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Join for freePosted: Fri 11th Sep 2026
Small business owners don't fail from a lack of ideas – they fail from a lack of execution infrastructure.
In this session, Dr Edward Klinger, founder of ScaleUpGym, draws on his background in building and scaling sensor networks for critical infrastructure to explain why strategy documents gather dust while operating systems get results.
Learn the difference between planning your business and running it, and walk away with a practical way to see what's actually happening across every part of your business at a glance.
Why strategy alone doesn't create change – and what does
The difference between a plan and an operating system (and why most businesses only have the first one)
A simple way to get a real-time view across every part of your business, not just the loudest parts
Dr Edward Klinger holds a PhD from McGill University and an MBA from Wharton.
Over 30 years, he has founded and scaled multiple businesses, raised $30m in funding, driven $50m in new revenues at PwC, and led a $100m joint venture at Perot Systems (now Dell) – operating across 25 countries along the way.
He built ScaleUpGym after seeing the same pattern everywhere: ambition without structure, knowledge without execution. A black belt in karate, Edward knows results come from showing up and following a system – every day. That's the principle behind everything he builds.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Amy: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Amy, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you who are attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses. I am pleased to introduce Edward Klinger, who is the founder and CEO of ScaleUpGym.
In this session, Edward will discuss the difference between planning your business and running it. If you've got any questions throughout the webinar, please post them into the chat or the Q&A, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar is recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email to you early next week, which will have the recording and further resources as well. Without much further ado, I will hand over to you, Edward.
Edward: Thank you very much, Amy, and thanks so much for having me, everyone. I'm really pleased you've taken half an hour off from your lunch, and I'm hoping that today will be a productive and insightful session.
As Amy said, my name's Edward, and I'm the founder of ScaleUpGym. Before I get into today's topic, I should mention that I spent about three decades in engineering, in an area called critical infrastructure. Today's session draws a lot on that background, and you'll see how it's meaningful for the topic we're discussing.
Let's get straight into it. Here's something I've noticed in my previous world in technology, and now working with many business owners: businesses, especially small business owners, don't fail from a lack of ideas. There are tons of those around.
What we fail at is often the execution of those ideas and putting them into practice – what I would call, relating it to my previous world, execution infrastructure. Let me explain that a bit more to set the scene.
Before ScaleUpGym, I spent years building sensor networks – literally thousands of sensors – which give utility operators, electricity companies and water companies a real-time view of their assets: pipelines, cables, that sort of thing. This meant they knew instantly what was happening in their infrastructure. For example, if a pressure valve started drifting, they would know about it immediately.
Now let's compare that world, which needs to run seamlessly – our utilities must work all the time, otherwise there's going to be a real problem – to how most small businesses run. In your mind, you may have a strategy. You may even have written it down.
If you did write it down, you probably did it when you were particularly inspired, or at a moment that was quite chaotic and you felt you needed to revisit your strategy. But if you did it, it probably sits in a folder somewhere.
Meanwhile, the day-to-day running of your business – the reality of your business, for example your cash position, your sales pipeline, your capacity, your inventories – none of that is really visible in real time.
There's a very simple way for us to picture this. A plan gives us our destination: this is where we're going to. An operating system, which is the nub of what I want to discuss today, is your compass.
You can know exactly where it is that you want to end up and still have no idea whether you're actually heading towards it or away from it. It doesn't matter if you're in a plane, a car or a business – it's a real problem, not just a minor inconvenience.
So you've got a strategy document, either in your head or gathering dust somewhere, and no operating system running underneath it. That gap between planning a strategy and seeing what is actually happening on the ground is what I want to talk about today.
Now, if there's nothing else that you take away from our half hour together, this is the one line I'd like you to leave with: you don't need another strategy. There are lots of those around, maybe even too many.
What you do need is an operating system that enables you to execute and get that strategy accomplished. That's the one line I'd like us to remember in the background.
Let's dig into this a little more. What is the difference between a plan and an operating system?
If we recall the destination-and-compass image I used, that's exactly what we're looking at. The plan sits somewhere; it's in a folder, and it's written once. Usually, it's written when you're either particularly inspired or when there's a lot of chaos going on, and it's really telling you what you hoped would happen, not what is actually happening – that is your destination, the plan.
An operating system is something completely different. It runs all the time, it runs daily, and it shows you what's actually happening right now and tells you what to do next.
This matters even – and especially – when it's just you, perhaps as a solo person running the business with no one else to catch what might fall through the cracks. It's your compass.
