PERSPECTIVE

Closing the Execution Gap: How Harms brings strategy to life through diagnostics, tiered advisory, and embedded leadership

A structured approach to advisory that solves what strategy alone cannot

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Sitelines

Strategy without structural readiness isn’t vision. It’s operational risk.

And yet, it happens all the time. The strategy is sound. The team is aligned. The deck is polished. But by week three, progress stalls. Priorities blur. Execution slows. Everyone is working, yet nothing is moving. The strategy didn’t fail. The system wasn’t prepared to carry it.

This is the overlooked reality in most advisory models. They assume alignment is enough. That clarity at the top will cascade through the business. But in founder-led and PE-backed companies where speed, complexity, and resource strain converge, that assumption is costly. Without the infrastructure to absorb, translate, and activate direction, even the strongest plan becomes a drag on the system.

Harms was built around this gap. Not to compete with traditional firms, but to address what they leave behind. We embed where others advise. We build the scaffolding that ensures strategy holds under pressure and moves.

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The Harms Lens

Most strategy firms measure alignment. We measure absorption.

At Harms, we’ve learned that it’s not just about whether a business understands the strategy. It’s about whether the business is structurally prepared to metabolize and carry it. That’s a different question entirely, and it demands a different kind of model.

In founder-led and PE-backed businesses, execution breakdowns rarely present as chaos. They show up as slow erosion in the form of delayed decisions, fragmented communication, inconsistent prioritization, and mounting rework. This is what we call execution entropy—the gradual, invisible loss of momentum as strategy fails to embed through the system.

The issue is not effort. It’s fit. A company may have the right people, the right tools, and even the right leadership, but if the internal scaffolding isn’t aligned to the stage, strategy, and required velocity, the business will unconsciously resist its own growth.

That’s why Harms leads with diagnostics. Our proprietary tools, including theExecution Entropy Score™, the COO Fit Matrix™, the Stakeholder Readiness Diagnostic, and our own proprietary founder archetyping, are all designed to surface the friction points that stall execution, alignment and scale before they show up on a dashboard. Diagnostics are just the entry point. What follows, whether strategic recalibration or embedded leadership is shaped by what those insights reveal.

We don’t offer a fixed playbook. We calibrate the system itself, then walk with our partner clients until execution flows cleanly through it.

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Prescriptive Clarity

The real risk isn’t choosing the wrong strategy. It’s deploying the right strategy into a system that isn’t built to carry it.

At Harms, we treat execution as a moving threshold. Strategy must be absorbed differently depending on where a business sits in its lifecycle, and how structurally ready it is to metabolize lift.

That’s why our model is tiered. Build. Reset. Scale. Embedded Partner. Each one addresses a distinct execution pattern and gives us a clear lens on what the system actually needs.

Build
For companies still forming their foundation—operating rhythm, team structure, trust flow.
We solve for clarity, cadence, and cohesion.

Reset
For businesses in motion but misaligned or strained. Strategy exists, but the system resists it.
We solve for friction, realignment, and restored rhythm.

Scale
For companies preparing to grow with intent. Execution is active, but not yet scalable.
We solve for velocity, repeatability, and lift.

EmbeddedPartner
For leadership teams that need embedded strategic support inside the business.
We solve for continuity, compounding leverage, and executive-level execution.

This tiering isn’t about packaging. It’s about precision.

We productize the front of the engagement—diagnostics and tier mapping—so we can tailor the rest with clarity and speed. Some of that insight is structured, scored, and modeled. Some of it emerges through deep conversation and what goes unsaid. Together, it gives us an evidence-based picture of how ready the system truly is.

From there, we embed. Not just as advisors, but as partners inside the business. We move with the team, not around it. The result is work that holds, because it's grounded, sequenced, and structurally fit for the moment.

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Refocus

Strategy doesn’t fail in the boardroom. It fails in the bloodstream of the business, where absorption breaks down, alignment slips, and execution slows.

For founders, that failure often looks like personal overload and structural stall.
For investors, it looks like friction where momentum should be. And for operators, it shows up as rework, ambiguity, and a system that resists scale.

Harms exists to shift that pattern. We don’t drop in with slides. We step in with structure, mapping what’s real, aligning what’s required, and embedding precisely where execution needs to move.

If you’re asking your system to do more, make sure it’s built for it.

Send us a signal to schedule a Precision Fit call.
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We’ll assess where you sit, what’s ready, and where execution needs reinforcement, before any next steps are made.