The 40% Error That Nearly Killed a $100 Million Company
with Kendley Davenport
The Corvus Effect / Episode 96
Released: February 2, 2026
Overview
Kendley Davenport walked into ESS to find 40% of customer bills contained errors, cash collection running 90 days out, and a team that knew the problem but couldn’t fix it. He scaled the company from $100M to $300M using a framework that reads simple — collaboration, clarity, accountability — and works because it refuses to let the founder be the smartest person in the room. This conversation is about why senior leaders working 70-hour weeks are usually the problem, not the solution.
About Kendley Davenport
Kendley Davenport is a transformational CEO with 30+ years leading PE-backed and founder-led companies, and the founder of Leadership for Success, his 2017 executive coaching practice. He scaled ESS from $100M to $300M, quadrupled EBITDA, and now teaches the operating discipline behind that result through the Execution-Driven Leadership Course.
Listen to the Full Episode
Key Takeaways
1. Collaboration, clarity, accountability — in that order
The 40% billing error rate didn’t get fixed in the executive suite; it got fixed by a team that included AP, AR, finance, operations, and HR — people who saw the problem from angles the leadership team couldn’t. Once the right people aligned, clarity made it repeatable: who does what, when, with stage gates everyone could read. After that, accountability became the easy part, because the team owned the deadlines they’d set themselves.
2. The founder is usually the bottleneck
Kendley’s framework is blunt: senior leaders working 70-hour weeks aren’t being heroic, they’re holding the bottleneck. The team has been trained to wait for the founder’s answer, so they stop generating their own — and the founder gets buried under work that should have been delegated. Real change starts with the question Kendley asks every founder: what are you willing to let go of, even if someone else only does it 80% as well?
3. Productive conflict beats the meeting after the meeting
The fastest culture-killer Kendley sees is people saying one thing in the room and something else afterward — meaning the room is a performance, not a decision. Productive conflict requires a CEO with the humility to be told he’s wrong and a team with the safety to say it. Without that, innovation stalls quietly while resentment compounds underneath.