Nick Anderson CEO OneAccord

09/02/2026

If you've hired a senior leader in the last two years and it didn't take, this may be why.

A company hires someone with an impressive resume for a role the company doesn't actually have yet. They need someone who can build a function from nothing, and they hire someone who spent the last ten years running a function that already existed.

Skill and stage are two different questions. A great operator inside a 200-person company and a great builder inside a 20-person company are not interchangeable, even when the title on the resume is identical. I've watched talented people fail in roles they were fully capable of, just not at that particular stage of the business.

Before you hire for the role, get honest about what stage you're actually in. Then hire for that, not for the version of the company you hope to be in three years.

09/01/2026

Finance has a right answer. People rarely do. That's why the hardest problems in a growing company usually aren't on the balance sheet.

08/31/2026

I've seen more than a few deals turn on having the right person in the room at the right moment. Most owners I know have paid for that lesson at least once.

On October 6 at the Bellevue Club, we're opening the room.

Cocktails, appetizers, and time to reconnect with people from across the OneAccord community, including the advisors and partners who have spent their careers helping owners in the Puget Sound build something durable.

There's a short program. We'll recognize this year's partnership award recipients, and I'll mark the launch of Hidden Multiples, the book I wrote with Cole Capriotti on why two companies with the same revenue can be worth very different amounts. After that, the evening is yours.

You don't need a history with us to be there. You just need to be building something worth protecting.

Seating is limited, and we want to plan the evening around the people in the room.

https://events.oneaccord.co/annual-celebration

08/30/2026

Operational problems often get blamed on ex*****on when the real issue is clarity. I've walked into companies with talented, hardworking teams that were still missing every deadline, and it had nothing to do with discipline or effort. Nobody could tell me, in one sentence, what the top priority was for the quarter.

Ask five people on a leadership team what the company's number one priority is right now, and in a lot of companies you'll get five different answers, all of them reasonable, none of them the same. That's not an ex*****on failure. That's a decision that was never actually made, or was made once and never repeated clearly enough to stick.

You can't execute your way out of a strategy that was never actually decided. Teams don't need more effort in most cases. They need one sentence, repeated often enough, that tells them exactly where to point that effort.

08/29/2026

There's a version of "we're a family here" that founders use as a compliment and employees hear as a warning. Families don't have performance reviews. Families don't get fired for missing a number, and everyone in the room knows it.

When a leader leans on family language instead of clear expectations, it's rarely because the culture is strong. It's usually because the accountability structure is missing, and the warmth is standing in for the structure that should be there instead. You can care about someone and still tell them exactly what winning looks like in their role. Those two things were never in conflict, even though a lot of founders act like they are.

More at

OneAccord delivers strategic planning, fractional C-suite leadership, talent advisory, and AI enablement for $5M to $100M+ Pacific Northwest companies.

08/28/2026

Growth exposes whatever was already broken. A messy pricing model, an unclear org structure, a founder who avoids hard conversations, all of it is survivable at $2 million in revenue and dangerous at $20 million. The cracks were always there. Growth just adds enough weight that they finally show.

The companies that scale well aren't the ones with fewer problems. Every company has them. They're the ones who went looking for the small cracks on purpose, while the business was still small enough that fixing them was cheap.

08/27/2026

08/27/2026

08/27/2026

There's a comparison in this video that stuck with me. Nobody sells a house without fixing the kitchen first, but business owners routinely try to sell a company without touching the equivalent of that kitchen.

The reason is simple: they've never done this before, and won't do it again, so there's no accumulated instinct telling them what actually needs to change before a buyer walks through. That's the call we think should happen before the banker call, not instead of it.

08/26/2026

If you choose to live your legend, the whole world conspires to make it so.

~ Coleho (adapted)