Stop Promoting Your Best Reps: The Leadership Gap No One Talks About

We’ve all seen it — your top performer crushes their sales goals, so you promote them to manager… and suddenly everything starts to fall apart.

In this episode of Elements of Culture, Laura Skinner sits down with Mark Zides, author, founder, and leadership coach, to unpack one of the most common mistakes companies make: assuming great sellers automatically become great leaders.

They dig into what real leadership development looks like, how to build trust and accountability inside high-performing teams, and why culture—not quotas—ultimately drives sustainable growth.

Join us weekly as we dig into the real stories behind work culture transformation.

Not theory. Not fluff. Just honest conversations with leaders and innovators who've been in the trenches.

Transcript

From IC To Sales Leader Pitfalls

Speaker 3 0:00

It's it's an interesting um challenge for a sales leader, right? Because again, to your point, a lot oftentimes sales leaders are promoted from within and they don't necessarily have the coaching or leadership skills. Just because somebody was a top contributor or individual performer, they were presence club winner or whatever, and oh, we're gonna make you head of sales now, but they've never led a team of a hundred people as an example, or even twenty people.

Speaker 0:22

At Elements of Culture, we sit down with experts in leadership and team building to explore the DNA that drives a thriving organization.

Speaker 4 0:30

Hello, Mark, and welcome to Elements of Culture. It's awesome to have you on. I am I obviously know a lot about your story. We've we've connected multiple times, but why don't you give the listeners a 101 on your story, your incredible background, and then we can dive straight in on all things sales 101.

Speaker 3 0:49

Awesome. Thanks, Laura. Thanks for having me. So my name is Mark Zides. I'm a business consultant that's been uh an entrepreneur a few times throughout my career, but also worked in management consulting. So I have an interesting lens and background from working in large um consulting firms like a PWC or a Deloitte that was once monitor, uh, you know, as well as having my own startups, right, in between sort of those roles. So over the 30 years I've been in business, I've had an interesting background where I've been in a startup culture, but I've also been in a consulting culture. So had the uh strong understanding of what it takes to grow those types of businesses, and I have an interesting lens around how to drive sales, how to drive revenue, and how to coach people to be better leaders, you know, throughout that journey.

Speaker 4 1:35

I love that. So are you more of a PWC or more of like a startup guy?

Speaker 3 1:41

That's a great question. Someone asked me that the other day. They say, What would you rather do? Be another startup?

Speaker 4 1:45

I I'm truly intrigued because I can't deal with the big corporate companies.

Startup Versus Corporate Mindset

Speaker 3 1:50

Yeah, I I like big corporations are great, right? They're just super successful and they and they hire and they bring on uh really smart people. Um, you know, in a matrix organization like that, it's um you know, you have to be a team and collaborative person, you know, to kind of help drive performance, help drive sales, help help win new customers. When you're on your own, um, you know, and you're building a startup, it's it gets uh the whole scrappy and you need the grit and you, you know, you might miss payroll. And you know, when you're working at PWC or Ernst and Young, you don't have to worry about you know missing payroll, right? So when you're in a startup environment, it's it's a lot different from a mindset perspective. And so to answer your question long-winded, I actually like the startup thing because it's just you know, you control your own destiny more per se, right? So you can actually, you know, um drive a business, build a business, but as you know, you know, it's seven or eight out of ten startups fail. So there's a large risk tolerance between the two. Uh, you know, so you have to have an interesting, you know, background and kind of um uh experience set to be a startup person.

Speaker 4 2:51

Yeah, a hundred percent. It it's interesting, isn't it? Like that payroll thing and that nerve-wracking thing of like, okay, it's literally month on month and no one actually understands how little the runway is with these startups. I definitely didn't at the start of my career, but then you do control everything in the sense that like promotions are accelerated, uh, your learning's accelerated, whereas I guess the the difference is like you are in a in a scenario where you have to almost like prove yourself and then work up. I guess like the food chain, really. So it's just an interesting dynamic. I always speak to my friends about the difference because I just got chucked into the startup life, and I think that I've just never, I can never now think about just being like in the corporate world based on like how quickly the startup life you can accelerate.

