By ETJ Life – helping PE-backed CEOs thrive in work and life.
A Hard Quarter Is Permission to Change
Every CEO eventually gets a quarter that doesn’t go the way the plan said it would. The best ones treat it as one of the most useful moments they’ll get all year.
When the numbers come in short, the instinct is to explain it, contain it, and get back to the plan as fast as possible. But a quarter that comes up short does something a good quarter never can: it hands you permission. The moves you’d been circling for months suddenly have air cover, whether that’s the personnel change you kept postponing, the structural fix everyone quietly knew was coming, or the priority you needed to set down. It’s the one moment the whole organization is ready to accept that something real has to change.
The leaders who get the most out of it match the size of the change to the size of the comeback. A small adjustment leaves the real issue sitting right where it was. So use the moment fully. If the quarter earned you the room to make three hard calls, make all three now, while the will is there, not one now and two once things settle down, because things always find a reason not to settle down.
The board is watching for exactly this. They’ll spend a little time on why the quarter landed where it did, but that isn’t what they actually want to know. What they want is simple: what’s the fix, and why should we believe it? Give them a forward story instead of an autopsy: here’s what I saw, here’s what I’m changing, and here’s what you’ll see by this date. That’s a CEO leading the business, not one managing the news.
Exercise: Pick Three. Then Pick One.
The fastest way to bounce back from a miss usually isn’t to do more. It’s to do less, on purpose.
When results come up short, the to-do list gets longer. Ten things suddenly feel urgent, and every one of them has a good argument behind it. But a team chasing ten priorities is really chasing none. Clarity is what turns a hard quarter around, and clarity comes from subtraction.
Try the exercise our coaches run with CEOs in exactly this spot. Take every lever on the table and score each one on three things: the effort it takes, the size of the prize it delivers, and the odds it actually works. Laid side by side, the real priorities separate themselves from the noise. Or do it with points. If you have 100 points of value to spread across your top three, which one is worth 60, which is 25, which is 15? Anything that can’t earn 15 doesn’t make the list.
Then take one more step and find the lead domino: the single priority that, once you nail it, makes everything else easier or even unnecessary. In a tougher climate, that’s often the win your team can actually control, like protecting the base, holding your best accounts, and tightening retention while new business is harder to come by. Give the organization one clear victory it owns, and you rebuild momentum and belief at the same time.
The miss is never the story. What you do with it is.
ETJ Life is a community for CEOs in the Performance season. This perspective reflects ongoing member interactions and real leadership challenges in the seat.