About
Why the practice is called Terminal Guidance
Anyone can write the strategy. I make sure it hits the target.
Terminal guidance is a term from the Patriot air defense system, which I served in as an Army officer. The Army spells it PATRIOT: Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept On Target. When the radar on the ground detects an incoming missile, its array of more than 5,000 antenna elements swings a tracking beam back and forth many times a second, holding the target while the system launches an interceptor and sends it steering updates in flight. The interceptor gets most of the way on that plan. In the final seconds, the terminal phase, the interceptor turns on its own radar seeker, lets go of the ground beam, makes the last corrections itself, and flies straight into the incoming warhead. Hit-to-kill. There is no blast to cover a near miss, so those last corrections have to be exact.
That is what I named the practice after. A strategy is the launch. It sets the direction and carries the work most of the way. The last part, where the plan meets what is actually happening and someone makes the corrections that produce the result, is where most strategies miss. I build the teams that finish, and I stay on the mission until the numbers move.
Three parts to the career
The Army.
West Point, then Air Defense Artillery. I commanded a Patriot missile battery on the Kuwait-Iraq border, 125 soldiers, with no other Army unit within a hundred miles. You do not hire in the Army. You build with the people you are given, so I led through my sergeants and handed junior leaders real decisions instead of checking their work. Title gets you compliance. Mission gets you people who make the right call when you are not in the room. I still run teams that way.
Enterprise systems.
The first part of my civilian career was ERP, the software behind a company's finance, orders and supply chain. Technicolor first, then Blue Skies Consulting, including three years inside one of the largest healthcare companies in the world. The work taught me to read a business as a connected system: change how orders are taken and it shows up in the warehouse, in cash, and in what the customer sees.
Consumer and subscription.
At Beachbody I built Beachbody On Demand, the streaming fitness app, from launch to 2.5M subscribers and $250M in annual recurring revenue, with revenue up 66% in three years and subscriber retention grown from 18 to 27 months. At Alchemee, parent of Proactiv, I ran technology and information, lifted conversion 40% (3.0% to 4.2%) and subscription retention 12%, and cut outsourced vendor cost 60% ($2.68M to $1.06M). At Sommsation, a wine eCommerce and subscription company, I took eCommerce conversion from 0.03% to 0.97%, 32x, and grew weekly revenue 8x in a market down 15%. Through Terminal Guidance I do the same work for subscription and digital product companies.
How I work
In a missile battery, honest reporting up the chain is a survival requirement. You do not round up a readiness number because someone above you wants a better one. I run a company's numbers the same way. A CEO or a board is informed often and never surprised.