Speaker 3 3:32

Right. I I I I completely agree. I I really do.

Speaker 4 3:35

Yeah, I love it. So let's just go to in terms of like driving these startup businesses, right? Because that's I I love this. I think this is super interesting. So, in your career or in your past, what what does that look like for you? So you've obviously been the founder, you've had some successful exits. Like, when we just break down like the whole go-to-market function, like where does it start? How do you drive it? We'd just love to get your perception on that for anyone that's like kind of got a product that doesn't really know about the go-to-market side, right? We work with a lot of people that have got this amazing product and they've got the tech and they know how to code and stuff, but the go-to-market side just seems super foreign to them.

Finding Product Market Fit

Speaker 3 4:11

Yeah, it's a great question. So it all starts with an idea, right? So whether you're a technologist and you have a technology idea or you're, you know, consulting a service person, you have a service idea, or you have a brick and mortar idea, right? So, you know, um, you start with the idea, but then I think the the most important thing is product market fit, right? So you have to know that there's a need in the market, right? Where somebody wants to, you know, pay money for your product or service. So that's the fundamental thing from an entrepreneurial perspective is to make sure that that that's a fit there. You have an MVP, you have a you know, you have a solution that actually people want to buy. Um, and then to get a paid customer or someone that actually you know wants to work with you is is really critical, right, when it comes to starting a business. So when I would start my businesses, it was really on the on the back of whether it was market timing. I thought there was an opportunity to go do something based on where the market was. Um, and in the first business that I started, um, I was working for a subsidiary of IBM, and um I was really successful. You know, I was fortunate enough to be the top salesperson there. I had a great territory, had great mentors. But from there I I said to myself, well, what's next? I'd have to go into management or go into a uh a different role, which which I was flattered by, but I'm like, you know what? I think I can do this better myself. I I want to try this and I want to go out and and people are like, Well, you work for, you know, again, ultimately IBM or an you know a subsidiary of IBM. Why would you want to leave? I said, you know what, I just think I can be more nimble, I can be more flexible, I can be more creative. And those are some of the you know uh tendencies and drivers that help uh make entrepreneurs you know who they are, right? You kind of you gotta know how to pivot, you gotta, you know, know how to uh make a customer happy. So that that's really what I've I've learned throughout my career over the three, you know, startups I've had. I've had a few others that that failed, or I've been, you know, passive investors, I'd say, whereas someone else, I'd start it with somebody and we'd hand the keys over to somebody else to kind of run it. So that's been an interesting model too. But I wouldn't call myself a serial entrepreneur, but I've you know started and operated a few different businesses and it's been a lot of fun. Um, but a lot of it, you know, is is around market timing and and really what niche that you can bring to you know the people that you have relationships with.

Speaker 4 6:24

Yeah, this is super interesting. I can't honestly speak about this topic for hours because like I think there's a massive difference between product market fit and then just having like five or ten really happy customers because you solve a pro like a solution for those specific customers rather than like an actual like product market fit. So here's a question because this is just what's cropped up is obviously you've got founder-led sales, right? So you've got an idea, you then have product market fit, and you then have like your initial like raving fans, like testing customers kind of thing. At what point do you think it's validated enough to then be like, okay, here's my first sales rep, or here's my second sales rep, or then bringing in and actually building that go-to-market motion. Like, I know it's not it's very contextual, right? But I think people get it wrong and they get it too soon, or they either get it too late, and it's really hard to understand when you've achieved product market fit and that you should get out of the sales process yourself because obviously you cannot scale if you're a founder in the sales process.

