Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Fred Voccola’s approach to accountability as moving the measurement earlier in the cycle rather than sharpening the consequence at the end of it. When an executive’s results are only visible at the end of a business cycle, Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group and previously the CEO who led Kaseya for eleven years to roughly $1.5 to $1.6 billion in revenue at mid-to-high-thirties profit margins, holds that a leader must deconstruct the workflow into its building blocks and measure them weekly or sub-weekly, because a 90-day accountability cycle for a 90-day sales cycle means the problem cannot be fixed until it has already broken.
This episode is for CEOs and executives who have hired strong leaders, given them room, and are discovering at the end of each cycle that the results did not arrive and the only remaining option is replacement.
Key Takeaways
- Hiring great people and leaving them alone does not produce repeatable success. Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, states that he tried that widely recommended model and it failed, and that a leader must stay on top of the details of the business while still empowering the people running it.
- Micromanaging outcomes is a different act from micromanaging people. Fred Voccola draws the distinction explicitly: the leader builds instrumentation around business outcomes and the operational indicators that drive them, and manages to those indicators rather than to the individuals.
- Accountability applied at the end of a cycle is a binary verdict, not management. Fred Voccola describes the common pattern of asking leaders how things are going, then firing them six to twelve months later when the result did not arrive, and says that provides no help and holds nobody accountable.
- Even excellent hiring produces a meaningful miss rate. Fred Voccola puts a strong executive hirer at two for three or three for four, and says anyone claiming ten out of ten is lying, which is why the operating system cannot depend on hiring alone.
- Hypergrowth is when leaders most often abandon the detail, and the cost compounds. Fred Voccola observes leaders responding to hyperscale by hiring hundreds of people and stepping back, at exactly the point when the business is changing completely every six to twelve months.
Leaders Reject the Idea That Hiring Well Removes the Need to Stay in the Detail
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, names the piece of conventional advice he was taught and now rejects: hire the best people and leave them alone. His objection is empirical rather than philosophical. He tried it, and it failed to produce repeatable success.
The correction is not a reduction in hiring standards. Fred Voccola holds that hiring the best people within a given cost range is the single most important thing a leader does, and that empowering them matters. What he disputes is the conclusion drawn from it. A leader who treats a strong hire as the end of their own involvement has bet the outcome on a decision with a known failure rate, and Fred Voccola puts that rate plainly: a genuinely skilled executive hirer goes two for three, maybe three for four, and anyone claiming ten out of ten is lying.
The distinction he draws next is what makes the position workable rather than contradictory: “You have to micromanage the business. It doesn’t mean you micromanage the people.” A leader builds instrumentation around business outcomes and the leading indicators that drive them, then understands those indicators as well as anyone in the company. Fred Voccola is specific that he does not mean sales, EBITDA, and margins, which he calls the easy part. He means the operational indicators that determine whether the product ships on time and whether whatever outcome the business is chasing actually arrives.
Leaders Deconstruct Workflows Into Weekly Indicators So Problems Surface Early Enough to Fix
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, frames the accountability problem as a timing problem. Holding someone accountable to the end outcome is easy, and easy is the tell. The difficult work is ensuring the outcome is always met so that the accountability conversation never has to happen.
His worked example is a B2B company with a 90-day sales cycle:
- Identify the outcome cycle length. In this case, 90 days.
- Recognize that an accountability cadence matching the cycle length leaves nothing to fix. Fred Voccola’s verdict on that configuration is direct: if accountability cycles run 90 days for sales executives, the leader is lost, because things cannot be fixed until they are already broken.
- Deconstruct the cycle into its building blocks.
- Break those blocks down to weekly or sub-weekly measures, down to the level of asking whether the last two days went well and where they fell down.
- Intervene at that resolution, which turns the conversation into help rather than judgment.
Fred Voccola’s claim about what this produces is the part worth extracting: at that resolution, everything is visible and transparent, which makes accountability self-governing and removes the need for the leader to impose it. He applies the same logic to R&D, finance, and any other workflow.
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, describes the same practice as holding people accountable to the plan, with metrics measured weekly or more often, so that a deviation opens a discussion rather than a verdict. Fred Voccola’s stated motive is that he does not want to hold anyone accountable at all. He wants people to succeed, and finding something before it breaks avoids the re-engineering that follows discovering it broken.
Leaders Who Stop Tracking the Details During Hypergrowth Build an Organization for the Wrong Year
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, separates ordinary scaling from what he calls hyperscaling. Moving from $5 million to $7 million, or $80 million to $90 million, is growth inside an existing framework. Going from $10 million to $1.9 billion in five years is a different problem.
The failure he watches leaders make at that transition is a substitution: they focus on the hyperscaling itself rather than on what is happening to the business while it hyperscales. In practice that means concluding the job is now to hire 350 people and trust that those people will handle the challenges. Fred Voccola’s counterargument is that no business stays the same, and in his industries the business is completely different every six to twelve months.
His engineering example makes the cost concrete. A software or AI company running a large engineering group in 2026 is operating in conditions he describes as 100 percent different from 2024, a shift he compares to the invention of the assembly line. A leader who is not in the detail of that change will build a 2024 engineering organization, which he says will be utterly worthless, precisely when exponential growth requires producing hundreds of times more functionality. The error is treating scale as permission to orchestrate rather than stay hands dirty in the business.
