A few years back I watched a large MSP hire four different VPs of Services in four years. Each one arrived with a mandate to fix delivery. Each one stood up a real plan. None of them lasted long enough to find out whether it worked.
The pattern was always the same. New leader, new process, sometimes a new ticketing system on top of it. Then roughly 180 days in, the executive team would look at the numbers, decide the improvement wasn't showing up fast enough, and pivot. New person. New process. New tools. Reset the clock.
What never changed was the thing underneath all of it. Nobody had aligned on what the organization was managing toward. There was no shared strategy for the VP to execute against, so every plan was just that VP's personal opinion, and every 180-day review was a referendum on whether the executives still liked them.
That company spent four years rutting in the mud. It lost its position as a top-tier MSP to competitors who were more deliberate about their methodology.
We built this practice to prevent that failure mode, and it's why our assessment runs People first, Process second, Technology third.
Everyone fixes the layer they can see
Process and technology have a quality that people work doesn't: they're visible, and you can buy them. A new PSA goes in a budget line. A workflow diagram gives you something to show at the exec meeting.
People work produces none of that. It looks like a hard conversation with a leader who's in the wrong seat, and admitting the comp plan is rewarding the wrong behavior. It looks like naming the fact that two functions have been optimizing against each other for two years.
So when an organization gets frustrated, it reaches for the layer it can see.
Process and technology get used to manage away frustration. They're what you stand up so you never have to have the hard conversation or tear down the bad strategy.
None of that is cynical, and it's usually well intentioned. A leader is trying to help, and buying a tool or writing an SOP feels like helping. It just doesn't touch the constraint, and six months later the constraint is still there and now it's got a subscription attached to it.
What we kept seeing on the other side
Dan and I have spent our careers inside high-performing technology sales and solutions organizations, and inside some that weren't. Across both, one thing held. If a business hadn't taken an honest inventory of its people, especially its leadership, and then built around their actual strengths, no amount of process or technology moved the number.
The reverse held too. When we inventoried our people first and built systems that supported the people we actually had rather than the people the org chart implied we had, businesses took off.
That's a mechanical observation, not a soft one. The intangibles, communication quality, morale, whether people believe leadership will follow through, are what determine adoption. A process is only real if people run it when nobody's watching. A tool only matters if people open it. Both of those are downstream of whether the team is aligned and whether they trust the direction.
Which means growth is almost always held back at the people layer before anywhere else.
So the order is a dependency chain, not a ranking
People first, process second, technology third doesn't mean technology is unimportant. It means each layer sits on top of the one before it, and installing a layer on an unstable one below is how a fix snaps back.
People
Who owns this number, are they in the right seat, and do they have the strengths the seat requires? Ownership, roles, review cadence.
Process
Design the motion around what makes this specific culture strong, not around a template. Workflows, handoffs, consistency.
Technology
Now equip the motion that already works and surface its numbers. Clean data, connected systems, tools that get used.
Designing process and technology around what makes your culture strong will beat buying a new platform almost every time. The best organizations we've worked in understood that instinctively. They didn't treat their people as the variable to be corrected by a framework. They treated the framework as the thing to shape around their people.
This whole practice came out of that one idea. We got excited about applying frameworks that work for people, instead of asking people to work around bad frameworks.
What we're not saying
This is where a lot of "people first" thinking goes soft, so here are the specifics. Each of the common moves can work. Whether it does almost always depends on the layer below.
Hiring a rainmaker is great, if you've got the structure and process to get them spun up. If the plan is hire a new person and expect great results, that's a hard bet. You're asking an individual to supply what the system doesn't have. Sometimes that works out, but it isn't something you can repeat with the next hire.
Absolutely, if your ICP matches what you do well and you can bring a compelling offer to them. Narrowing is only part of it. You have to be where your buyers are and know how to show up there. More leads into an undefined offer is just a more expensive version of the same result.
There are plenty of excellent tools that never get adopted. We've seen organizations roll out new platforms and investments almost weekly without accounting for the fact that adoption takes time, running straight over their sales team's capacity because they never took an inventory of the core assets they already had.
All three are good ideas resting on an assumption nobody has checked. Our job in the first weeks of an engagement is to check it before you spend against it.
How this shows up in the actual work
A philosophy that never touches a number isn't worth much, so we made this one measurable.
We assess five stages of the revenue engine: Customer Acquisition, Sales, Pre-Sales, Delivery, and Retention. We score twenty criteria across four areas: People, Process, Data, and Systems. The last two are the technology layer, split in two because a clean record and the tools that hold it fail in different ways.
Ownership runs through all four. Whether the revenue engine has an executive owner, whether each number is reviewed on a recurring cadence by the person who owns it, whether a baseline exists for the KPIs that matter: those are scored criteria, not footnotes. And a strong total can't hide a weak area. If one of the four falls below the floor, the whole result is capped, however good the rest looks.
A KPI that looks good but has no owner and no review rhythm doesn't score well with us. Nobody's managing that number, they're just getting lucky with it.
Scoring ownership is the single most opinionated thing in our methodology, and it comes directly out of the four-VP story. That MSP had numbers. What it didn't have was anybody who owned them across a horizon longer than the next executive review.
The same logic governs what we recommend. Short-horizon recommendations focus on ownership, cadence, and visibility before any tool expansion. We only recommend technology once the process and ownership conditions are stable enough for adoption to stick. Otherwise we'd just be selling the client the next thing to bulldoze their team with.
Why we built it this way
We built this process because we watched the alternative happen for years, from the inside, and it was avoidable every single time.
The organizations that lost ground were rarely beaten on talent or capital. They were beaten by somebody who picked a methodology and stayed deliberate about it long enough for it to compound. Four years of uncertain pivoting versus four years of strategic held direction isn't a close race.
So we start with your people, because it's the only layer that decides whether anything you install on top of it is still running the first week that you are not involved in everything.
Want the framework in full? Our methodology page walks through the five stages, the People, Process and Technology lens, and how an engagement is structured.