My board and I disagreed about the number, and I was the one who was wrong
Fourteen months into her first CEO job, hired not founded, she defended a 40% growth plan to a board that wanted 22%. She won the argument in March and missed the number in November. What she would do differently is not what you would expect.
As told to ceo.cafe. Transcribed with AI; edited by a human; published under the teller's own name. Published .
- Headcount
- 180
- Growth plan I defended
- 40%
- Growth the board proposed
- 22%
- Growth actually delivered
- 19%
- Months in the seat at the time
- 14
- Roles hired against the plan
- 31
- Roles cut nine months later
- 18
- Days from board meeting to plan sign-off
- 6
Figures as given by the person who made the call. We do not audit them; we do ask for them.
OneWho is telling this?
I run a services business in the north of England. A hundred and eighty people, private-equity owned, and I did not found it; I was hired into the chair after eleven years of running operations somewhere else.
That distinction matters more than anything else in this story. A founder disagreeing with a board is a negotiation between two kinds of owner. A hired CEO disagreeing with a board in month fourteen is an audition.
TwoWhat was the decision?
Whether to sign a plan committing to 40% revenue growth, which I had written, or 22%, which the board wanted.
I knew there would be a fight the moment I saw the pre-read comments. The chair had written a single line against my revenue build: 'what does this assume about sales productivity in months 4 to 9?' It assumed, as it turned out, that thirty-one new salespeople would reach the productivity of our existing team in five months. Our existing team had taken eleven.
Option one on paper: my 40%, which required the 31 hires front-loaded into Q1 and Q2. Option two: their 22%, hiring 12, and holding the rest against actual pipeline. I thought option two was a lack of ambition. It was a lack of my ambition, which is not the same thing and I could not see the difference at the time.
ThreeWho did you talk to before you decided?
My CFO, who agreed with the board and told me so twice, in writing, which I have since thanked him for. My sales director, who agreed with me, which I took as corroboration and should have taken as a man agreeing with his own headcount.
I did not talk to the chair between the pre-read and the meeting. That was the error. I treated a board meeting as the venue for the argument, when the board meeting is the venue for the conclusion of an argument that should already have happened on a phone call.
I did not tell my predecessor, who I could have called. Pride. He would have taken the call.
FourWhat were you afraid of the night before?
That accepting 22% in month fourteen would mark me permanently as a caretaker. I had been hired to accelerate a business, and the first substantive thing I would be doing was agreeing to go slower.
What I told myself: that a CEO who cannot defend her own plan does not have a plan. That is a good sentence. It is also a sentence about me, and the plan was supposed to be about the company.
The personal cost was specific and slow. I spent the following eight months unable to say the words 'we might miss' out loud, because I had spent my credibility buying the right to the number. That silence cost more than the number did.
I thought I was being asked whether the number was achievable. I was being asked whether I could tell the difference between a plan and a promise.
FiveWhat did you actually do that morning?
I presented for eighteen minutes and I was good. That is the problem with this story: I was persuasive, and being persuasive is what got me the wrong outcome.
The chair asked the productivity question directly. I answered with a comparable from my previous company, where a team had in fact ramped in five months. I did not mention that it had been an inbound-led motion and ours was outbound. I do not think I was hiding it. I think I genuinely had not examined it until he asked, and then answered from memory rather than from the file.
They approved 40% with a review gate at the half-year. Signed six days later. Three people came up to me afterwards and said well done, which I enjoyed, which I now regard as the single clearest warning sign in the whole episode.
SixWhat did it cost?
We hired 31 people. We grew 19%. We cut 18 roles the following autumn, most of them people hired against a plan I had insisted on.
In money: roughly £2.1M of salary and recruitment spent against revenue that did not arrive, and a restructuring that cost another £400,000.
The number that surprised me was the half-year gate. It existed. It was in the approved plan. We passed through it in July with growth tracking at 21% and I presented it as 'phasing.' The board let me. I have thought a great deal about why they let me, and the answer I have landed on is that they had already decided to watch rather than intervene, and I had taught them that intervening would cost them an argument.
SevenWas it the right call?
No. And the interesting part is that 22% was not right either. We did 19%, so the board's number was also too high. Being closer to correct is not the same as being correct, and that has made it harder to learn from, not easier.
What I would do differently in practice: call the chair three days before the meeting and say the quiet sentence out loud: 'my build assumes a five-month ramp and our history says eleven; talk me out of it or I am going to defend it.' That call takes twenty minutes. The alternative took nine months and eighteen jobs.
And I would have signed a 22% plan with a stretch case attached, rather than a 40% plan with a review gate attached. Those sound like the same instrument. They are opposites. One makes the upside a bonus; the other makes the downside a failure.
What I got right: when we missed, I said so in the October board pack, in the first paragraph, with no adjectives. I had spent my credibility on the number and the only thing I had left was being the first person to say it had gone.
EightWhat does the next CEO need to hear?
If you are a hired CEO in your first two years, your board is not testing the plan. They are testing whether you can tell the difference between a plan and a promise. I thought I was being asked whether the number was achievable. I was being asked whether I could distinguish the two, and I answered the wrong question confidently.
Have the argument before the meeting. A board meeting where the outcome is genuinely in doubt is a meeting that has been badly prepared, usually by you.
Notice who agrees with you and what it costs them to agree. My sales director's agreement cost him nothing and gained him thirty-one people. My CFO's disagreement cost him a difficult conversation with his boss. Weight them accordingly. I did the opposite.
The thing everyone says that turned out to be false: 'push back on your board, they respect it.' They do respect it. They will also let you win, and a board that lets a fourteen-month CEO win an argument they think she is losing is not a board that respects her. It is a board taking a cheap look at her judgement.