AspireSix

07/14/2026

It's July ... You're in the back half of the year.

Your numbers aren't where you thought they'd be.

Before you add more pressure, more headcount, or more activity — it's worth asking a harder question:

Is something in your leadership structure quietly working against you?

Missed targets at mid-year often aren't a market problem or a team effort problem. They're a decision-making problem. Misaligned priorities. Fuzzy ownership. Leadership gaps that don't show up on any dashboard.

That's Executive Debt. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the more expensive the second half gets.

The free Executive Debt Assessment takes about 10 minutes and tells you where debt is hiding in your organization.

No sales call required. Results are immediate.

Every organization carries some level of Executive Debt – the hidden cost of decisions made to solve immediate problems without addressing long-term consequences. Over time, that debt compounds and…

07/12/2026

Customers were taking too long to see value after the product was installed. Leadership assumed the technology was problematic.

It wasn't. It was a problem in sales that was quietly draining revenue every single quarter.

Who knew? James Trotter knew. He saw it when no one else did. And then he fixed it.

→ Bookings grew 73% in year one
→ Expansion revenue up 44%
→ Time-to-value cut from 17 months to under 5
→ Deal velocity doubled

Full story here.
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Stop revenue leakage! Discover the hidden growth problem: long Time-to-Value. This SaaS case study cut TTV from 17 months to under 5 and boosted bookings 73%.

07/11/2026

"Bob, you're the problem." That's what Monty Fowler had to tell a founder.

Not because he was a bad leader. Because he was such a good one ... for so long ... that the entire company had been built to run through him. Every approval. Every sign-off. Every "let me just take a look first."

25 years in. Great people. Strong culture. A company that grew 4% last year.

If you're working alongside someone like this, you've probably felt the weight of it; ideas that stall, decisions that wait, momentum that never quite builds.

Monty breaks down what it takes to actually shift this in his conversation on Igniting the CEO Within.

Worth a listen. Worth sharing with someone who needs to hear it.
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In this episode of Igniting the CEO Within, Mark McFatridge sits down with Monty Fowler, co-founder and managing partner of AspireSix, to discuss leadership, company culture, and the evolving role of…

07/08/2026

You already know something is "off" with your leadership team.

You can feel it in how heavy ex*****on has gotten. In the same problems surfacing in different forms. In a team that's working hard but not moving fast.

You just can't prove it yet.

That is where Monty starts in this video — and what the Executive Debt Mastery course is built around.

Not a framework to file away. A working system to find where Executive Debt is hiding, quantify the real cost, and build a plan to fix it.

And it doesn't end when the content does.

Every enrollment includes a 90-minute 1:1 with Monty — built around one real decision you're sitting on right now.

Watch his video overview first. Then decide if it's for you. → https://aspiresix.com/executive-debt-mastery/

07/04/2026

06/30/2026

Most leaders know their team well. They can tell you who's strong, who's stretched, who gets along with who. What they usually can't tell you is what's actually wrong with how the team operates.

That's because the symptoms don't look like problems. A decision that never had a clear owner. A priority that got "agreed to" in the room and quietly died after. An initiative still "in progress" three months later, and nobody can say why.

On a team that gets along well, none of that raises a flag, it just looks like everyone's busy. Good relationships tell you people are comfortable with each other. They don't tell you whether anything's actually wrong, or whether anyone would say so if it were.

We call this Executive Debt. The compounding cost of decisions leadership makes, or avoids, without resolving what's underneath them. Most conversations about it stop at opinion. We put a number on it. Strategy, Operations, Talent, Culture, and Decision-Making each get scored separately, because they rarely move together. A team can look strong in one and be quietly broken in another, and never know it until they see the numbers side by side.

The free Executive Debt Assessment tells you what's actually wrong, not just that something might be.

Take it yourself to see where your own decisions might be the problem.

OR

Have your whole leadership team take it and compare results — seeing it in numbers, not gut feel, is usually the most useful conversation your team has all year.

