Scenario three · The Challenge
Kelso Systems Ltd
Eighteen months as Chief Executive. Five disciplines. One runway that does not negotiate.
Kelso Systems builds supply-chain visibility software for mid-market manufacturers and retailers. Two hundred and ten people, five years old, twenty-two million pounds of annual recurring revenue, and a burn rate the board has started watching more closely than the roadmap.
The board approved the Runway Plan eight months ago: cut net burn in half, extend the runway past two years without a down round, get the metrics investors actually respect in front of them before the money runs out. They approved it in a room that included the founder who built the company and has no real experience running what it has become. Then they hired you to carry it, and the clock started the week you arrived.
What comes next arrives the way trouble actually arrives inside a scale-up, one thing at a time and never at a convenient one: a top-billing VP who turns out to be a bully, a founder with a board seat and a following who liked the old way better, a security scare, a leak, a rival with deeper pockets.
What is at stake
Every choice tests one of the five RESOLVE disciplines, and every discipline you let slip makes the next month harder. The forecast you smooth, the waiver you approve just this once, the founder you don't confront: all of it comes back, and a fourteen-month runway does not wait for the bill to arrive. Reach month eighteen with the disciplines intact and you will have proved something worth proving. Get there having quietly traded them away, and the score, like the runway, will tell you exactly what it cost.
Kelso Systems leans hardest on Velocity of Decision and Anchored Conviction, the disciplines a fixed runway has no patience for.
You will pick a difficulty and, if you want, challenge a colleague to the identical run before you start. It plays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.