Payroll is the biggest number on your P&L. It is also the only one you manage on gut feel.
Your CFO would never close the books on instinct. Your sales team wouldn’t run without a pipeline. But when it comes to who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who quietly stays two years too long in a seat they’ve outgrown, most CEOs are still guessing.
At $10M you can get away with it. You know every person in the building. Somewhere past $25M that ends, and now you’re betting seven-figure outcomes on interviews and instinct. A wrong VP costs you the salary, the severance, the search fee, and a year of momentum. The year is the expensive part.
I’ve watched this play out in my groups for 17 years, and the pattern rarely changes. The CEO knew for months. They didn’t have data, so they waited for a certainty that never came. The org waited with them.
Culture Index measured where the return on talent actually lives. Ten percent of it is recruiting and hiring. Ninety percent is keeping the people you already pay and putting them in seats that fit how they’re wired. Most CEOs spend nearly all their energy on the ten percent.
The week of August 11, Jazmyn Friesz presents “Right People, Right Seats” to my Vistage groups in Manhattan. She’s an Executive Advisor with Culture Index in New York, and before advising CEOs she ran retail P&Ls from $15M to $65M with teams of 100 to 350 people. She isn’t bringing theory. She’s bringing the instrument she used to run businesses the size of yours.
You leave with a way to measure the seven traits that predict performance in a seat before you make the offer. You leave knowing how to spot burnout and disengagement in your current team months before the resignation letter lands on your desk. And every CEO in attendance can request a complimentary Team Diagnostic on their own company at the end of the session. You’ll see your actual org, mapped, at no cost. That alone is worth the morning.
This session is for my groups. I hold a small number of guest seats for founder-CEOs running $10M to $350M companies who want to see what a working session looks like from the inside. She’s presenting three times that week, so if one day doesn’t work, another might. Email me or grab time on my calendar and we’ll find your day. When the guest seats are gone, they’re gone.
One morning, one instrument, and a group of CEOs who will tell you the truth about your org chart.
That’s peer advisory.
