I spent September 9th and 10th, 2026 at Soaltee Hotel in Kathmandu, with Verne Harnish and Alan Miltz. I’d read about their frameworks for years. This time, I got to learn them directly from the two people who built them.

I’m writing this down for the same reason I write most things on this site: I learn things properly when I have to explain them to someone else. Consider this me explaining it to you. I’m going roughly in the order it landed on me — not a clean syllabus, because that’s not how two intense days actually work on your brain.

Bimal Raj Paudel with Verne Harnish at the Scaling Up with Verne Harnish and Alan Miltz event in Kathmandu, with Alan Miltz appearing on the screen behind them.

Why a Sports Scoreboard Is the Whole Point

Verne opened with something obvious that I’d never actually thought about: sports have scoreboards. That’s why they’re fun — for the players, and for everyone just watching.

Nobody has ever needed to be told the score matters. It makes the game competitive. It gives people something to look up at. It makes even bystanders care about the outcome. Business, Verne argued, should feel the same way — for your team, and ideally for people watching from outside too.

That single idea is the seed for two of the most repeated Scaling Up habits: a daily huddle of about 15 minutes, and a running checklist the whole team can see. Not a status meeting. A scoreboard check. If a habit like this sounds too simple to matter, that’s usually a sign it actually works. Scaling Up has published the Rockefeller Habits Checklist for years, and it’s built on exactly this idea: rhythm and visibility beat a clever strategy deck nobody rereads.

The Four Decisions That Actually Determine Company Health

Everything else in the two days hung off one structure: Scaling Up’s Four Decisions — People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. Alan Miltz actually co-authored the Cash section of the Scaling Up book. That alone tells you how central Cash is to the framework — not an afterthought bolted onto the end.

I’d seen the Four Decisions diagram before, but it never really stuck. Two days of real examples for each one changed that. So I’m walking through them the way I actually absorbed them — not necessarily in the book’s order.

People: Why 3-5 Great People Beat 30 Average Ones

Verne’s number was specific: 3 to 5 truly excellent people can outperform 30 mediocre ones. And they don’t need to be similar to each other. Different knowledge, different strengths, same bar for excellence.

This connects to something I’ve said for years about what a growth strategist actually does. A small team of genuinely sharp people, all aligned on the same outcome, will always beat a bigger team assembled just to fill an org chart.

The harder point was about senior people specifically: the more senior you are, the more you should be avoiding people-management and freeing up time to think. Verne’s benchmark: at least 80% of a senior leader’s time should be protected for strategy, not for managing people.

He also said the plainest version of a line I’ve heard phrased more diplomatically for years:

People don’t leave companies, they leave managers who make them work with people they can’t stand.

And here’s a specific trap worth naming: promoting your best salesperson into a management role is usually two mistakes at once. You lose a great salesperson, and you gain a manager who was never trained to manage. Scaling Up’s answer, bluntly:

Most companies carry far more middle management than they actually need. Each added layer adds social slack, not less of it.

The Elon Musk contrast stuck with me the most. Verne framed him as closer to an old industrial-era founder — Edison, Ford — than to a modern CEO. He sits with his five best people once a week, per company, and works exactly one hard problem to resolution. That’s fifty-two solved problems a year, per company — instead of a calendar full of meetings that produce motion without progress.

The practical version of that same instinct: get your hands dirty on your own product. Airbnb’s CEO spent six months actually living in one of his own rentals to find what was broken. Lyft’s CEO drove as a driver. If you’re running an app, Verne’s point was simple: use it yourself, every day. Don’t just review dashboards about it. This one landed personally — I do exactly this with Bhudki. Using my own app daily isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how I actually catch what a support ticket never would.

Strategy: A Brand Needs Exactly One Promise, and a Name

This section is where Verne got specific in a way I wasn’t expecting from a strategy talk. Good companies say yes to only a few things. Saying yes to everything, in his words, is what actually drives a team crazy — not overwork, but the lack of a clear “no.”

The clearest illustration was Domino’s original promise: pizza delivered in 30 minutes, or it’s free. Nothing else. Not “best pizza.” Not “most toppings.” One promise, ruthlessly kept. He paired it with an old Oracle Exadata example: a direct challenge that it ran 5x faster than IBM’s hardware — or the customer won 1 crore. A promise with real teeth behind it, not a marketing slogan.

3M’s case was different but made the same point from another angle: their tagline is “Science Applied to Life.” To actually deliver on that promise, they have to employ the best scientists in the world. That means the best labs and the best pay. The promise you choose upstream dictates what you’re forced to invest in downstream. This is exactly the thinking I bring into go-to-market strategy work for founders here. The promise isn’t a tagline exercise — it’s a resourcing decision in disguise.

Two things I hadn’t considered before. First: a brand’s promise can and should evolve over time — it isn’t set in stone at founding. Second: testimonials on your website aren’t decoration, they’re social proof doing real persuasion work — a small thing most Nepal business sites still underuse.

Innovation gets you out of a promise nobody else can match. The example Verne gave was a first-aid kit company. Everyone assumed the product couldn’t be meaningfully improved — until one company split the kit into separate labeled pouches for different injuries: burns, bleeding, strains, eye injuries. Nobody thought there was room to innovate in a first-aid kit until someone actually looked.

