Stop Optimizing for Revenue. Optimize for Great Decisions. The Rest Follows.

By Austin Holmes, Co-Founder & President, Publicity For Good & Signal Raptor / Host of OverPressure Podcast

OverPressure podcast with guest Mike Konrad 

I recently interviewed Mike Konrad on the Over Pressure Podcast. 34 years in electronics manufacturing, founder and CEO of Aqueous Technologies, author of The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Anatomy of a Business Start-Up — From Uncertainty to Unstoppable, host of two podcasts, and one of the more direct voices on entrepreneurship I’ve talked to this year. Mike started his company in 1992 after his employer turned down his idea for solving an environmental crisis in his industry. They sued him two months after he launched, and the trial ate more than 100% of his startup capital. As he put it: “I was like Weekend at Bernie’s. I was the dead guy that they kept dragging around to a party.”

He got past that. Then he ran the company for three decades. And somewhere in there, he learned something that stopped me cold when he said it out loud because it’s the exact reframe I’ve been circling around at Publicity For Good without having language for.

Mike told me that everything changed for his company when they stopped optimizing for revenue targets and started optimizing for the quality of their decisions.

That is probably the deepest thing I’ve heard about business this year. And I want to unpack it, because I think most founders, veterans especially are running the exact operating model Mike had to unlearn.

What this article covers:

• Why KPI-first operating models quietly break the businesses they’re supposed to grow
• What “make great decisions” actually looks like as a leadership practice
• Why veteran founders are unusually prone to the KPI trap — and what to shift to

The trap most founders fall into

Here’s how Mike described the mechanism. When you set a revenue target and organize the company around hitting it, every decision gets filtered through “does this move us toward the number.” That sounds disciplined. It sounds like good management. What it actually does is quietly force trade-offs the founder never explicitly authorized. Quality gets sacrificed for speed. Standards get relaxed for scale. The right customer gets passed over for the fast customer. The team optimizes for whatever the leader is measuring rather than for whatever would actually build the durable business.

His words: “When we focused on the revenue, we lost something else. It was one in exchange for another.” Every KPI-driven business he watched, including his own, ended up making that trade. And it’s often without anyone noticing it was happening.

Then he made the shift. His version: “Let’s just make the best product we possibly can, best-in-class. Let’s make the best quality decisions we possibly can. And use the KPIs as a scorecard, not as a goal.”

That single sentence rearranges how the whole company operates.

What “make great decisions” actually looks like

The reframe still respects the numbers. Mike still watches his metrics. He just stopped letting them drive the decisions. The metrics tell him whether the decisions are working. The decisions themselves are made against a different standard: what is the highest-integrity, best-quality, most-durable choice for this specific moment, given what we actually know?

That standard forces a different kind of thinking. You stop asking “what will hit the quarter” and start asking “what will this decision look like in three years.” You stop asking “which option is fastest” and start asking “which option is most likely to still be right when the market shifts.” You stop optimizing for immediate impression and start optimizing for compounding effect.

And here’s what Mike said happened when his team adopted this: things turned around in a way that surprised him. His words: “It became extremely obvious. Like, oh my god, why haven’t we been doing this before?” The answer, he said, was that they weren’t ready, and that ideas sounded stupid until suddenly they didn’t.

Why veterans are especially prone to the KPI trap

I want to name this specifically because it’s the version of the trap I’ve been catching myself in.

The military trains us on mission accomplishment. That framing is right for combat. The mission is the mission, and either you complete it or you don’t. Success is binary and outcome-defined. That mental model transfers into business as an obsession with hitting the number, closing the deal, delivering the launch. It feels like the same operational discipline that made us effective in uniform.

What we miss is that mission accomplishment in combat has a specific end state defined by someone else. The mission was chosen by command; our job was execution. In business, the mission is our own to define, and if we let the KPI define it, we’ve quietly outsourced the most important decision the founder ever makes: what the company is actually for. That’s how veteran-led businesses end up hitting all their targets and still losing the thing they started the company to build.

The Publicity For Good version of this

I’ll be honest that this reframe is one I’ve been running into at PFG. When Heather and I focus first on hitting a revenue number, we make trade-offs we don’t like. We spend time on activities that boost the near-term metric while neglecting the work that would compound over years.

When we shift to “make the best decision available for this specific client, this specific week, given what we actually know,” the trade-offs disappear. The pressure doesn’t disappear, it just gets redirected toward the right thing. The right client gets the right work at the right cadence. The team spends its hours on judgment and craft rather than metric-chasing. The revenue follows, not immediately, but durably.

That is what Mike was describing in his own thirty-four years of running Aqueous Technologies. And it landed on me because it named something I had been circling.

Change, not abandon

If you’re a veteran founder reading this and your operating rhythm is built around hitting quarterly numbers, I’d offer Mike’s reframe as the one worth sitting with. The move is to change what the numbers are for, not to abandon them. Use the KPIs as a scorecard telling you whether your decisions are working. Make the decisions themselves against a different standard: what is the best quality choice for this moment, given what we actually know?

Mike’s version, as he said it: “Just make the best quality decisions we possibly can. And use the KPIs as a scorecard, not as a goal. And let’s just see where it takes us.”

Thirty-four years of running a company through a lawsuit that nearly killed him, a global industry disruption that created his market, and every kind of pressure a founder faces. That’s the operating principle he landed on. It is the one I’m sitting with too.

Watch the full podcast here and other episodes on the Overpressure Podcasts on Spotify and YouTube.

########

Austin Holmes is a Navy Special Operations veteran, father, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and President of Publicity For Good and CEO of Signal Raptor, a SaaS-enabled PR platform that modernizes one of the most traditional industries by productizing services and pairing technology with human expertise. He hosts the Over Pressure Podcast, where he interviews veteran entrepreneurs about building businesses under real-world pressure.