Most Businesses Don’t Fail Because of Bad Ideas. They Fail Because of Bad Execution.
Harvard Business Review estimates that over 70% of strategic initiatives fail. Not because the ideas were wrong. Not because the leaders weren’t smart. Not because people didn’t care. They fail because execution breaks down.
But you already know this because you’ve likely experienced this first-hand:
That strategy retreat binder collecting dust on the shelf.
The ambitious 90-day plan that quietly fell apart by week six.
The “all hands” meeting that created energy but no movement.
The gnawing sense that what got you here won’t get you there.
If you’re leading a $500K–$5M service business, you don’t have the luxury of execution failure.
The stakes are too high:
Margins. Team confidence. Market position. Your own capacity.
And yet… most weeks, you’re left feeling more like the bottleneck than the leader.
The business needs clarity.
The team needs direction.
You need breathing room.
That’s why we built…
Levership: The Strategic Operating System for Founder-Led Businesses
Levership is not another mastermind, course, or coaching program.
It’s a strategic operating system — the same kind used inside elite organizations — designed specifically for small and mid-sized service businesses.
Inside Levership, you and your leadership team learn to:
Levership doesn’t just give you frameworks.
It helps you operationalize them — quarter after quarter, year after year.
(And see exactly how we build strategy into execution.)
If you’re here, it’s because you know the way you’re running your business right now isn’t sustainable.
The hidden costs are everywhere:
Lost capacity. You and your best people are firefighting instead of focusing on the work that moves the business forward.
Margin erosion. Small inefficiencies compound into major profitability leaks.
Talent risk. Your top people won’t stay if chaos is the norm.
Founder fatigue. You can feel your calendar tightening, your energy dipping, your confidence slipping.
Every quarter that passes without a clear operating rhythm is a quarter of opportunity lost.
And the longer you wait, the harder it is to fix.
In your first 90 days with us, you’ll develop a rock solid:
90-day plan, with owners and deadlines.
A forward-looking financial model that shows you exactly where to focus for profit and capacity.
More breathing room in your own calendar — because fewer things are “only you.”
Here’s how we identify and implement that fix inside Levership:
After 12 months, your business might not be recognizable because you’ll have:
A business that runs on rhythm and discipline, not heroics.
A leadership team aligned around the same story, numbers, and outcomes.
Practical AI tools doing the work of another headcount, without the cost.
Growth in revenue and margin — without growth in chaos.
The ability to step back without everything falling apart.
And it doesn’t have to stop there.
More than half of Levership clients continue in the program into Year 2 and beyond, because once you’ve built the rhythm, the system’s value only compounds.
Every quarter, you’re not starting over. You’re building momentum.
Client Love for Levership
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Laurie Kanaan from MDW Law
“... we really felt like we had a partner. We just felt like we could be real with them. We’ve grown our team. We’ve fixed our ratios. We add better value to the client and we get it done for the client much more quickly. And I think at a better price. But it’s also resulted in an increase in our revenue. So from our perspective, we have gained process, we have gained revenue. We did the work but we could not have done it without the guidance of Matt and his team. They have changed our lives and our family’s lives.”
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Phillip Robinsonfrom Trunk 7 Contracting Ltd.
“We were a very reactive company. We didn’t have a whole lot of processes in place, the time management skills were probably not the best, so this created a lot of bottle necks. Turns out we don’t have to struggle with those, there are ways around that. In the last year, we’ve increased our revenue a little more than 20%. Looking ahead to the next 12 months we’re on track to triple our revenue. We’ve made some really big changes in how we operate and how we execute. That’s been the biggest impact. It really forced us to look at ourselves as well, there’s been a lot of personal growth.”
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Laura Lundquist from Zoomers Physiotherapy
“Nobody other than me was focused on growing the business and moving the business forward. With the structural changes we made, I substantially changed the way all of my professionals were hired so that everyone is working together collectively to not only move their professional selves forward but also our business forward. That has created a really positive and exciting culture to be a part of because everybody’s invested in how the business is doing as a whole. Now I really understand where to look for the answers in terms of the numbers of what my business tells me and that has helped me make some big decisions of where we’re heading in the future.”
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Chelsea Colwell-Pasch from Colbr Consulting
“I realized I needed to work on my business as a business, as opposed to just doing Archaeology. I came to realize during [Levership], I just needed more help and to delegate some of the work and roles I wore. Since starting [Levership], I have a dedicated full time administration, executor, a brand new facility that allows us to be more efficient and organized, we have a growth plan with our students, and we are fully booked with the correct mix of work for probably the next 3 - 5 years. On a personal level, the security of knowing we will be secure and safe financially, forever with the skills we’ve learned from [Levership].”
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Greg Doucette from Bulletproof
“They don’t powder coat things, they’ll actually tell you exactly what they think, things you need to know and what you need to do to improve your business. The results for us has been a really good grasp on our financials, understanding our projected delivery work that is hard booked for today but also forecasting out in the future. Having that rolling forecast allowed us to integrate with sales and actually get sales to drive the right work at the right time, to keep our funnel full and our people fully utilized.”