I'm going to ask a very simple question to get a gut feel for this. You might be able to tell me what your pipeline number is – the overall number of targets you have in your sales pipeline.
You might know that offhand; if you did, fantastic. If you didn't, you might need to look for it.
But could you actually tell me how much of that pipeline you can actually trust, and how much of it is hope? Let's pause on that for a moment, because that element is critical: do you actually trust and understand what's ongoing in your business?
So how do you actually build such an operating system? I want to look at it in three different layers, and this goes straight back to the infrastructure world I mentioned before, when I was deploying sensors for utilities.
Layer one is your key performance indicators, or KPIs – these are your sensors. They're the individual numbers you already have, whether you're tracking them or not: things like your leads, your cash reserves, your inventory levels, your staffing and follow-throughs. Those are your sensors out there.
Layer two is what I call indices. Think of these as dials, like gauges: you take the individual KPIs, your multiple sensors, and roll them up into a simple, meaningful reading for each area of your business.
So instead of staring at 10 different things, you're looking at one dial that tells you, for example, that sales are healthy, or that cash is tight. Those are your indices.
If we go back to our gut check a minute ago – could you tell me how much of your pipeline is actually healthy, that you can trust, versus hope? That's exactly the gap an index can help close for you. A KPI is just a number out there, more of a total; an index is the actual number with the confidence built into it, broken down by what's actually going on inside your business.
So you're not looking at something you merely hope is holding up – you're looking at something you can actually trust.
Layer three is your business operating and scaling system: BOSS, for short. You are the boss of your business, or the boss of your career, so the acronym is meaningful here. This is your BOSS platform – the dashboard for the business, every dial in one place, updated in real time, so that nothing gets missed even when there's no team around you to catch what might fall through the cracks.
Now, that dashboard doesn't stop just at your business itself – it also includes you. It must include, for example, your personality.
Are you someone who's biased to action, or are you consistent and disciplined in what you do? Do you have clear cognition – do you get stuck or confused? And do you hold yourself accountable, or do you externalise things and say, 'that's not actually my responsibility, it's something else'?
There's no right or wrong answer here. Your personality is something that develops and is something at this particular moment, but we need to be aware of it.
Similarly, our health: our energy levels, our motivations, our clarity, our sleep, our stress levels – those sorts of things. These sit right alongside the other indices I mentioned, because a business cannot outrun us as the founders, owners or people working in it.
I want to share this with you because it's not theoretical – it's a live example that we see. Let me point to these indices.
Here we have a business model canvas index. This tells you the what and the why of your business: why does your business exist, and what is its strategy? This is where you define things like your customer segments, the products and services you have, and the channels through which you'll get those products and services to your customer segments.
What kind of relationships do you need to have with your clients, and what are your revenue streams? That's the front-facing part of your business. On the back end, what are the operations, the activities and the partnerships you need, and what are your cost structures? That's one index.
Another index is the how of your business – how you're going to implement the what and the why. This is about the things you need to do fast, from a velocity perspective: that's what the V stands for in VISTA. The I stands for what you have to do innovatively.
The S is about what you need to do to simplify things – there's a lot of complexity out there, so how do you make it easier to work with? The T is what you have to be tenacious with, and the A is whether you're being audacious enough – bold enough in your aspirations for your business or your career. That's what VISTA stands for.
Financials are a clear indicator for your business too, as is personality, which we talked about before. There's also your career index – are you just starting out, or already in a mature phase of what you're doing? – your health index, and your community index: how do you compare to everyone else?
These are gauges, and they translate and roll up into things like your goals: your short-, medium-, and long-term goals for your business. Signals is market intelligence – it tells you how your business is performing and what the drivers of your business are from the outside: compliance, regulation, competition, trends and opportunities, as well as leads.
These are the opportunities your business can take advantage of, and the organisations you should be approaching to generate sales, as well as the opportunity pipeline – what's in your pipeline. It's a bit like a CRM that tells you who you've contacted, who's been qualified, what's been won and what's been lost.
So this is basically a dashboard for your business, and this is what you need to get a handle on, because behind it there's a lot of complexity.
There are sensors out there in our businesses that we may not be aware of, and what you need to do is get visibility on those in a very real way. Let me talk about a couple of case studies to bring this to life – two very different, but real, stories.
First is Emma. Emma is a solo virtual assistant, very capable and very reliable. Her one-liner beforehand, her strategy statement, was: ‘Experienced virtual assistant (VA) offering administrative support, calendar management and general business assistance.’
