Episode Summary
There is a specific kind of trouble that only comes from winning. The company grows, and the growth starts breaking things. Decisions pile up on one desk, the same problems keep coming back, and holding it together starts to depend on a few people being heroic on a Tuesday. In this episode of the Sly Fox Podcast, Lindsay Sutula sits down with Alecia Huck, founder of Maverick & Company, who has spent more than twenty years helping companies through exactly that.
The companies Alecia works with have entered what she calls Phase Two: that messy stretch where a company has outgrown founder-led execution but has not yet built the systems to scale. Her position is unusually blunt for her industry. She does not do motivation, personality coaching, or culture work disconnected from how the business actually runs. The work is structural, moving authority, decision rights, and accountability out of the founder’s head and into the organization.
The centerpiece is accountability. Alecia reframes it from an emotional, moral idea into a design problem built on three things: clarity, structure, and ownership. She and Lindsay get into why your org chart is usually a lie, how to delegate with her goldfish, puppy, and baby test, and why the goal is a company that runs without the founder in the room.
About the Guest
Alecia Huck is a management consultant who specializes in Phase 2 companies. Organizations where growth and complexity have overwhelmed the existing management structures. She installs the structures, accountability, decision-making processes, and operating discipline required to operate at scale. Working directly with executive teams, Alecia helps teams go from managing by proximity, effort, and personal relationships to systems, processes, and tools that can continue to growth with the organization.
Connect with Alecia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleciahuckmaverick
Maverick & Company: https://www.maverickandcompany.com
Key Takeaways
The trouble Alecia works on is the kind that only comes from winning. Growth breaks the informal systems that got a company here: the founder is still the operating system, decisions still route through one desk, and everyone is busier than ever while quality starts to slip. Working harder does not fix it, because the problem is structural.
Most leaders treat accountability as a hard conversation they need to get better at. Alecia reframes it as a system. We inherit our accountability models from parents and teachers, so it turns emotional and even moral, where good people are accountable and bad people are not, which she says is neither true nor useful. The move is to design the conditions that make accountability possible.
Her accountability system rests on three things: clarity, structure, and ownership. Clarity is the biggest precondition: name one owner, define what done looks like, and set when it is due. As Alecia puts it, you could save six figures in consulting fees just by training your team to ask who is responsible, what needs to get done, and when it is due.
Her goldfish, puppy, and baby test is a memorable way to match oversight to the stakes of the work. The bigger point is founder independence: get the special thing out of your head and onto paper so it can run without you. Her closing idea doubles as a marketing truth. If your company sounds like everyone else, the right clients will never find you.
About the Show
The Sly Fox Podcast: Building an Authority Engine is powered by Top Fox Marketing and hosted by founder and CEO Lindsay Sutula. Most episodes are conversations with founders and leaders from across B2B, focused on the moments where something actually changed and the systems that let growth keep moving without the founder in every conversation. Subscribe at slyfoxpod.com.
