Running Strategy As Efficiently as the Production Line: How Coach Dave Sluka Keeps Manufacturers Accountable Between Sessions

Dave Sluka has coached manufacturing leadership teams through Scaling Up for years, and he’s noticed a pattern. The clients who grow are the ones whose progress stays in plain view every week. Visibility for the whole team, including Dave. So from the first meeting, every client’s plans, goals, and data go into Align.

He saw how much that visibility matters when one client chose a different path. They kept their plan in Excel and PowerPoint, and without a consistent weekly rhythm, the team’s follow-through faded before the first year was out.

That difference between the two paths shapes how Dave coaches every client today.

Disciplined on the floor, not everywhere else

Dave Sluka is a certified Scaling Up coach with MAGNET, a Cleveland nonprofit consultancy that gives small and midsize manufacturers the same growth opportunities as larger companies. His clients typically run $10 million to $100 million in revenue with goals to double or triple revenue in a 3-5 year period.

Dave loves working with manufacturers because they already understand disciplined process. Their challenge is often applying the process mindset beyond the plant floor.

“If I ask them to describe how they make something, they can go into the most granular detail in regard to every step of the process. But then I say, tell me your sales process.”

The answer doesn’t usually come as easily. Dave’s job is to get them to run the rest of the business with the same discipline, and he credits Scaling Up and Align together with making that possible. That shift doesn’t happen in a single planning session. It happens week after week.

The weeks between sessions

CEOs and leaders usually call Dave about an obvious pain, like flat sales or missed customer deadlines. However, once he’s inside, the root cause is often accountability. Fixing it means keeping commitments on track long after the planning session ends.

A strategy succeeds or fails in the weeks between Dave’s sessions. In a manufacturing business, those weeks fill up fast with operational fires, from a line that goes down to a customer who moves up a deadline, and each one pulls the team away from the work that grows the company. Dave hears the result in follow-up meetings, when leaders report that they didn’t get to their commitments because something else came up. But he can’t be inside a client’s business every day to keep the strategy in front of them.

Without that visibility, commitments slip quietly, and a spreadsheet plan won’t flag it. Align puts it in front of Dave and the team every week, so he can step in well before a quarter is lost.

Knowing their coach will review the platform and see their progress creates inherent accountability. The one client who passed on Align shows what happens when that accountability fades.

When the plan lives in spreadsheets and slide decks

For that outlier client, the plan looked solid on paper. In practice, it sat in files nobody opened between meetings. A spreadsheet, a Google Doc, or a slide deck can hold goals and numbers, but it can’t prompt updates or tie a goal to the weekly work behind it. It doesn’t connect to the systems the team already runs on, and it doesn’t show a coach what moved since the last session.

Nothing in those files reminds a leader that a commitment is due, and an empty cell means little to the rest of the team.

The real breakdown was commitment. With nothing keeping the plan in front of them, the team’s follow-through slipped a little more each week, and by the end of the first year, the engagement was over. Align doesn’t do the work for a leadership team, but it makes it much harder for that commitment to fade without anyone noticing.

Turning a quarterly plan into a weekly habit

Clients who stay with Align build habits that drive growth well beyond the first year. Every quarterly goal comes with clear actions and an owner, and every week, those owners update their progress in Align. The day and the structure vary by client, but the rhythm doesn’t. It’s the spirit of Scaling Up’s 13-week race, kept where the whole team can see it.

That weekly check-in not only standardizes communication, but it’s also a natural accountability engine. Whatever day a team chooses, the effect is the same.

“If you know every Monday at 10 a.m., I have to report on whether or not I completed the task I committed to doing last week, that peer pressure is going to result in you being a little more conscious of doing what you said you were gonna do.”

As the coach, Dave has visibility of the updates between sessions. When a commitment slips, he can address it right away rather than hearing about it at the next session.

Once the executive team has the rhythm, Dave works with the next layer of leaders. They set goals that support the executive team’s, and those goals run on the same weekly check-in. From there, the rhythm reaches the people doing the work, on the plant floor and in the office.

What visible progress delivers

Over time, that rhythm changes how a leadership team operates, and the results reach well beyond the weekly meeting. With everyone connected in one system, accountability runs through the whole organization, and the company builds a culture of producing results.

Accountability the team owns. When everyone reports on their commitments every week, the team starts holding each other accountable without waiting for Dave to step in. Dave calls it the discipline many leadership teams lack, and it keeps the strategy moving when the operational fires flare up.

A deeper leadership bench. Cascading goals to the next layer gives the company leaders who understand the strategy and own a piece of it. That frees executives to work on the business instead of getting stuck in it, the shift Dave pushes every client to make.

Growth that holds for years. Clients who commit to the system see it in their numbers. One manufacturing client Dave has coached for five years has more than tripled its revenue in that time. Another long-time client, AEco, hit its five-year revenue goal two years early. Read the AEco story. Dave is the first to say those are standout results, but his biggest wins share a theme: a leadership team that fully embraced the system and stuck with it for years.

A coaching practice that scales. The visibility pays off for Dave too. With every client on one platform, he keeps a clear view of all his active engagements, allowing him to grow his roster without increasing his hours at the same pace.

“I couldn’t imagine functioning in the role that I’m functioning in without it.”

The bottom line

Visible progress is what turns a coaching engagement into results. Dave’s clients show it from both directions: the teams that run their goals in Align week after week have grown consistently for years, and the one whose follow-through faded never turned its plan into results.

For other coaches, Dave’s advice is to make Align part of how you work from the very first session. Once he did that, the discipline he asks of his clients took hold in his own practice.

“Once you commit to the adoption of it, and you realize the benefits, sticking with it is pretty darn easy.”

Every one of Dave’s clients started with a strong plan. The ones who grew connected everyone to that plan in one system and built the weekly habit of reporting on it, until holding each other accountable and driving results became central to how the whole company works.

If you coach leadership teams, see how Align supports coaches or book a personalized tour.