Move the Ball
A weekly practice for founders who want to keep moving, with senior eyes on the moves.
Move the Ball is a practice I have used inside every organization I have run or advised for the last fifteen years, and the reason I keep using it is that it works, not because it is clever, but because it is honest. The practice is simple, almost embarrassingly so, and that simplicity is the whole point, because most of what gets in the way of growth in idea-led firms is not a missing framework or a missing strategy, it is the slow, accumulated drift of a founder who is busy without being clear about whether the busyness is moving the business or just filling the calendar.
The practice is two questions, asked every Friday, in writing.
What are three things that moved the business forward this week.
What are three things you are going to do next week to move it again.
Three and three. That is it. The note takes ten minutes to write if you are honest and forty-five minutes to write if you are not, because the second version requires you to face the difference between activity and movement, and most weeks there is a gap, and the gap is the thing worth looking at.
I have watched the Move the Ball practice change businesses on its own, with no other intervention, just the discipline of writing the note every week and reading it back the next Friday before writing the new one. The discipline forces a kind of accountability that is hard to fake, because the patterns become visible across weeks. You see when the same item shows up three weeks in a row in the “going to do” column without ever showing up in the “moved the business” column. You see when “movement” turns out to be administrative work dressed up as strategy. You see when a whole month went by and you cannot point to a single thing that genuinely changed the trajectory of the business, even though you were exhausted the entire time. The note does not lie, even when the founder writing it is trying to.
That is the practice. Move the Ball, the subscription, is the practice with me in the loop on yours.
Here is what is in it.
You write your Move the Ball note every Friday and send it to me. I read every note and respond by Monday with whatever the moment calls for, sharpening, redirection, a question, sometimes a flat disagreement when what you are calling movement is not movement, sometimes confirmation when you are right and need to hear it from someone who has seen the pattern before. The weekly review is the spine of the subscription, because the weekly cadence is what catches drift before it becomes a quarter you cannot get back.
We meet once a month, one hour, on whatever is hardest right now. The monthly session is not a status update, because the weekly notes already keep me current, which means we can spend the hour on the thing that actually matters, the decision you are stuck on, the conversation you are avoiding, the move you keep putting off, the question you have not let yourself ask out loud.
You have me on WhatsApp between sessions. Not for everything, but for the moments that do not wait, the call before the call, the email you are about to send and want a second pair of eyes on, the situation that just blew up and needs a fast read from someone who has seen it before. I respond same day in most cases, next business day at the latest, and I am honest about my availability when I am traveling or in deep client work, because pretending to be more available than I am would corrode the whole thing.
Move the Ball is $750 a month, billed monthly, cancel anytime. The price reflects what is in it, the weekly review and the on-call access more than the monthly hour, because the hour is the visible part but the weekly note review and the WhatsApp access are where most of the actual work happens.
The roster is capped at twelve founders at a time. The cap is real, not marketing. The weekly note review and the on-call access do not scale, and stretching past twelve would mean stretching the quality of attention I can give to any one founder, which would defeat the point of the subscription. When the roster is full, you can join a waitlist, and I will tell you honestly where you sit on it.
A few things Move the Ball is not, because the wrong fit wastes both of our time.
It is not for founders who want a strategic advisor on retainer for the big questions only. That is what Counsel is for, and Counsel is a different shape of relationship at a different price. If you want standing time once a month or once a quarter on the decisions only you can make, without a weekly rhythm and without on-call access, Counsel is the better fit.
It is not for founders who do not actually want to be challenged on what they think movement is. The whole practice depends on a willingness to look honestly at the gap between activity and movement, and if you want a coach who will mostly affirm your choices and help you feel better about your week, this will frustrate both of us.
It is not a replacement for the work that has to happen inside your business. I am not running your sales process, building your pitch, or sitting in your team meetings. The deeper movements, the ones that require hands inside the business, are what Bossey Research Partners engagements are for. Move the Ball is the standing practice that sits alongside your work, not a substitute for the work itself.
It is for founders of research firms, consultancies, data businesses, and creative practices, somewhere in the range where the business is real but the next stage feels uncertain, who want a weekly rhythm of senior accountability and an experienced operator on call, and who already understand that the gap between knowing and doing is where their business actually lives.
If that is you, the next step is a conversation, not a credit card. Send me a note about your business and what you are trying to move, and we will figure out together whether Move the Ball is the right shape of help, or whether something else in the system fits better.
The thinking is free. The movement is priced honestly. This is one of the ways the movement happens.