Nothing wrong with that grammatically, but completely forgettable in practice.
Now, the business model canvas – the same canvas we talked about before – was flashing red at this stage: unhealthy. She had two clients at that point, and nothing crisp for a stranger to remember her by.
She felt at the time, instinctively, that the positioning was fine – that's hope. The index, which is a real measure, said otherwise: the same trust-versus-hope gap we discussed before, just showing up in a completely different part of the business.
Here's what actually changed as a result of using dashboards and this principle of getting an operating system. Using that same positioning canvas, Emma rebuilt her one-liner, and it became something a lot more real: ‘Overwhelmed founders lose hours a week buried in inbox and calendar chaos. I run their day-to-day operations like clockwork, giving them back a full day of work to focus on growth.’
That was the reframing that took place by modifying the assumptions in her canvas, in her original strategy. This is something very specific that someone can repeat back.
Furthermore, and critically, to use such a system you need to make a commitment to using it. One hour a week is enough – if you can put in more, even better. I call it a sacrosanct hour: one hour a week where you can work on your business, and not necessarily be buried in it, which is what we mostly do.
That's non-negotiable – you need to have that, no exceptions. Six months later, she went from two to 14 clients.
But not only that – and perhaps even more critically – she did it without dropping her prices. In fact, she was able to raise her pricing. Her referral conversations also started flowing from the very first call.
That one-liner, the change of the one-liner, was just the entry point. But it's the upstream condition: it's the strategic positioning of your business, and you do that using the business model canvas we discussed. That's not the finish line, though.
Using that business model canvas, she then mapped exactly who she wanted to work with, the specific problems, and the value propositions she'd solve for them – and also how to explain the value of that support, not just per time. This is the crucial thing: a lot of us express ourselves in terms of the time we commit, not the value or the outcomes. That makes all the difference in the world.
That clarity did a couple of things. First, referral conversations started closing a lot faster, because prospects started to understand the value before the call even got started. Then she raised her rates at the same time that her client numbers grew, moving from charging for hours to value-based outcomes.
So that's the story of Emma: using a strategic repositioning, and then an operating system, to implement it. The plan and the compass – that's how she was able to achieve significant improvement in her business.
Now let's switch gears to a completely different world. This is Doctor Shah – he's a neurosurgeon, broadly accomplished and a genuine expert in his field. His one-liner when we got started, the strategic starting point, was: ‘Experienced neurosurgeon providing high-quality clinical care with a strong academic and surgical background.’
Accurate? Yes. But the problem was that it's indistinguishable, because thousands of other people would say the same thing.
It's similar to everything else we do – if we're web designers, virtual assistants, plumbers or mortgage advisers, whatever our line of business, there are tens of thousands, if not more, people saying the same thing. As a result, the business model canvas index at that time was unhealthy – it was flashing red.
Respected, but never the first name anyone reached for. Again, instinctively, he felt his positioning was solid – 'respected, credentialled, experienced.' That's hope, and hope isn't a strategy: his index told him otherwise. Same gap, completely different world.
So, using that same canvas and process, Doctor Shah rebuilt his positioning around a new, clear one-liner: ‘Board-ready clinical leadership. I translate frontline neurosurgical expertise into strategic judgment that healthcare boards and investors can act on.’
Same weekly ritual – you can't outsource someone to do the weekly reps for you, so you need to do it yourself, with that sacrosanct hour protected every week for something like this to work.
The result, in his particular case, was that Global Healthcare magazine named him one of the most visionary neurosurgeons of 2026, and echoed his own words in that article on the cover. He's now sitting not on zero advisory boards, but on three – which was the original mission of the project.
Let's have a look at this. The new positioning line was the starting point, not the whole story.
Of course, you need to get your restraint organisation correct, and you do that inside the operating system, then use the canvas to express that and map it into the things you can actually measure on an ongoing basis. The value – the polished material that made the case for the board seat before he even walked into the room – was real: from zero board positions before, to three afterwards.
This is the same clarity that eventually became what the magazine editor chose to put into the feature.
So, we talked about trusting your numbers instead of hoping they're fine, and about your own health and personality being part of this too – it's not just the business. Here's the simplest way to put all of that: you're not going to fly a plane, or hope that someone else isn't flying a plane, without instruments, and you wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard.
So why run your business without one? An operating system is just that – it's your dashboard, and it's time that you had one.