Speaker 3 7:19

Yeah, that's that's where um you know the the timing of scaling a business and taking it to the next level comes, right? So you know the way you ask that question is really interesting because some businesses can be founder-led, like you said, where the founder is the face of the franchise or the business and the customers are buying from them, right? So, you know, and that's a hard business to scale, right? Because you you there's only so many hours in the day. So to be able to build a business and a framework and a structure where you can then take the next level and go hire a team uh and go and go scale the business and go rinse repeat per se around what your product or service is is a really critical juncture in a business. So with that, you have to have to me either paying customers or you have to have a great idea that somebody wants to invest in. So if somebody wants to be an investor, you know, a seed investor, or an early stage investor, or friends and family investor. And that gets a little tricky and risky because you know, if you want to um ask friends and family for money, if the business fails, you know, you have that dynamic that that potentially comes in. If you have actually a really strong idea um and you want to go after venture capital, you know, that's another approach. So that's where, you know, to answer your question directly, Laura, which is again another good one, is you know, once you get to scale, right? I I'd say once you get to, you know, four or five paid customers, or uh you see traction in the market, or um, you know, you you have some partnerships that have that have aligned well where people are actually OEMing or or reselling your your product, uh, or you have a good distribution channel, there's so many different you know ways to kind of think about how to scale a business. That's when you say, hey, let's build a team, right? Let's build people, you know, that let's bring people in. And that's where you have to decide what type of people do you want. Well, you know, what type of salespeople do you want? You know, again, are you selling a product? Are you selling a service? Are you selling you know um uh something that's that's more more unique? In the world of AI now, it's it's it's really changed the whole dynamic of kind of how companies go to market. So the whole go-to-market is now much more automated than it was even a few years ago, never mind, 10 years ago when you started a business.

Founder-Led Sales To First Hires

Speaker 4 9:23

It is actually insane because like what I hear from what you're saying before we go into like the actual sales team is like lead diversification at the top, top level, right? So, like if you have different distribution with channels, you that gives you lead diversification, and that's like the number one metric that investors look for anyway, that and like your LTV and et cetera. But like if you can have enough pipeline but coming from multiple different areas, then that gives you a massive market validation. But what's super interesting is a couple of years ago, it was actually a lot easier to call it outbound because you could be really different, like you could LinkedIn Voice note, you could um send a video on LinkedIn, whereas now you can actually streamline that whole process that it makes it makes it less personalized. But I also think on the other end, the people that are really good at it and the people that use AI will there'll be a clear difference between like mediocre, like SDR, so to speak, and the top end. But I guess what I'm trying to say is if you can build a business where you've got like referral partners and like partnerships, you've got like an outbound play, you've got then a like a content play where you're speaking to your constant ICP the whole time, you then have like a flywheel of organic that can give you inbound over time. I feel like if you can build that up, plus like your first four to five customers, at that point, I feel like that's where I'll be like, okay, now you're starting to track between like some solid product market fair.

Speaker 3 10:37

Right. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's omnichannel, it's multiple channel, it's it's yeah, it's based on you know what type of business or service you're in, right? I mean, obviously, you know, social selling is is huge now, right? Again, that didn't even exist a few years ago. Um, uh, you know, link LinkedIn, I think, is 15 years old now. So again, people are obviously selling through LinkedIn, DMing people. Now, look, it's it's it's challenging because if you're a salesperson, a lot of people are doing that, right? So, you know, what what are the sales motions or what are the go-to-market motions? And a lot of it, again, depending on the type of solution that you're selling or service, it's it's really understanding the sales cycle, understanding the dynamic of how your product fits or competes with something else. What's the hook that you have that is going to make a buyer or an ICP want to speak to you versus somebody else, right? And sales is all about relationships, right? It's all about um you know, tenacity and communication and resilience and all of that, you know, kind of outward, you know, which is what you're really good at. I mean, you have to have that, you have to be able to understand no is no, it's it's it's you know, you have to be able to accept no, but then you have to figure out, okay, well, why did I get the no? You know, the next time I'm gonna try something else, and you can't get, you know, um down on yourself because maybe you had a bad day because you didn't get any appointments or meetings or whatever, or you lost a deal. And so, yeah, so being a salesperson or go to market is is very, very challenging from you know from my experience.

Speaker 4 12:03

Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like I it it destroyed me for like three years being a sales rep because like the anxiety of like not having exactly what you just said, but then I actually pick I actually train my brain into actually wanting the nose and treating it like a sales process and like okay, this was a bad day, but that's actually part of the process, and that's great, we're getting closer, or like all that kind of stuff. And if you change like the whole control illusion within your brain and flip the narrative, it's actually an incredibly lucrative career if you can manage the mindset. Like, I'm so passionate about the fact that like that you've got everyone seems to over-index on talent, right? Everyone's like, where can I find these like A players? Where can I find these like the four or five people that are gonna take us to one billion when the rest can just be at like 60%? Like everyone's always gunning for them. Whereas I actually feel like if you do if 50% of it is the talent, of course, but if you actually do the vehicle as the other 50%, and the vehicle being how to optimize that person and actually how to get them to the next level in a clear process that's actually worked and proven that it's worked, is just as successful and just less time consuming than going out and trying to find these top reps. And a lot of that is training these people that like literally it's fine if you get a no, like you want to welcome them because it's part of the process.

Omnichannel GTM And Social Selling

Speaker 3 13:17

I love that. Yeah, I love the vehicle analogy, right? I mean, you know, you have the driver, right, of the car, and then you have the vehicle, right? So you have the process um which has to work. Um so that's where you know when you go back to large companies or more established companies, if you're a CRO of a software company, you have your A players and your B players. Hopefully, you don't have any C players, and how do you train up those people to all be A players, right? And a lot of them, a lot of those individuals um, you know, don't really have the experience that they need. So they need a mentor, they need a coach. So I think you know, people like you or companies that you work with are really good from a standpoint of you know being a sales coach, kind of implementing those, you know, sales um tactics and sort of the mindset. I think a lot of it starts with the mindset, right? You have to wake up yeah, you have to wake up every day saying, I'm gonna go win the day, I'm actually gonna go win some customers, and you have to be positive regardless of the of the what the outcome can be, and that's where you have to start, right? So that's really what you need to do with sales. Now go, you need a plan, you need a territory, you want to go to market. Yeah. But yeah, so from go ahead, sorry. No, no, no, I'm just starting. Yeah, I just get really passionate about it. I think that's why we're aligned on this stuff. Yeah, because so for if I put my sales coaching hat on, I look at consulting firms, and this is where you know I'm looking to kind of coach and help some large consulting firms, they have incredibly smart people, right? Partners that have been at these big consulting firms or boutique consulting firms for many, many years, really, really successful, because they have really deep relationships with the buyers, right? So if you're a consulting firm like one of the big four, and you know, you're talking to C-level people, right? You're solving all these you know huge problems. But for them to grow their business as a practitioner, they don't necessarily know how to do that. And it's not a bad thing, they just don't, they're not trained on kind of how to take a million-dollar account to a two million dollar account. And that's something that you and I are really good at. So, how do you build a plan around that, right? How do you cross-sell? How do you bring other you know people in your organization to the table? You know, if you have multiple service lines or multiple things, you know, how do you build an account plan? How do you look at a company and say, okay, let's look at the x-ray of this business? You know, we're in this one one business center, we're in the HR stack, right? Okay, we can sell you know these services there, but what about supply chain? What about finance? What about compliance? What about sales? Like if you sell training, for example, you can argue that everyone in a company needs to get trained, whether it's the uh CEO or the C level folks need, you know, uh I don't know if they're gonna get formal training, but they need executive coaches, right? So from the top of the house all the way to new hires, the new hires, guess what? When you get hired, you get training, right? You know, how do you, you know, how do you work within the context of the company? You know, what are the skills you need to build? But then everyone in the middle needs constant development, whether you do it on your own, whether you do it through somebody, uh, or you bring in a company like yours to kind of come in into a sales organization and help them understand how to build their book of business is critical to a company's success and growth.

Speaker 4 16:18

Literally. It's actually insane to me because and I'd love to hear what you think of this theory, but like I actually believe, and like I've built companies and whatever, and I I I'm obsessed with sales. I read about sales, I I think I'm more obsessed with it because it changed my life and I was just so rubbish at school, right? So it's like I was never gonna be a doctor or a lawyer, I was never gonna work for the big five, but I also didn't realise that was this whole other world that you could earn equally just the same amount and three, four, five X it in a world that you could like use your personality and like work ethic, right? But like I genuinely believe in a business is like within like the talent pool of people, you have like three, you have three buckets. When you've got those top, like the like 10x's or whatever anyone wants to call them, the A players or the multipliers or whatever, they need coaching, but more importantly, they need like growth coaching. So they need to understand where they're going, what vehicle they use your business as a vehicle to get them there. But more importantly, they need like the sexiest comp plan in the world that's gonna make it impossible for them to leave. So, really, with that bucket, all you're doing is making it impossible for them to ever want to leave, but also getting them to their next stage in their career. Whereas like the middle ones, as long as they're coachable and follow a process, I actually think it's a leadership issue rather than an individual contributor issue because a lot of the times I go into these organizations and they think it's a like their reps are like it's a rep problem. And I'm like, well, they're coachable, they're hardworking and they will understand and learn. So then actually it's a leadership issue on how to kind of get them to that next player, but then that leadership might have just been promoted from a top performer and it's a whole new role and doesn't know how to coach and doesn't really know themselves how they've been so successful. So, like, how would you then coach that if you don't really know yourself? And then the bottom ones like you mentioned earlier about the C players, is like I see that more as like if you do have them, we all do miss hires, etc. It's just about either navigating them somewhere in the organization that suits them better or helping them get their next job. But you shouldn't really put any time really down there. But I do believe if you have the right vehicle for those middle performers, they can get up to those like 10x's, so to speak.

Handling No, Mindset, And Coaching

Speaker 3 18:19

I agree with you. Yeah, I agree. It's uh it's it's an interesting um challenge for a sales leader, right? Because again, to your point, a lot oftentimes sales leaders are promoted from within and they don't necessarily have the coaching or leadership skills. Just because somebody was a top contributor or individual performer, they were presence club winner or whatever. And oh, we're gonna make you head of sales now, but they've never led a team of a hundred people as an example, or even twenty people. So, what I would say to that is training is absolutely paramount, but uh you also need as an organization a playbook, a sales playbook, right? So you need to be able to have you know the ability to you know communicate what works and what doesn't work within the context of of your organization, you go to market. And go to markets change all the time, right? So I feel like sales and marketing need to communicate better, right? Because if marketing's not telling sales what they're doing from a lead generation perspective, you know, that can be you know um a challenge, you know, okay, well, where are the leads coming from? Am I am I supposed to, you know, uh find my own leads, you know, if I'm a sales rep, what's my territory? So there's a lot of dynamics that go into kind of you know sales pursuits and and and sales performance.

Speaker 4 19:30

Yeah, it's super interesting because I honestly feel a bit sorry for some leaders that are top like promoting. Also, don't even get me started on the team lead role where you're still on quota and still have to coach and develop. But like what we see happen all the time, and like the our the business that that we're that we're building here at New Well is kind of just gone in this way because it's what the market wants and it's the appetite, right? But you seem to have a lot of coaching for the ICs. There seems to be objection handling, there seems to be just like everything out there that they could need, and there's almost too many resources, and what's right or wrong is actually really hard to understand. But with the leadership, like the middle line leadership is a really interesting role because they might only get like one or two meetings a month with the CRO or even the VP if they're just like a frontline leader, but their whole role is completely changed from having all that energy and momentum within speaking to people to then actually just all they have to do is quality control all day. Because realistically, that's all they should be doing is quality control, coaching, and making sure that the deals are getting to where they need to be, which is actually a completely different role. But there's no kind of like there doesn't seem to be that like emphasis on that middle level management, albeit if you get it right, that'll then change like a group of 10 AEs that you might have below you, you know. It's really interesting.

Speaker 3 20:42

Yeah, I think it all depends on the size of the business, Laura, right? Because again, if you're a startup and you have a couple of salespeople, you can you can be really like a high-touch leader, right? Even if it's even if at a in a startup a couple of new sales reps report right to the CEO, maybe, maybe the the CEO hasn't hired a CRO yet, right? Or a head of sales. So that dynamic would be different versus a company that's more mature and they have a you know a true sales organization. You know, the what I've seen work a lot of times in organizations is you know, sort of a mentor-mentoree model, right? Where you know, if someone's a sales rep, they might be aligned with you know a pre-sales person, for example, who's been there longer, or they might be aligned with a senior salesperson. So there's a lot of team selling that goes on that that that can be helpful, you know, in in let's say a SaaS or software business. In a professional service firm, it's it's it's it's very different, or in a marketing firm. So a lot of those pursuits are very joint-oriented and team pursuit, right? So you have teams, you have you know the practitioners, you have the subject matter experts, you have the salesperson, you have the marketing person, you have the technical person, and they all kind of pursue an engagement or an opportunity together or a pitch together. And that's kind of an interesting thing to kind of go through, you know, that you don't necessarily go through when you're in a startup. Like, but when I when I sat at you know a big consulting firm, that's the way those guys, you know, went after a company. It's just a much different process, a much different approach. Some are some work, some don't. But again, uh you know, when you want to go win a new deal, uh, you have to have your best foot forward and you actually actually have the best solution, whether it's what your product or service is or pricing, right? And I we we can have a whole other podcast on pricing and how to win new work and all that stuff, but but let's keep it high level now for you know for for now.

Speaker 4 22:29

I honestly have such an opinion on pricing. I'm like, if you're dropping your pricing, you failed in discovery. Like, truly, that's what I believe. Like, I just feel like there should literally be no negotiation because you should have got all of the metrics in discovery that you can quantify so easily the pain of them not moving forward with you. So it all goes back to discovery for me. But I could I could talk about a speed to be sales process all day, every day. I I I went into like the high-ticket space and I'm back into like the B2B SaaS corporate space, and like I just like I love the sales process because it is a process and you can learn the process and then you just understand it and it and it's pretty easy. But yeah, the pricing thing's interesting. So, in terms of like building businesses, in terms of once you've got the value, you've got the product market fit, and then you're building your go-to-market teams in your world and what you've seen work really well, does that look like to you just hiring a few sales reps and then scaling and building from there? Or what does that look like for you now? We've got product market fit, we've got our first five to ten customers, and we're starting to like get some real attraction here.

Playbooks, Marketing Alignment, Territories

Speaker 3 23:28

Yeah, I yeah, I think I think it's you gotta go find, like you said, it's all about the talent, right? So you have to find somebody that that uh understands your market, understands your product. What what I you know, my cheat code in this in this world is try to find somebody who's got a Rolodex. So you know, try to find somebody who has the relationships already so they can hit the ground running. But I will say, you know, a nice balance to that would be a younger professional, right? So who's been in a in a sales role or a training, strong training role. So there's some great companies out there where people that come right out of, say, industry or I'm sorry, or college or or right out of school will work for like uh an ADP, for example, right? Or you know, enterprise rent a car. It sounds crazy, but a lot of those people get put into these incredible training programs and they learn how to sell. They learn pipeline management, they learn how to cold call, they learn all the nuts and bolts of sales, and then if they're successful there, those folks can then move into like a SaaS or kind of a next sort of relationship type sale. So if you have a startup, for my opinion, and you're small and you only have a budget for a couple people, you know, my my recommendation would be a senior, more of a senior person who's got the experience, and then bring in somebody who's got the you know the tenacity and sort of the energy to kind of dial for dollars per se, even though dial for dollars isn't the same as it was, you know, 10 years ago.

Speaker 4 24:52

I know it's super interesting to me because like this whole like young person role, I feel like if you get it right, can be pivotal to like the business. Because like a lot of like like younger than me, I guess, but they're they're look they're hungry, right? They're hungry for a role. And and I I watch a lot of podcasts and I listen to a lot of um, I guess, wealthy people speak on some interesting podcasts, but that there's there's there's actually like a really quick way to get pretty wealthy and learn a lot, and it's if you do have those attributes that you've just said as like a younger person, and you attach yourself to someone that's not gonna pay you a lot, but they're building a business that's clearly gonna be successful, where you can just learn and like literally digest all of it, and then somehow end up on like some higher level of profit share or like a higher level of commission or like in a long-term play. If you can like sustain something like that and get into a business early, which is just like what you're talking about from a founder that knows what they're doing, from a founder that may have done it before, that you can basically be like cheap labour to them when they don't have the budget, but you're gonna produce the results, and then from there they can coach training. You're you're like their right-hand person, I think is a really unique role, but like no one really talks about it that much. But that feels like to me the cheap code in because it's all about learning at that age anyway, just getting your network as wide as possible and learning as much as possible, and then like money will come once you've got those two things. But imagine being able to like tie yourself to a successful founder that doesn't have like 150k or 200k OT to pay you, but has had proven success where you can learn all this, your network's building, you're starting to build like bit like loads of profit, you might move on to profit share. I mean, I honestly feel like that's the quickest way to success if you are like, I don't know, early 20s, just like looking for looking for a big break or something like that.

Speaker 3 26:40

Yeah, it's an awesome um overview you just said, and and and then I'll simplify and say what I've done successfully in the last couple of companies that I've built is excuse me, is um I've hired sorry about that, in the last couple companies that I've built, I've hired a chief of staff. So that role is a chief of staff role, and it's basically a lieutenant for me and the leadership team. Right? So it's somebody that not only they may not have the sales skills, but they have the communication skills and they're willing to get their feet wet, they're willing to do anything to help. So to your point, they're willing to get immersed in the business and learn whatever it takes. Oh, hey, can you send an invoice out? Great, like they'll learn how to figure out how to do it.

Middle Managers And Team Selling

Speaker 4 27:25

We've we've got a chief of staff, but we call him director of people operations, whatever, whatever name that you want to call it. But his ability to like, it's almost like I've got my own sales, like solution sales engineer that can create me decks out of Canva that I've never even like, I'm so black and white, right? So then that. Then he edits all of our content, then he like makes sure that the exec docs always uploaded, all the team meetings are going ahead, then he does all of the contracts he's on with our attorneys to make sure that we're completely like legally bounded. And I'm just like, I don't understand, like, you must have the funniest role ever. Because sometimes you're with me and sometimes you're on my LinkedIn, and then sometimes you're doing all of this. But this company that we're building now is like my third run, so to speak. A, there's two things that we're doing massively different, we're building a brand around the business because my first ever business, but if I would have built a brand around it, I that's just like the biggest mistake I ever didn't make. So that's a key takeaway for the listener. But the second thing is you get a hire like that, that's not even necessarily like has to be a C-suite chief of staff, but someone that's clever and intelligent enough to be able to do creative stuff while you're building that brand in-house, because then they're like, they want to work with you, they've got a promotion tracker, it's just so much better in-house and outsourcing, but can do all of these other things, plus keep the culture and the transparency, like the radical, like just being so radically honest with each other and host like really big leadership meetings. I actually think that's more pivotal than a bloody revenue role.

Speaker 3 28:48

I agree, yeah. I I think when you're building the foundation to have that person in a startup is is critical to its success. 100% agree.

