Every day at 4:45 PM, Zach Augustine, our Head of Analytics, and I jump on a call.
It lasts three to five minutes. No deck. No agenda. No prep required.
Just three questions: What happened today? What are we seeing? What matters?
It could be Dakota Marketplace usage trends, Google Analytics traffic, demo bookings, conversion shifts, or something that looked unusual in the data. Whatever moved that day, we talk about it. Then we hang up.
Yesterday, after we hung up, I called him back.
I told him I was blown away. His delivery over the past 90 days has been night and day. Accurate. Straight to the findings. No noise, no hedging, no burying the lead. Just clean thinking delivered out loud in under five minutes.
And then I realized — the call is what did it.
There's no pressure on the 4:45 call. It's calm. But it has clarity built into it, because Zach knows every single day he's going to have to answer the same questions: what changed, why it changed, and what it means.
When you have to articulate something every day, you get good at it. Not eventually. Fast.
You stop hiding behind dashboards. You stop sending screenshots with no context. You stop saying "I'll pull that together for next week." You start thinking in real time, because real time is when the call is happening.
That daily constraint has done more for his development than any tool, course, or performance review we could have run.
Most organizations wait for weekly reports. Monthly summaries. Quarterly business reviews. And they wonder why decisions lag, why problems surface late, why the people running analytics or finance or sales ops always seem to be one step behind the actual business.
The cadence is the problem. When you review something monthly, you're reviewing history. You're not managing the present; you're autopsying the past.
Daily forces something different. It forces transparency, because there's nowhere to hide. It forces ownership, because the person delivering the update becomes the authority on it. It forces pattern recognition, because you're watching the same data move every day and you start to develop real instincts for what's normal and what isn't.
And it compounds. Three minutes a day doesn't feel like much. But 90 days in, that's 270 reps. Reps build confidence. Confidence builds clarity. Clarity, over time, builds real leadership.
The check-in isn't a monitoring mechanism. I'm not watching over Zach's shoulder. It's not about accountability in a punitive sense.
It's elevation. When you ask someone to show up every day with clean thinking, they rise to it. The standard creates the performance.
Zach didn't get better because I gave him a better dashboard or a more sophisticated analytics stack. He got better because he had to explain what he was seeing — out loud, clearly, to another person — every single day.
We've seen the same thing with our 7:45 AM daily sales check-in, which is now in its fifth year. Same format. Same discipline. The reps compound the same way.
Small cadence. Big results. You can apply it anywhere in your organization.
The question isn't whether your team has the capability. It's whether you've built the conditions that bring it out.