Start the free assessment: https://aspiresix.com/free-assessment/

Want the framework behind it first? Grab the free book Executive Debt by AspireSix co-founder Monty Fowler: https://aspiresix.com/executive-debt-free-book/

06/28/2026

Somewhere this week, a leadership team is in a room trying to figure out why Q2 isn't delivering. The conversation is going to land on sales.

What almost never gets said in that room is that the plan itself might have been the problem, not the people executing it.

What's above the waterline is a number that isn't there. What's below it is usually a mix of things a sales review won't surface: positioning the market has been quietly rejecting, a go-to-market motion built for a different era, leadership misalignment showing up as mixed signals to the team, or growth targets that were never resourced to be achievable in the first place.

More pipeline activity doesn't fix any of that. Neither does a new comp structure. Those are solutions to a different problem.

The first half of 2026 is showing you that the plan isn't working, the most important conversation you can have right now isn't a sales review. It's an honest look at what's beneath the surface.

AspireSix helps leadership teams diagnose what's really driving stalled growth and build a plan for you that can actually deliver.

06/25/2026

***Sales leaders*** The next time the board asks why revenue is flat, hand them this.

The conversation goes the same way every time. Revenue is flat. The board wants answers. Leadership points at sales.

A new VP gets hired. Goals get reset. And six months later, the numbers still aren't moving.

What we've seen from sitting inside a lot of those rooms: Sales is frequently not where the problem actually lives. Here's where to actually look:

1. Strategy — The company is chasing the wrong market, or no clearly defined market at all.

2. Positioning — What you're telling the market doesn't match what they're actually trying to buy.

3. Route to market — The playbook that worked 15 years ago doesn't carry the same weight in today's buying environment.

4. Leadership alignment — When the executive team can't agree on where the company is going, the sales team can't either.

The cost of the wrong diagnosis isn't just a bad hire. It's momentum that stalls while everyone focuses on the wrong fix. It's a team that quietly loses confidence in leadership. And it's the real problem compounding in the background.
Before you put sales on trial — make sure you know what you're actually dealing with.
AspireSix works with leadership teams to diagnose what's really driving stalled growth. If this hits close to home, let's talk.

06/23/2026

There's a consultant's binder sitting on a shelf in an executive's office somewhere right now. Leather-bound. Gold leaf lettering. Cost about $4 million. Nobody has opened it in three years.

We've sat across from enough C-suite leaders who've been there. A major firm comes in, deploys a team, runs a months-long engagement, and delivers a beautifully produced strategy document that the internal team cannot execute. Not because leadership isn't capable. Because the recommendations were never designed to be actionable by the team you actually have.

When your business model depends on deploying 50 to 150 consultants, you have every incentive to build deliverables that require ongoing support. Complexity isn't a byproduct — it's the product.

AspireSix operates differently.

Our goal isn't to make ourselves indispensable. It's to make you self-sufficient as fast as possible — with strategy that's sized for your organization, your team, and the resources you have right now.

The difference between a strategy you can understand and a strategy you can actually execute is everything.

If your last big consulting engagement is collecting dust, let's talk.

06/21/2026

When the board says "Do something with AI," they're not asking for a pilot program. They're asking for transformation. Real growth. A competitive leap.

Most leadership teams hear something different. They hear "deploy" — and the race begins. Buy the platform, stand up the pilot, aim the technology at the most expensive corner of the operation, and call it progress.

Here's what happens after that: a faster broken process, a bigger blind spot, and a bill nobody budgeted for. AI doesn't fix broken processes. It scales them.

The companies winning with AI didn't start with the technology. They started with the outcome — what the business is actually supposed to produce, for whom, and at what cost. The tool decision was the easy part.

AspireSix Managing Partner Monty Fowler wrote about this — including 4 questions every CEO should ask before automating anything, the hidden costs most business cases completely ignore, and why the audit always comes before the software.

Link in the comments. Worth reading before you make a major move with AI.