I want to wrap up now. Concretely, what I'd like each and every one of you to do next week is three things, and notice that these map exactly onto the key performance indicators, the indices and the BOSS structure – the dashboard from earlier, just made personal.
First, pick a blind spot in your business: choose a single part of your business that you don't currently track, and start tracking it.
Second, turn it into a dial – roll up that whole process into a very simple reading on a weekly basis, something you can trust, not just hope or instinct telling you, 'I think it's right.' That's not good enough.
Third, put it into your calendar: 10 minutes, say, every Monday, to check it, and that's it. That's as simple as it is – that's an operating system, gotten started.
Thank you very much for listening to the presentation.
Amy: Thank you so much, Edward. Lovely. If anyone's got any questions, please do share them, and I'll take a look now.
So the first question we've had is: does this dashboard already exist, or is it an app, or was the image simply an indication of what we need to focus on?
Edward: Great, I'm glad that was asked. That's an actual application, which I put together myself when I realised, once I left my technology businesses, that there was this gap – especially for micro-SMEs and small businesses – where it was necessary to be able to look at your business in real time, especially if you're a very small business owner.
So it does exist, yes, on the one hand. On the other hand, I also don't want to overcomplicate it: a lot of what we're talking about today, you could use that application for, and you're welcome to try it.
You could also use a simple spreadsheet in many cases, or a notebook – there are many different ways you could take the principles I've talked about today and apply them. The application, as you saw, is real, and it does work.
The advantage of it, of course, is that it's able to roll up a lot of complex parameters in your business, including your personality and health indices as well.
Amy: Lovely. Thanks, Edward. Another question we've had is: reviewing past KPIs is retrospective and leads to reactive management. How do we shift to predictive KPI management to enable proactive business management?
Edward: Great question. In fact, you need to be looking at both: what's happened in the past, obviously, but also what's happening in the future. Future key performance indicators are, for example, your pipeline, which I showed in the growth index as one of the gauges we have.
That shows you what the future holds. It also gives you a granularity underneath it – why it is, and what our confidence level is in being able to get there. That's one proactive KPI we need to be thinking about.
The other is business intelligence: live information coming to us from the marketplace. It tells us about upcoming regulatory or compliance drivers, competitive factors happening out there, trends, and new technologies we should be aware of.
Again, these are forward-thinking indicators that we need to feed into it as well. Really, what you need is a balance of elements that tell you how you've been doing, which is also important, but also what's ahead of you.
Amy: Thanks, Edward. I had another question, which is: would you say that the operating system is the same as an operating model, such as a target operating model, that speaks to the organisation's strategic objectives?
Edward: Great question. The model itself is basically a template that you use, and you revise it, improve it and change it. For me, that's fundamentally different from the operating system itself.
The operating system is not the model – it's what is actually happening, and it's measuring things across these different gauges we talked about. That needs to be reconciled against the model, because if what you're seeing in your operating system is showing negative or plateaued results, and not buoyant growth, then clearly something is wrong, perhaps in your business model. So you go back.
The advantage is that this operating system can reconnect the dots directly into the strategic framework, which is more in line with the model you were perhaps talking about.
Amy: Perfect. Thanks, Edward. I think that's all the questions we've had from the audience, so I'll end on one final question: if you could give every small business owner one principle from this session to implement tomorrow, what would it be?
Edward: I love that question, and I'm going to give you the simplest possible answer: allow one hour every week to work on your business, and not in it. That's a resolution you need to make.
At the end of the year, or the beginning of the year, we make resolutions – 99% of them fail. What you need to do is hold yourself accountable, because we try to outsource it, or lose interest, or get diverted.
This requires a very disciplined approach: whether you use the platform I discussed, or your own spreadsheet, or a notebook – whatever it happens to be – the main thing is you need to hold yourself accountable with the sacrosanct hour. Take one hour a week, set it aside, and say, 'I am now going to work on my business, and pay attention intentionally to my strategy and my operating system.'
That's my most important takeaway from today.
Amy: Lovely. Thanks so much, Edward. That's a great top tip to end this webinar on.
So thank you so much to everyone who has joined. As I said earlier, we'll be sharing a follow-up email, and in there there'll be some follow-up resources, including this recording.
But thank you so much to Edward for running this webinar – it's been some incredible advice that you've provided. So thank you so much, and thank you for answering our questions as well.
The follow-up email will also include a link so you can connect with Edward – we've added it into the chat as well. But thanks, everyone, and I hope everyone has a lovely rest of their day.
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