What Makes Levership Different?
You’ve probably tried programs before.
A coach. A mastermind. A binder of frameworks.
And you might have walked away with good ideas — but as you went to action them in the business, you quickly realized you didn’t have a way to make them stick.
Here’s how we make the changes sticky, so you get value for your time, energy and investment over and over again:
Most programs give you energy.
Levership gives you execution.
So what happens month to month inside Levership?
Foundational Pre-Work:
Operational Proforma:
We start by pulling two years of your financials into a forward-looking model.
This helps us see the ‘as is’ state of your business and determine the levers that really move profit and capacity.
You’ll see, in black and white, how customer mix, subcontracting, admin/AI productivity, and capacity limits impact your bottom line. From day one, your strategic choices are anchored to dollars, not hunches.
Customer Rationalization
Next, we map your customer base on a simple 2x2 matrix — best fit/best results vs. low fit/low results.
Together we identify who you should double down on, and who you need to offboard. The outcome?
More energy and margin from your best-fit clients, and less drag from customers who never should have been on your roster in the first place.
By the time you finish the pre-work, you’re making decisions from clean data and sharper focus — not guesswork.
The 12-Month Program
Levership runs on a 12-month cycle designed to give you momentum and compound value. Here’s how the cadence works:
Quarterly 2-Day Sessions
Every quarter, you and your leadership team step out of the weeds and into a structured planning space. Over two days, we:
Align on your 10-Year Impact Story and 1-Year Outcomes.
Identify the few critical levers to prioritize this quarter.
Translate those into a 90-day action plan — with clear owners, deadlines, and value attached.
All of this is anchored into your calendar with baked in accountability. You are set up for success.
Monthly Half-Day Check-ins
Each month, we come back together for a half-day session to keep you on track. These sessions are where accountability and course correction happen:
Are you on pace with your 90-day plan?
Where are the blockers showing up?
What wins need to be captured and repeated?
How do we free up capacity with better processes or AI tools?
These monthly check-ins are your safeguard against drift. They ensure that when problems surface — and they always do — you don’t lose another quarter to firefighting.
By the end of the year, you’ve stacked four 90-day cycles and built a leadership rhythm that compounds quarter after quarter.
Core Focus Areas
Alignment
We help you and your team define a 10-Year Impact Story and distill it into measurable 1-Year Outcomes. With everyone clear on where you’re going and what “success” actually looks like, your team stops spinning in different directions and starts rowing together toward meaningful results.
Choice
Every quarter, we guide you to identify the few strategic levers that matter most and the blockers holding you back. By making deliberate trade-offs, you stop spreading thin across dozens of initiatives and instead focus resources where they create the biggest lift in revenue, margin, and capacity.
Execution
We don’t leave execution to chance. Together we translate choices into specific calendar commitments with owners, deadlines, and defined value. That way, the plan doesn’t stay in a binder — it lives in your team’s rhythm and actually gets done.
Monthly Deep Dive Learning Modules
Pricing for Profit
We walk you through building models that connect pricing directly to profit and margin. You’ll finally see where you’re leaving money on the table and learn how to confidently set prices that fund growth instead of eroding it.
Key Relationship Management
We teach you how to identify, protect, and grow your most valuable relationships. When you have a clear system for managing customers, partners, and internal talent, you reduce risk and build resilience into your business.
Daily Management (PDCA)
We show you how to embed a “plan-do-check-act” cycle into your daily operations. Instead of firefighting, your leaders develop a rhythm of small, continuous improvements that compound over time.
Balanced Scorecard
We implement a scorecard that balances financials, customers, processes, and people. You get a dashboard that keeps your finger on the pulse of your business — not just in one area, but across the levers that drive sustainable growth.
Org Structure & HR Model
We help you design a structure that scales, with clear roles, accountabilities, and HR practices. The outcome is a team that knows where they fit, why they matter, and how they contribute to company growth.
Cost of Poor Quality
We measure the hidden costs of mistakes, rework, and inefficiency. By putting a dollar figure on wasted effort, you see exactly where to intervene to protect margin and improve customer experience.
DMAIC Framework
We train you to solve problems with a structured process: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. The result is less trial-and-error, more predictable improvements, and a team that feels empowered to fix what’s broken.
AI INTEGRATION
Practical use-cases built directly into your business
Proposal Drafts & Client Communications
We set up safe AI workflows to generate first drafts of proposals, emails, and FAQs. This frees leaders from repetitive writing so they can focus on strategy and relationships.
RFP Responses
We plug AI into your RFP process so you can quickly assemble high-quality submissions. You save time without sacrificing compliance or quality — and increase your win rate.
Data Cleanup & Analysis
We use AI to process messy spreadsheets and generate clear insights. Instead of wasting hours wrangling data, your team makes decisions on reliable information.
Most importantly, as all of this is unfolding, you are stepping into your Leadership Mindset
What Clients Say:
“I didn’t realize how much I needed a structured space to step back.”
“I expected frameworks. What I didn’t expect was the shift in how I saw my own role.”