Fred Voccola’s conclusion about who succeeds at this is a named category rather than a trait: entrepreneurs who scale are the best executives in the world, because they carry the detail habit into the size where most leaders abandon it.
Leaders Apply the Same Detail Discipline When They Move Between Companies
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, spent eleven years leading Kaseya, an IT management and cybersecurity software company, reaching roughly $1.5 to $1.6 billion in revenue at mid-to-high-thirties profit margins and, in his description, one of the largest and most valuable privately held software companies in the world, where he remains the largest individual shareholder. He left in 2024 for family and personal reasons.
What he did with the interval demonstrates the same operating instinct at a personal scale. Fred Voccola took nine months, was bored within a week, and wrote a book in order to go deep on AI and who would change the world. His account of the value is that the research taught him more than the writing did, and it produced the thesis he then went looking to test: that AI is disrupting every aspect of society rather than only business.
The Simpro decision followed from applying that thesis to a specific detail-level problem. Field service trades run companies typically under 200 employees at profit margins around 5 percent, where the difficulty is not the trade work but the logistics of getting the right worker, the right materials, and the right training to the right place at the right time. Simpro Group serves 23,000 customers with over a million workers on the platform daily, processing over 10 million jobs a month, and Simpro Lightning now applies AI agents to reporting, technician training, and job documentation.
A leader moving between companies carries the method rather than the domain. Fred Voccola states he has worked in the weeds at companies doing multiple billions in revenue and at companies he started from day one, and does not believe an executive can succeed without it.
Principles Leaders Will Apply From This Episode
| Principle | Practice | Named outcome evidence |
| Move accountability earlier than the outcome | Deconstruct each workflow into building blocks measured weekly or sub-weekly, so deviations surface while they can still be corrected | Fred Voccola applied this operating model across eleven years leading Kaseya to roughly $1.5 to $1.6 billion in revenue at mid-to-high-thirties profit margins |
| Micromanage the business, not the people | Build instrumentation around operational leading indicators rather than sales, EBITDA, and margins, and understand them as well as anyone in the company | Fred Voccola credits this discipline across companies from day-one startups through multi-billion-dollar revenue businesses, and now runs Simpro Group at 45 percent profit margin growing 30 percent a year |
| Great hiring reduces risk, it does not remove it | Treat a two-for-three or three-for-four hit rate as the realistic ceiling and design an operating system that does not assume every hire lands | Fred Voccola holds that no executive hirer reaches ten out of ten, which is why he rejects the hire-and-step-back model that failed when he tried it |
| Hypergrowth is when the detail matters most | Stay in the operational detail while the organization is being rebuilt, rather than treating headcount as the answer to scale | Simpro Group has rolled out over 25,000 digital workers across an installed base of 23,000 customers, over a million daily workers, and over 10 million jobs processed monthly |
| The method transfers, the domain does not | Carry the same leading-indicator discipline into a new company and apply it to that industry’s specific operational problem | After leaving Kaseya in 2024, Fred Voccola spent nine months researching AI, then took Simpro Group into AI-native operation at 45 percent profit margin and 30 percent annual growth |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I do not believe that simply hiring the best people and letting them do their thing will lead to repeatable success.” Fred Voccola, Chairman and CEO, Simpro Group
- “Accountability is a forgotten art, particularly in software.” Fred Voccola, Chairman and CEO, Simpro Group
- “Finding something before it breaks is so much better than realizing something is broken and having to re-engineer and fix” Fred Voccola, Chairman and CEO, Simpro Group
- “Entrepreneurs who scale are the best executives in the world.” Fred Voccola, Chairman and CEO, Simpro Group
- “For those of you who have ever written a book, you learn so much in the research.” Fred Voccola, Chairman and CEO, Simpro Group
Frequently Asked Questions
How should a CEO hold executives accountable without waiting for the end result?
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, told Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and a CEO for 25 years, that accountability has to move earlier in the cycle, because holding someone to the final outcome is easy and arrives too late to change anything. His example is a 90-day B2B sales cycle: running 90-day accountability cycles against it means problems cannot be fixed until they have already broken. Voccola deconstructs the cycle into building blocks measured weekly or sub-weekly, which makes performance visible and transparent enough that accountability becomes self-governing.
Is hiring great people and leaving them alone a workable operating model?
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, tried that model and reports it failed to produce repeatable success, while still holding that hiring the best people within a cost range is the most important thing a leader does. His reason is arithmetic: a genuinely skilled executive hirer goes two for three or three for four, and anyone claiming a perfect record is lying. He replaces the model with micromanaging the business rather than the people, meaning the leader builds instrumentation around operational leading indicators and understands them as well as anyone in the company.
What do leaders get wrong when a company enters hypergrowth?
Fred Voccola, chairman and CEO of Simpro Group, says leaders entering hyperscale focus on the hyperscaling itself instead of on what is happening to the business while it scales, typically concluding that hiring hundreds of people will absorb the challenges. He argues no business stays the same, and in his industries it is completely different every six to twelve months. A leader out of the detail during that period will build an organization designed for the prior year, which Voccola says will be worthless at exactly the moment exponential growth demands far more output.
CEOs Work With Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Their Own Capability
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, drawing on 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
