Most organizations don’t fail for lack of strategy—they fail because the strategy never reaches the frontline. The Square Management System (SMS) was built to fix that. It’s a leadership operating framework that drives alignment, accountability, and execution across all levels of the business—especially in areas where momentum stalls: staffing, leadership development, and revenue growth.
Whether you're building a sales team, launching a new marketing campaign, or scaling a frontline workforce, SMS replaces gut feel with systems, heroics with processes, and silos with shared accountability. It’s not just a set of tools—it’s a method for making growth scalable and culture intentional.
5 Things Every C-Suite Leader Should Know About SMS
- Alignment Isn’t a Buzzword, It’s Operational: SMS creates cross-functional alignment through clear decision rights, structured communication rhythms, and role accountability, so strategy turns into execution.
- Staff & Leadership Development Become Scalable: SMS builds leaders through systems, not guesswork—ensuring roles are clear, autonomy is earned, and growth isn’t limited to top-down command or tenure.
- Sales and Marketing Stop Operating in Silos: With SMS, GTM functions align around common goals, metrics, and rhythms—so pipeline is visible, handoffs are seamless, and campaigns drive actual revenue.
- Visibility = Control = Growth: SMS makes performance transparent at every level. This allows for proactive decisions, better forecasting, and fewer surprises in execution.
- It Works in Real Companies, Not Just Whiteboards: SMS is not theory—it’s built for operating leaders. Whether you’re a PE-backed CEO, founder, or COO, the framework can be applied immediately to stabilize chaos, unlock growth, and build enduring value.
Town Square Advisors created the proprietary Square Management System as a framework to identify, assess, and create successful organizational structures that can empower a dynamic and loyal workforce.
The key to understanding how to organize, manage and grow a company is properly aligning employees to internal processes. This is defined by Town Square Advisors as the level of “constrained independence” employees are permitted in the normal course of business (i.e, the degree of freedom to act and/or make independent decisions within their role).
The Square Management System uses the 4 ‘i’s” of independence to create an i-score, a unique and proprietary benchmark that captures the 5th “i”, the degree of constrained independence.
- Knowing this figure can help identify organizational misalignment, highlight the gaps between current office culture and desired culture, focus HR development efforts and aid M&A synergies calculations as well as overall M&A transaction viability assessments.
The 4 "i"s of Independence and the resulting 5th "i" - your individual "Square Score"
The 1st “i”: Identity
(Who We Are)
- How your organization defines itself: mission, values, brand personality, and core beliefs.
Key Question: Do your staff know what the Company stands for and why it matters?
The 2nd “i”: Instruction
(How We Operate)
- The clarity and consistency of expectations: onboarding, SOPs, training, and knowledge transfer.
Key Question: Are roles, expectations and processes clear and scalable?
The 5th “i”: Constrained Independence
- The freedom to act within defined, communicated boundaries
The aggregate total of each side of the square, knowing your desired “square score” helps create a benchmark for the accepted degree of constrained independence within a company.
Aligning staff correctly to the underlying processes and procedures that form each separate "i" is the secret to intentionally designing a workplace where staff feel:
- Empowered by not aimless
- Supported but not micromanaged
- Free to ideate and act independently, but aligned to company goals
The 3rd “i”: Intercommunication
(How We Interact)
- How people interact: hierarchy, meeting cadence, use of communication tools, and tone (formal/informal).
Key Question: Is information flowing in a way that drives clarity and trust across the organization?
The 4th “i”: Info Feedback
(How We Improve)
- How performance is measured, shared, and used to evolve: feedback loops, performance reviews, metrics, recognition programs.
Key Question: Are staff learning and adapting fast enough to stay competitive?