“The biggest benefit of Levership is that you get access to Symplicity’s team of seasoned, experienced advisors and experts. They assess your business quickly and see the right path forward. Levership takes you through a rigorous process, and if you follow their system, the results are significant.”
“It’s the only time I have to work ON the business instead of IN it.”
“Becoming better at business actually made me literally better at life.”
And now we hear you saying to yourself ‘This is what I need. But how are we going to afford this?’
Well, there’s good news. Levership is priced to scale with your business.
We do it this way so finances aren’t a barrier to entry and so we can guarantee we are bringing you a value that is meaningful to your business as it grows.
Here’s what that looks like in a monthly payment:
$1,500/month — If your revenue is under $600K
$2,500/month — If your revenue is under $600K–$1M
$3,750/month — If your revenue is over $1M
Commitment Policy
This is a 12-month program, not a month-to-month membership.
But here’s what we stand by:
70% of participants make back their investment within the first year.
The only ones that don’t are the ones that don’t do the work. If you’re committed, you’ll be in the 70%.
Bonuses That Multiply Your Results
Enrollment in Levership comes with more than the core 12-month program. We layer in tools, access, and accelerators that make your progress even faster:
1. 1:1 Advisor Call Pack
Quarterly private calls with a senior advisor so you can troubleshoot sensitive challenges or get deeper perspective outside the cohort cadence.
2. Financial Model Templates
Pre-built pro forma and margin-mapping templates that save hours of work and give you confidence in the numbers behind your choices.
3. AI Productivity Labs
Hands-on sessions showing you how to safely plug AI into admin, sales, and operations. You’ll leave with practical workflows you can implement immediately.
4. Key Relationships Workshop
Live training on how to identify and protect your top customer, partner, and talent relationships — the ones that will make or break your growth.
What Happens When You Put Levership to Work
John, Owner of a Professional Services Firm
Before Levership, John’s firm was profitable but stuck. Every growth initiative stalled at the execution stage, and his calendar was filled with client work instead of leadership.
Within the first 90 days, John had a forward-looking pro forma that showed exactly where margin was leaking and which customers to prioritize. He cut 10% of the client base, doubled down on his top 5%, and freed up dozens of leadership hours.
“The biggest benefit of Levership is that you get access to Symplicity’s team of seasoned, experienced advisors and experts. They assess your business quickly and see the right path forward. Levership takes you through a rigorous process, and if you follow their system, the results are significant. ”
A Manufacturing Business at Capacity
A family-owned operation came into Levership with strong demand but constant firefighting. The owner was the bottleneck, margins were eroding, and expansion felt impossible.
By Month 6, the leadership team was running quarterly plans and monthly check-ins without depending on the founder. AI tools were handling proposals, event recaps, and basic data analysis. The result? Increased throughput without new hires, and a founder finally able to take a two-week vacation without everything grinding to a halt.
“I didn’t realize how much I needed a structured space to step back.”
A Growing Agency on the Edge of Burnout
The agency had scaled quickly to seven figures but was cracking under the weight of its own growth. Projects were late, staff turnover was rising, and the owner was losing confidence.
In Levership, the team learned to choose fewer, more critical priorities each quarter and build a rhythm of accountability. Within a year, the agency had improved margins, stabilized its pipeline math, and rebuilt team trust.
“I expected frameworks. What I didn’t expect was the shift in how I saw my own role. Becoming better at business actually made me literally better at life.”
These aren’t ‘unicorn’ stories.
They’re the lived reality of founders and owners who committed to a system.
👉 [Download the Levership Syllabus] and see how these results are built, quarter by quarter.
Your Guides
Matt Symes
Systems-driven strategist. Known for telling hard truths with clarity and care.
** more details for both
Chris Johnston
Framework-first consultant. Architect of strategy maps and operating models that simplify complexity.
Together, they’ve helped hundreds of businesses build clarity, cadence, and confidence.
Listen to the private podcast for a behind the scenes of the first 90-days inside Levership
✅ You lead a $500K–$5M service business.
✅ You’re tired of being the bottleneck.
✅ You want systems, not slogans.
✅ You’re ready to commit to disciplined execution.
To be clear, Levership will help you if:
It’s not for you if:
❌ You want a quick fix.
❌ You’re unwilling to look at your numbers.
❌ You’re not ready to change how you lead.
Our Commitment to You
Levership is a 12-month operating system designed to permanently change how you run your business.
Here’s what we can promise:
1. 70% of participants make back their investment within the first year.
2. You’ll leave the first 90 days with a plan, a pro forma, and customer clarity that would cost tens of thousands to build elsewhere.
3. If you show up and do the work, you’ll see momentum in your business — fewer bottlenecks, more margin, and more breathing room in your calendar.
Your Next Step
If you’ve read this far, you already know your business isn’t broken — but the way you’re running it is costing you.
You don’t need another binder.
You don’t need another coach.
You need a system.
Download the Levership Syllabus and see exactly how we turn vision into execution.
And if you’re ready to explore fit today, book a call with us.