Getting to the Next Level of Your Business

Sometimes it’s hard for business owners to know how to take their businesses to the next level of growth and profitability. If you’ve been stuck at the same level of revenue or profit for a while, it could be because scaling your business is not a skill in your toolkit… yet. 


Enter a classic management book on scaling your business: High Output Management by Andrew Grove, ex-chairman and CEO of Intel. While the book was written in 1983, it has made a recent comeback in Silicon Valley, but it’s still not well-known outside of the Bay Area. Many people who have read it say it’s the best management book they’ve ever read—life-changing even. 


In the book, Grove applies the principles of engineering and manufacturing production to management. It’s all about process—developing processes and procedures so you can track what’s going on and measure the results or output every step of the way. Only then can you improve the process so it leads to higher output. 


Measurement is an important concept in the book. No matter what business you’re in, you can apply the ideas of developing processes, measuring them, and improving upon them in your business. 


Grove explains how managers can motivate their team members and improve production. He talks a lot about leverage, which enables scaling both positively and negatively, and how it can affect employees’ output. One example of positive leverage is when managers ‘nudge’ employees to enable their work. A negative example is when managers meddle and get in the way of progress. 


In the section on meetings, Grove breaks the topic down by purpose and lends his ideas on how to run each type of meeting better. He touches on other key topics such as decision-making, planning, motivation, performance reviews, and values. 


One significant highlight from the book: If you’re motivated to become a better manager and wish to improve the output of your organization, there’s nothing more important than training yourself.


Reading this book is a wonderful way to spend time learning new business skills you can put into action immediately. 

Our Latest Insight

Fixing It: How to Build the COO-Accounting Relationship Your Business Is Missing

By Alisa McCabe • October 12, 2026
If Article 3 felt a little too familiar, your first instinct may be to call a meeting. You tell Operations and Accounting they need to communicate better. That will not fix it. The five warning signs were never personality problems. They were signs that your accounting systems and routines were never intentionally built around how these two functions work together. People cannot follow a structure that does not exist. Accounting cannot inform decisions they do not know are being considered. Your COO cannot use financial information they cannot access in time. The fix is not complicated. That does not mean it happens naturally. Most of what you need to build will feel almost obvious. Recurring conversations. Clear handoffs. Shared definitions. Access to the right information. This is not glamorous work. That is probably one reason it gets overlooked. For the first few months, you may have to follow up constantly. People will forget. Meetings will get moved. Someone will make a decision and skip the handoff. Then something starts to change. The follow-up becomes unnecessary. Information moves without you. Problems get caught earlier. Eventually the results look effortless from the outside. They were not. You built the relationship that made them possible.  ​ Part 4 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Five Warning Signs Your COO and Accounting Aren’t Talking

By Alisa McCabe • September 28, 2026
Article 2 ended with a question. What would you actually see first if this relationship started breaking down inside your business? Here is the answer. You would see five things. If you are like most owners reading this, you are already looking at two or three of them. None of the five announces itself as a communication problem. Each one shows up as friction inside your accounting systems, wearing a perfectly reasonable disguise. That is the difficulty. On the surface, none of these looks like a broken relationship. Each looks like something else entirely. A busy month. A tough quarter. A personality difference between two people who were never going to be friends anyway. Every one of them gets explained away the first time you see it. That is exactly what makes them expensive. This article does not fix any of it. Article 4 does that. The job here is naming what is already sitting in front of you. Most owners walk past these signs for years without recognizing what they are looking at.  ​ Part 3 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

What a Growth-Focused COO-Accounting Relationship Looks Like

By Alisa McCabe • September 21, 2026
Article 1 ended with a question. When does your COO actually talk to Accounting before a decision gets made? How long did it take you to answer? Immediately? Minutes? Maybe you could not think of a single example. Bills get paid, projects keep moving, and financial reports show up. Nothing feels obviously broken, so you conclude everything is fine. If that question made you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Here is the part that keeps this problem alive. You only know what good looks like based on what you have already lived through. Most owners have never worked inside a business where Operations and Accounting were intentionally built to function together. So they measure their company against their own status quo. This article gives you a different reference point. You will see what the relationship looks like day to day, what rhythm it runs on, and five things you can check this week. None of it requires scrapping what you have built. The people are already in the building. The data already exists. What changes is how the pieces are arranged, and how much leverage you get out of the company you have right now.  ​ Part 2 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship