The reps
How I read a business fast.
Owners ask how I can walk in and see the problem in a couple of weeks. This is the honest answer. It is not instinct. It is a decade I picked on purpose.
01
80 salespeople at 27
I hired, trained and led 80 salespeople and four managers I developed into leaders. That team did $20M and finished as one of the best in the company's 25-year history.
I learned that a sales problem is almost always a manager problem. Nobody outperforms the person running their week.
So when your numbers are soft, I look at the four people running the weeks before I look at the twenty people running the calls.
02
50 people, 11 countries, at 28
I was picked to lead 50 people across seven teams, 11 countries and four continents. No office. No budget I controlled. No title anyone in those countries cared about.
Authority you are given stops working the second things get hard. Authority you earn is the only kind that travels.
Your team does not report to me. They will still run the thing I am accountable for.
03
An industry I knew nothing about, at 31
I wanted to learn every department at once, so I joined a small advertising company. I had never worked in advertising. I stayed until I was 33.
I sold over $2M myself and broke the company record. In a small business you get sales, ops, HR and finance whether you asked for them or not.
I do not need to already know your industry. I need two weeks and access to your numbers.
04
The nonprofit and the $300K
I wanted to see what happens to a business when mission outranks money, so I went to a faith based media nonprofit. Podcast, magazine, website, newsletter.
I spent time in the accounting department asking questions. Revenue had been sliding $100K to $200K a year for ten years. Nobody used the word turnaround. That was still the job.
We ran an article about the founder of another media company. I read it, called him, and found out he would sell. Then I got him to let us put advertisers on his platform to see whether the revenue was real. It did over $100K in a month.
I negotiated the company to $300K. The CEO approved it. The board said no. It is worth close to $10M today.
Start to finish, two months.
I do not bring you an idea and ask you to fund it. I bring you an idea with a number already attached.
05
Startups, on purpose
The last thing I wanted was scarcity, so I went to startups. Bootstrapped, venture backed, PE backed, and cash flowing.
No budget means no place to hide. You either move the number or you do not.
A lot of what needs to happen in your first month costs nothing. It just has not been decided yet.
The point
Nobody assigned me that order.
I picked it. I wanted every department, then mission over money, then scarcity, and I went and got each one in a real job with real consequences.
That is why the first two weeks in your business do not feel like an audit. I am not gathering information to build you a document. I am looking for the move that changes your next quarter. Usually it is one somebody already named out loud and nobody owns.
You are not buying my time. You are buying the fact that I have already been in the room where this went right and the room where it went wrong, at a size bigger than yours, and I do not have to learn it on your payroll.
The honest part
What it did not teach me.
I am not the person to build your finance function. I am not a systems guy, and if what you need is somebody to document every process in the business, that is a different hire and I will tell you that on the call.
I am also not fast to say yes. The arc is the reason. I know what it costs to be in a seat and do it right.
Bring me the bottleneck.
30 minutes. If it's a fit, you'll get a firm price before you commit to anything.
Or read what I will and won’t do
Questions
Reading a business, answered plainly
How do you read a business you have never seen?+
I start where the money moves and where it stops. Who sells, who decides, who follows up, and what happens when one of them is out. The constraint almost always shows up in the handoffs, not in the plan.
How long does it take to find the real constraint?+
Thirty minutes gets me the shape of it. The first step is a short application, followed by a 30-minute call if it's a fit.
What do you look at first?+
Pipeline, then people, then cadence. Revenue problems are usually one person carrying a job that belongs to a system, and a calendar with no place for the decision to get made.
What makes this different from an audit?+
An audit ends with findings. I stay and run the fix. Reading the business fast is only useful because I am the one who has to live in it afterward.