Apogee Leadership

08/26/2026

A contractor in Palm Bay told me his succession plan was three names in a folder.

Forty-five minutes later, two of those three had never come up.

Here's what we did. His leadership team — five people — sat around a table with a stack of Post-its. One rule: if you had to rebuild this company from scratch tomorrow, who are you taking with you? One name at a time, in order, out loud. You can't pick anyone else in the room. You keep going until about half the company is up on the wall.

By round three it got quiet. That's always when it gets interesting.

Two of his three "succession names" sat on the table until the very end. Meanwhile a 26-year-old barge foreman nobody had ever mentioned to me went in the second round — picked by two different people who had no idea the other was going to take him.

The owner's read on it, once he stopped arguing with the wall: "I've been planning around the guys I like. Not the guys we'd rebuild with."

That's the thing about succession. Most owners treat it as a document problem. It's an inventory problem. You don't have a plan until you know who is actually on the bench, and you cannot know that from your own chair. You find it out when five people pick independently and the same name keeps surfacing — or doesn't.

The exercise is called The "A Players" Draft. A Pinnacle Business Guides™ tool, via Apogee. It takes an hour, costs nothing but Post-its, and the debrief is the whole point: Did every supervisor and manager get picked? Where were the surprises? Who did nobody take — and what does that tell us about how we've been leading them?

You don't have to be ready to hand the company over. You do have to know who's on the wall.

DM me BENCH and I'll send you the four debrief questions.

Book a conversation: https://apogeeleadership.co/booking

If your leadership team ran that exercise Monday morning — who's the name you're most afraid wouldn't come up?

08/26/2026

apogeeleadership.co

08/21/2026

A mechanical contractor down here in Brevard told me his performance reviews were handled. Every December: one sit-down per employee, a form, a signature, a number. Done.

Then his best service tech quit in February.

The exit interview stung. "I found out in December that I'd been screwing up the invoicing since March."

Nine months. A fixable problem, saved up and handed over as a surprise.

Here's the thing I wish more owners heard: the review is not the coaching. The review is the receipt. If the coaching never happened, the review is just a bill for work nobody taught them to do.

The Pinnacle "Coach 'em Up" tool runs on four moves, and "annual review" isn't one of them. Write down the expectations — roles, responsibilities, priorities. Define what winning looks like in each seat, and put it on a scoreboard people see every week. Sit down every 90 days to review the scoreboard, the projects and the talent. And when you coach, do it with empathy and challenge: put yourself in their seat, ask what they should be most proud of and what they need to improve — then actually push.

Do that and the formal conversation has nothing new in it. No ambush. Just a summary of what you've already been saying.

If review season feels like dental work at your shop, the problem isn't the form. It's the eleven months in front of it.

Send me a message with the word LOOKOUT and I'll share the four questions we use to run a real 90-day conversation — or grab a time here: https://apogeeleadership.co/booking

Lead With Clarity.

08/21/2026

08/20/2026

If you run a mechanical, marine or construction shop on the Space Coast, this one is for you.

Two businesses, same trade, same size, same street. One is in business to win. One is in business to not lose.

You cannot tell them apart from the parking lot. You can tell them apart in about four decisions:

Do you take the job you’re not quite staffed for, or pass on it? Do you hire ahead of the work, or after you’re already drowning? Do you have the hard conversation in March, or in December? Is your number one you’re chasing, or one you’re defending?

Nobody chooses “not lose” on purpose. You drift there after a rough year, and the caution that saved you never gets switched off.

Winning and not losing are two different plans. They build two different companies.

DM me WIN and I’ll send you the four questions.

🔗 https://apogeeleadership.co/booking

Lead With Clarity.

08/19/2026

221% average ROI.

I don't love leading with a number, because every coach on the internet has one. So here's the context behind ours: [SOURCE — across 121 Apogee engagements, 2015–2026, measured on client-reported revenue and profit].

What I'd rather you notice is the word average. That figure includes the engagements that started slow. It includes the owner who took two quarters to actually delegate anything. It includes the leadership team that had to have three uncomfortable conversations before they had one honest one.

Most firms will show you their ceiling. The floor is the more useful number — it tells you what happens when things don't go perfectly, which is most of the time.

If you're running a business here on the Space Coast and your good quarters are carrying your bad ones, that's a system problem, not an effort problem. Systems are fixable.

Send me a message, or grab a time: https://apogeeleadership.co/booking

Lead With Clarity.

08/18/2026

You already know something's off. You just can't name it.

Is it the strategy? The people? The follow-through? Three weeks of back-and-forth with a coach won't answer that any faster than five focused minutes will.

20 questions. Five dimensions. One honest picture of your business.

Get your FREE assessment in 5 minutes → https://apogeeleadership.co/assessment

08/14/2026

"Should I fire them?"

If you own a business, you've asked yourself that at least once. Probably about someone specific. Probably more than once.

Here's what I've learned coaching leadership teams here on the Space Coast and beyond: that question almost never gets answered by thinking harder about it.

I sat with a CEO — 40 people, solid company — who'd been circling the same employee for eleven months. Eleven months of Monday-morning dread. Eleven months of quietly building the schedule around one person. Eleven months of his best people watching to see whether the standard actually applied to everybody.

So I asked him two questions instead of one:

Does this person live your values?
Does this person deliver results?

He had a clear answer for both. He'd just never separated them. He was trying to make a values call and a performance call with a single gut feeling — and that's why he was stuck.

We ran the Talent Assessment Chart — a Pinnacle Business Guides™ tool, via Apogee. Two axes: cultural fit on one, productivity on the other. Everybody on the team gets a 0–10 on each. Then you plot them.

Once it's on paper, the fog lifts. Your A players show up as A players. Your "he's difficult but he produces" guy shows up as exactly what he is — and you finally understand why your good people are frustrated.

The chart doesn't make the decision for you. It just ends the argument you've been having with yourself for eleven months.

If you've got someone on your mind right now, let's plot your team together. Send me a message, or grab a time here: https://apogeeleadership.co/booking

Lead With Clarity.