And then the one that got the biggest laugh in the room. HVLS Fan Company kept getting called “the big-ass fan company” by customers, informally and constantly. Instead of fighting it, the founder renamed the company Big Ass Fans, and gave himself the title Chief Big Ass. It’s a real, well-documented rebrand. It generated more free publicity than any campaign the company could have bought.

The strategic lesson underneath both stories: you don’t actually have a strategy until it has a name. Domino’s named theirs “Hungry for MORE?” — built on four pillars: Most Delicious, Operational Excellence, Renowned Value, Enhanced by Franchise. A named strategy is one your whole team can repeat back to you. An unnamed one is just a slide.

One more line I keep coming back to: attainable goals are boring. A goal your team already knows how to hit doesn’t stretch anyone. Ambition is a feature, not a risk to manage down.

Execution: Turn Judgment Into a Script Where You Can

The execution piece was the most operational of the four — and the most quietly controversial in the room. Verne’s advice for repeatable, high-volume processes: script them like a robot, don’t ask the person doing them to think. He used customer service scripting (CSD) as the example. The goal isn’t to make support reps smarter — it’s to make outcomes consistent, no matter who’s on shift. Judgment gets reserved for the 20% of situations that genuinely need it.

Being genuinely data-driven was the other half of execution. Verne pushed this further than the usual “check your dashboards” advice. The relationship between a business and its customers extends well past the sale itself: people who never paid you a rupee still leave reviews on Google Maps, Amazon, and TripAdvisor. That unpaid feedback loop is data most companies simply aren’t tracking.

Cash: Where Alan Miltz Took Over

Alan Miltz’s half of the two days was a genuinely different register — less storytelling, more spreadsheet, in the best way. His core message as a financial expert: most accountants hand founders far too much complexity. What a founder actually needs is a small number of numbers that show whether the business is healthy.

He walked through what he and his team call the Power of One. The idea: a handful of small, specific improvements — a percentage point here, a few days there — across the key financial levers compound into a very different cash position. You don’t need a dramatic revenue jump to get there. It’s built into his platform, Cash Flow Story. Tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of banks globally now use it to make exactly this simplification concrete, not theoretical.

His summary line is the one I wrote down word for word:

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king.

It’s simple enough to repeat to a non-finance founder in one sentence — which is precisely the point he was making about how financial reporting should work in the first place.

Scaling Through Relationships, and Funding From People Who Believe in You First

Verne’s closing thread tied back to something structural about how he’s spent his career. Scaling a business also means scaling your relationships — peer groups, forums, the right influencers, real PR. He’s spent decades building exactly this kind of network himself as the founder of EO, the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, alongside running Scaling Up. That’s part of why the relationship point landed as more than theory.

Good people, he argued, want to work at good companies. That means your reputation among talent is itself a growth lever, not just your reputation among customers. And for very early funding — before any of the frameworks above are even relevant — his framing was blunt, and honestly kind of funny. The first money usually comes from the 3 F’s: Friends, Family, and Fools.

He closed both days with a long list of book recommendations — apparently something of a signature of his. I left with more reading queued up than I’ve had in a while. If you want the source material instead of my notes, Scaling Up’s own resource library has the tools and worksheets referenced across both days, free to download.

What I’m Actually Taking Back to My Own Work

I didn’t walk out of this planning to rebuild everything overnight. That’s not how two days of dense frameworks should land, and Verne said as much himself. But a few things are getting implemented immediately: a real daily huddle for the small teams I advise, and a harder look at how much of my own week is actually protected for strategic thinking, versus busywork that just feels productive.

If you’re a founder in Nepal wrestling with the same People-Strategy-Execution-Cash tension, this is exactly the kind of structural thinking I bring into growth strategy engagements — not more tactics, but the operating rhythm underneath them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Scaling Up methodology?

Scaling Up is a business growth framework created by Verne Harnish. It’s built around four core decision areas — People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash — along with practical tools like the One-Page Strategic Plan, the Rockefeller Habits Checklist, and daily team huddles.

What are the Four Decisions in Scaling Up?

The Four Decisions are People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The framework’s position: a company’s overall health depends on getting all four right at the same time, not excelling at one while neglecting the others.

Who is Alan Miltz?

Alan Miltz is a financial expert and co-founder of Cash Flow Story, a platform used globally to help business leaders understand and improve profit, cash flow, and business value. He is also a co-author of the Cash section of the Scaling Up book.

What is the Power of One in business?

The Power of One is a concept from Alan Miltz’s team. It shows how small, specific improvements — often as little as 1%, or a few days — across key financial levers can compound into a much stronger cash position.

Is Verne Harnish connected to EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization)?

Yes. Verne Harnish founded EO, the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which now has more than 20,000 members globally. He also founded and leads Scaling Up.

Why do good employees actually leave companies?

Per the framework discussed in the session, people rarely leave a company outright. They leave a specific manager — often one who has them working alongside people who are dragging the team down instead of lifting it up.

What is a BHAG?

A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is a deliberately ambitious, sometimes uncomfortable long-term goal. The idea: a goal your team already knows how to hit is too small to meaningfully stretch anyone.

These are my own notes from two days I genuinely think were worth attending. They’re not a substitute for the actual frameworks. If you’re serious about applying any of this, Scaling Up and Alan Miltz’s Cash Flow Story are the primary sources.

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