Shannon Byrne Susko's Compound Growth System integrates 7 interdependent systems into one unified operating framework. Here's everything you need to know — from the foundational concepts to how we supercharge it with AI.
Imagine Metronomics as a house. The foundation is coaching. The walls are split between "Soft Edge" (people and culture) and "Hard Edge" (strategy, execution, cash). Every system reinforces the others. Remove one, and the house wobbles.
Compound Growth System — 7 Systems Working Together
Developing Level 5 Leaders who lead with humility and will
The Cultural System ensures clarity and alignment across your entire organization. It establishes shared Core Values, a clear Core Purpose, and a long-term BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) that everyone understands and embodies.
The CEO's role is crucial here — they must be the living embodiment of the culture, communicating values in every decision and every interaction. Culture isn't what you put on the wall; it's what you tolerate, reward, and demonstrate.
Influenced by Patrick Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," the Cohesive System builds vulnerability-based trust within your leadership team. When trust exists, teams engage in productive conflict, achieve commitment, hold each other accountable, and focus on collective results.
Without cohesion, strategy is meaningless — because a dysfunctional team will never execute it. This system provides structured approaches to building trust and managing healthy conflict, creating the psychological safety that high-performance teams require.
As Jim Collins said: "First Who, Then What." Success begins with having the right people. The Human System, inspired by Brad Smart's Topgrading methodology, emphasizes clear role expectations, rigorous hiring standards, and accountability measures that ensure your team is filled with A-Players.
This isn't just about hiring — it's about creating an environment where A-Players thrive, B-Players grow, and chronic underperformers are coached up or coached out. Combined with behavioral assessments (Predictive Index, DISC), you get a data-driven approach to building world-class teams.
Drawing on Michael Porter's competitive strategy, the Strategic System focuses on creating a unique market position through deliberate choices. Strategy isn't about being better — it's about being different. This system translates complex strategic thinking into the 3HAG (3-Year Highly Achievable Goal).
The output: a clear strategic picture — Core Customer, Attribution Framework, Activity Fit Map, swimlanes, and 36-month rolling forecast — that your entire team can see, understand, and execute against. Not a 50-page document that nobody reads. A living, breathing strategic picture.
Execution translates strategy into daily actions. This system involves setting annual priorities, quarterly goals, and weekly accountabilities, then maintaining a communication rhythm — daily huddles, weekly meetings, monthly reviews, quarterly planning sessions — that ensures alignment and progress.
The key insight: execution isn't about doing more, it's about doing the right things in the right cadence. The One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) makes priorities visible. Status metrics (green/yellow/red) make accountability immediate. The rhythm never stops.
Cash is oxygen. The Cash System emphasizes forecasting and monitoring cash flow, integrating both financial and non-financial metrics to manage performance and respond to market changes. You need to know your cash conversion cycle, your unit economics, and your runway — at all times.
This system connects directly to the 3HAG's 36-month rolling forecast, giving the leadership team real-time visibility into the financial trajectory. No more "check the bank account and hope" — data-driven cash decisions every week.
At the base of the entire Metronomics house sits the Coach Cascade — the system for developing leaders into coaches who can guide their teams toward high performance. This draws on Jim Collins' concept of the Level 5 Leader: one who leads with a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will.
An external Metronomics coach works with the CEO, who coaches the leadership team, who coach their direct reports — the cascade effect. This is where an organization transforms from a company that depends on its founder to a company that runs on its system.
Every company needs a 3HAG — a 3-Year Highly Achievable Goal. The 3HAG Way is a prescriptive framework by Shannon Susko that takes the guessing out of strategy and breaks your vision into a clear, testable, executable picture your entire team can see.
Your 3HAG is a highly specific, measurable 3-year goal — not a vague vision statement. It includes revenue targets, key metrics, market position, and the strategic picture of what your company looks like in 36 months. It's "highly achievable" because it's built from validated data, not wishful thinking.
The key difference from traditional strategic planning: the 3HAG is visible to everyone in the company, updated quarterly, and connected to the execution cadence. It's a living document, not a dusty binder.
10 years is too far — too much uncertainty, too easy to defer action. 1 year is too close — you end up in firefighting mode, optimizing tactics instead of building strategy.
3 years is the sweet spot — far enough to think strategically, close enough to be concrete. You can see your Core Customer, map your competitive moat, forecast your cash, and break it into 12 quarterly milestones. It's the time horizon where strategy becomes executable.
Define your #1 customer with extreme specificity. Not a "segment" — a real person with real pain, real budget, and real urgency. Everything else flows from knowing who you serve better than anyone.
What makes you different? Not "better" — different. Map 8-12 attributes where you compete, then identify the 3-4 where you must win. This is your competitive position, quantified.
Inspired by Michael Porter's Activity System Maps. The 6-10 key activities that create your competitive moat and how they interlock. Competitors can copy one activity. They can't copy the system.
Key functional lanes (Product, Sales, Marketing, Ops, Finance, People) with 36-month milestone markers. Each lane shows where you need to be at months 12, 24, and 36. The roadmap made visible.
Month-over-month financial roadmap: revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, cash. Updated quarterly with actuals. Not a budget — a living forecast that validates (or invalidates) your strategic assumptions.
The team workshop where strategy gets real. Leadership team works through each block together, debates, commits. This is where buy-in happens — not because the CEO dictated it, but because the team built it.
Created by Brad Smart and refined by his son Geoff Smart in the bestseller "Who", Topgrading is the most rigorous hiring methodology ever developed. It takes your A-Player hiring rate from ~25% to 90%+. Used by GE, Honeywell, Barclays, and Lincoln Financial.
Most companies have a ~25% hiring success rate. That means 3 out of every 4 hires don't work out. At an average cost of $500K-$1.5M per mis-hire (salary, training, lost productivity, severance, re-hiring), the typical growth company wastes millions on bad hiring decisions.
Why? Because the standard hiring process — résumé screening, gut-feel interviews, vague reference checks — is fundamentally broken. Candidates fake résumés. Interviews are manipulated. And hiring managers rely on instinct instead of data.
At the start of the process, candidates are told they'll be asked to arrange reference calls from every previous boss. This single disclosure causes dishonest candidates to self-select out — immediately improving your candidate pool quality.
Replace vague job descriptions with scorecards: Mission (why this role exists), Outcomes (3-5 measurable objectives), and Competencies (the 6-8 behavioral traits essential for success). This is the blueprint every interview measures against.
A 2-4 hour tandem interview that walks through every job in the candidate's career — chronologically. For each role: successes, mistakes, key decisions, relationships, manager ratings, and why they left. Patterns emerge. Deception becomes visible.
The candidate — not the company — arranges reference calls with former bosses, peers, and reports. This verifies everything said in the interview and reveals patterns the candidate may not have disclosed voluntarily.
I don't teach from textbooks. I teach from the CEO chair. Let's talk about implementing Metronomics, 3HAG, and Topgrading — supercharged with AI — in your company.