. It’s beautiful. It’s also extreme overkill for what you actually needed: five simple slides to drive a decision. Or the opposite: You ask for “a plan” and get three bullet points in Slack with no tradeoffs or clear direction. You...

a group of women sitting around a table working on a project

The Signal You’re overwhelmed. Not from doing too much, but from deciding too much. Some days it feels like your brain is actually melting. Your team asks for your input on everything from vendor selection to pricing tweaks to copy edits. You jump in because it’s faster, you know the context and you can’t afford mistakes. That might have worked at the beginning... but it’s not faster anymore. You’ve become the bottleneck. Projects slow down waiting for your approval. The team hesitates...

Hands working on a crafting project with ruler and paper

The Signal When things start to wobble, founders instinctively reach for control. You tell yourself: If I stay closer to the work, we’ll grow faster. So you review more, approve more and reinsert yourself in decisions you thought you’d already delegated. It feels responsible. It feels like leadership. But here’s the paradox: The more you grip, the slower it goes. Every extra checkpoint, every “just to be sure” correction quietly communicates to your team that progress depends on you. And that...

Chalkboard wall with mind map and bicycle

You’ve heard of “Just-in-Time Inventory”? I’m all about Just-in-Time Information. Two things are true: I want every shred of knowledge and every piece of information I’ve collected to be discoverable and accessible to me the moment I need it. My brain is more Swiss Cheese than sponge. That combo means I’m religious about tagging, cross-referencing and storing everything I need to know and everything I learn inside a system that is intuitively designed to match how my brain works and where I...