"Grow Fast and Break Things, or Grow Slow?"

0:00My name's Christian, and I sell solar to homeowners, and we do $20 million in revenue a year. I would like to be at $160 million in revenue. The biggest thing that's stopping me is we can recruit unlimited appointment setters. Um the reps that we bring on are independent contractors, so there's not a high cost there. Um the biggest bottleneck is that although we could bring on unlimited appointment setters, we need the leaders to be able to help scale. You're right.

0:27>> Arm hair. >> Okay. >> [laughter] >> Um we need the leaders to help, you know, obviously lead those guys through the job, help hold them accountable, and that we have a lack of leaders issue, where we don't recruit externally, like from other companies to take leaders from. It's not my preference. I like to develop them internally, but it also comes at the cost of it's very slow to develop leaders.

0:54>> it taken you to get from zero to 20? >> Um it's been 5 years now. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Heard. Um well, what problem would you rather have? Slower growth or faster growth? >> Yeah. >> So, faster growth and dilution of culture, probably more fires for finding wrong people that aren't good leaders, and then mis-hiring underneath of them, and then having to lay those kind of branches off, and then bring new people in, or continue to grow on the path that you're currently on, which seems to be working pretty well.

1:22>> Yeah. I mean, just thinking out loud, I'd prefer to grow slower, but like obviously, it would be really cool to have my cake and eat it, too. >> Yeah, but um yeah. >> [laughter] >> Um yeah, I guess is is there an intermediary road where uh >> Can I just get the best of the fast growth and the great culture? >> [laughter] >> Uh >> How how can I guess the probably the question is how can we help grow and develop leaders quicker within our organization?

1:48>> So, I'll bet you right now that you're probably pretty good at training sales. >> Yeah. >> Okay. You have to get good at training leadership. >> Okay. >> So, right now you're a sales training fundamentally like you're in the business and I've had lots of very sales driven organizations like your business is a sales driven organization. You're in the recruiting onboarding and training of sales people business and you just happen to sell roof right solar. And if you needed tomorrow to sell roofs you'd [ __ ] sell roofs. Right exactly of course.

2:14>> [laughter] >> Couldn't leave money on the table. But basically what it is is that you have really operationalized how to get someone to do a specific set of behaviors that increase the likelihood someone gives you money period. So now you need to have a different set of behaviors that you have to standardize around leadership that increase the likelihood that people follow directives. >> Okay. One challenge I have is like I've tried to shift the culture to we've like put together a leadership development program but I noticed that what will happen is some of the sales people will start focusing on the leadership development stuff and then their sales volume goes down.

2:46>> Yeah. Cuz they're like I'm guessing you're picking for the for the leaders. >> What was that? >> So I'll tell you this in my experience the best leaders especially in sales organizations are not the best closers. >> Yeah. >> And so I think um And the best closers in every business that I own make more than the sales managers. >> Yeah. >> And so if you have a killer let him kill let him hunt.

3:11It's the guys who were like three out of 10s worked really hard to get to a six or seven out of 10. Those guys I found have been exceptional sales managers and leaders. >> Interesting. >> And so I would be trying to identify that because the thing is it's like some of the best basketball coaches were not the best players but they were guys who loved basketball loved their teammates loved learning how to get better so they could point out what someone else needs to do even if they're not as good as it at it. And so you probably have a little bit of a pick them issue which is that you might be picking the wrong horses cuz now you're hurting yourself twice.

3:41You're losing a sales guy and don't have a good leader. >> Yeah. Yes. >> And so I would say leave the best sales guys alone and then look for the middle of the pack guys that everyone loves like you know those guys that like they're not the best closers but like everyone loves them. They're like spiritual leaders of the the team that they're on. Those guys are the ones that make banger sales managers. And this is a pattern recognition thing. I'm sure like you'll get it. Okay. And then really cuz the thing is is those guys eat up the leadership stuff.

4:08>> Beautiful. >> And and then basically the way that you train sales, I'm sure it's really militant, you train leadership the same way. >> Cool. >> So leadership development path isn't like once a month we do a [ __ ] training. No, I'm being real cuz some of you guys have that. You're like, "Oh, we're we're pouring into our people. Once a month we spend an hour with them." >> Yep. >> Great. >> [laughter] >> And then when that takes, you know, 25 years for them to become a leader because they've forgotten between each 1 hour where they just have a random Zoom call, then maybe you'll teach them how to lead, right? And so you have to train it the way that you train sales.

4:37>> Okay. Beautiful. >> Which is intense, many hours, lots of shadowing, >> Yes. >> full days, like 1 day a week you're with the other sales manager for a month or two cuz the thing is is they know what to do, they lose it in the how. >> Mhm. >> And a lot of that gets there the obviously you want to get as good as you can operationalizing the the smaller skills, but there's a hundred things that someone does. You might operationalize the 15 most important ones, but the other 85 still make a big difference. >> And so when I was like a sales leader like running a team, I was a really good player coach and I'd lead from the front just closing a [ __ ] ton of deals, but like

5:08>> But you won a $20 million business. >> Yeah. It's a good point. >> Why can't everyone be me? >> So player coach is a bad >> of me, oh my god, I'd make so much money, but you're not. >> So player coach is a good or bad idea? >> Um I prefer it depends on because you're bigger organizations. This this applies to them. >> In in our context >> Yeah. >> the reason I like lean towards player coach sometimes is because there's shared risk like mutual risk because we're going out and knocking on doors every day. And if your sales leader isn't doing that to some extent

5:38>> I mean you can have them do half days if you really want to, but like if it really depends on the ratio of sales lead or leader to guys. I found after like sixish it's it's a full-time job if you really want them to manage the team. >> Cool. Okay. >> If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at your business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.