Speaker 4 28:56

And I never had it, and you literally just said chief of staff, and I went, I don't really get what that role is. And then everything that you are making, you are like I was like, oh my god, I'm doing that this time.

Speaker 3 29:04

Yeah. Yeah, it's a critical role. And look, I mean, that that person may not become a salesperson, but they understand the sales process, right? Because they're working alongside the founder or other people because they're building decks and they're and they're sitting in on calls and they're kind of listening to the pitch. And yeah, it's it's a critical role, in my opinion. In a startup, um, I think it and again, you look at successful entrepreneurs and successful people that have built businesses and exited, you look at their team and or you go on LinkedIn, you're like, geez, they have a chief of state, you know, oh, they have somebody that or people operations or somebody that kind of you know keeps all the glue together in the world.

Speaker 4 29:39

That's literally him. And it's so funny because like I actually believe when you're building a startup, and this is so funny because the first one we built, if I ever get married, there'll literally be a table dedicated to them because we're still so close. Because the trauma that you go through, and I'm going to one of their weddings in two weeks, and like we met on Zoom, we built a business together. I mean, it's literally west coast of America to UK. I mean, I live. Literally going to a different day. But like it's crazy that kind of like bond that you get with people. And like I think that's a huge part of the I think's also useful to share is you everyone's like, oh, if your employees saying you're a family, then they're doing it wrong. I do kind of get that in big corporate companies, but if you have that family, like five or four to five people where you've got like killer sales rep that can build the whole go-to-market, you have the founder, you have the chief of staff, you have the um tech guy, and then you might have like another sales rep on commission or something. But you have those like four to five in the exec team to begin with, if they are literally like a family, that is exactly what's going to attract top talent because that's where A, it's the most fun you'll ever have because it's like working with your best friends every day. B, you just then want to do everything to help them because they are like your family. And it I just feel like that's like if that's the ultimate competitive advantage, if you can create a team like that as your founding team.

Speaker 3 30:52

Yeah, completely agree. Love that model.

Speaker 4 30:54

Yeah, like that is what I've got so passionate about. But I know, I know we're going over time and I've taken up loads of your time, but just in like with your all your success, and I'd love to wrap with just any like key lessons learned, or anything that you can share with our listeners that you feel like you may have wanted to know before you started the companies, or anything about the go-to-market side that keeps coming up that that resonates with you before we end.

Discovery, Pricing, And Process

Speaker 3 31:16

Yeah, you know, there's no uh there's nothing that that really comes up. I mean, it's it's really a journey, right? When you start a business or or or you're a consultant or you hang a shingle and you go out on your own. You know, you have to do research. You know, you have to have again, we talked about mindset at the beginning, you know, you have to have a clear approach to kind of how you you know how you measure success, right? Some people like, hey, I want a lifestyle business, right? So I want the work-life balance and it's okay to just have a life life. Yeah, that's okay. Like if you want a lifestyle business and you want to work 20 hours a week, but you enjoy it and and you travel and get to sit and spend time with your family and friends, great. But if you want to build something and work, you know, 15 hours a day and go build it for toward an exit or towards another event, then you know it takes a it takes a really um special person to kind of you know build that build that um again go to market and and uh approach to to be successful.

Speaker 4 32:08

Yeah, honestly, I completely agree. And the whole lifestyle thing, I just want to say it's never a negative. Like I work with a lot of clients or a lot of customers where whatever your goal is, you just have to reverse engineer that and there'll be a pathway to get there. But like I've seen people like way happier on two, three, four hundredk a year where they have like five to ten like clients that they know that they can help but continuously keep renewing than like people that are exiting their companies for over a billion dollars.

Speaker 3 32:32

Right, right.

Speaker 4 32:33

It's it's interesting that one. But Mark, this has been awesome, it's been so much fun, you're great. We're lucky to have you on and yeah, looking forward to seeing how this all comes out.

Speaker 3 32:43

Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks, Laura. It was a fun.

Speaker 4 32:45

Thanks, Mark.