How One KPI Turned a $180M Manufacturer Into a Margin Machine
89 days. That’s all it took for a $180M window maker to slash its quote time from 25 to 13 days, recover 140 bps of margin, and walk into the boardroom with an 88% forecast-accuracy slide every director wanted to screenshot. No extra headcount, no seven-figure software, just a relentless sprint we call the 90-Day GTM Accelerator™.
As CEO, you own go-to-market, and the clock. You can delegate the work, but the wait time is yours. If quotes crawl, and revenue bleeds on your watch, full stop.
Revenue Red Flags: 4 Costly Symptoms You Can’t Ignore
Quotes Stuck in Second Gear Lead-to-quote lingers beyond 20 days.
Forecast Fantasy League Sales and Ops miss demand by double digits.
Margin Erosion Price overrides and rush freight nibble half points weekly.
Deck-Stacked Meetings Marketing, Sales, Ops, and Finance each bring their own numbers. No one trusts the other three.
Tick even one box? Keep reading. This playbook was built for you.
Your 90-Day Accelerator Playbook
Day 1-14 | Expose the Silent Stallers
We trail a single order. Click by click, hand-off by hand-off, timing every pause like a pit crew. Twenty-seven touches, nine approval lags, and 0.8% of margin lost per job. When that math hits the whiteboard, every silo finds religion.
Book a 90-minute exec huddle; pick and protect one North-Star KPI (hint: lead-to-quote).
Week 3-11 | Wire Speed Into the System
Make the data move as fast as the people who need it.
Kill vanity metrics Shrink a 42-column scorecard to one OKR tree. Everything else goes dark.
Automate hand-offs Zapier/Workato pipes CRM → CPQ → ERP; a 24-hour SLA timer puts Slack on fire if a lead idles.
Pilot in public One high-margin SKU, one region, daily stand-ups. Wins and bugs surface in real time.
Time-box the first API connection to 20 dev hours. If it can’t ship that fast, it waits.
Week 12 | Put the Wins on the Board
A live Power BI dashboard replaces every spreadsheet. Forecast accuracy climbs north of 85%, and the board’s first question is, “How soon can we roll this out?”
The Fractional Edge in a 90-Day Race
You could hire a full-time GTM chief, burn three quarters onboarding, and pray they’ve seen your movie before. Or you can borrow a leader who’s already looped the track 20 times.
A fractional Accelerator works because it delivers leverage, not just labor:
Pattern Velocity - Arrives with battle-tested playbooks. Zero learning-curve tax.
Neutral Turf-Cutting - Acts as a rent-a-referee who settles KPI fistfights in minutes, not months.
Cap-Ex Flex - You lease the muscle for the lift, not the lull. No six-figure severance lurking in the future.
That’s how we kept our window client’s fixed costs flat while pulling an extra 140 bps of margin out of the same P&L.
The Alignment Oath. Draw the Line Before Day 1
No sprint survives executive drift. Before the timer starts, make three public promises:
Shield the KPI - Nothing new gets added until the North Star shines green.
Own the Latency - When a hand-off stalls, the C-suite jumps first. No finger-pointing down the chain.
Pilot Loudly - Celebrate every blocker killed in the open; transparency converts skeptics faster than memos ever will.
Post that oath on Slack, pin it to the break room, tattoo it on a coffee mug. Just keep it visible.
The Slide Your Board Actually Cares About
When Day 90 rolls around, here’s all the board wants to see. Drop these bullets on a single slide and let the numbers do the talking:
Lead-to-Quote: < 10 days (was 25)
Forecast Accuracy: ≥ 85% (was ≤ 70%)
Margin Lift: +100-150 bps (price overrides crushed, rush freight down)
Cost Model: Fractional leadership, not a full-time addition
Spare them the 50-page deck. They’ll screenshot this slide and talk about it all quarter.
Your Next 30 Minutes
Ask yourself:
Are dealers begging for quotes while your teams juggle CSV uploads?
Does every weekly call still need four decks?
Will another quarter slip while margin leaks?
If the answers are yes, DM me “Accelerate.” We’ll map a 30-minute fit call, see if the 90-Day GTM Accelerator™ can rewrite your board slide before the next earnings call.