Your Finest Moment Comes Right After Your Darkest
Yes I know I need to get some sleep, but that would require my brain to turn off and I don’t see that happening any time soon. So with that, I am up!
I founded my company to help business owners discover the power of sales inside their organization. For too long I have seen amazing organizations fail. Not because their product/service was bad, or because they couldn’t market themselves, but they failed because they never figured out how to sell what they did. It is my mission to fix that!
So in February, 2016 I started my podcast to bring training to these business owners. Then out of nowhere I started to get calls from business owners who wanted to learn more about how to make a more reliable and a forecastable sales team. At first I was just offering my advice for free, but quickly saw a business opportunity. So in March, 2016 I decided to leave my amazing job to take this hobby full time. Luckily I had three clients lined up ready to take me on.
For the next four months I would spend 3 weeks of every month traveling back and forth between my new home in San Diego and New York, New Jersey, and Toronto, Canada. I was not earning anywhere near my old income levels, but I was loving the freedom and impact I was making on these businesses. It was some of the most professionally fulfilling times of my life.
Then after four months I was sitting at my computer building a financial forecast for my company that I was getting very excited about. It took longer than expected, but after four months I had finally figured out a plan that could get me off the road, and get my revenues up.
To accomplish this new plan would require me taking a HUGE gamble by hiring in some people to help me expand the services of my company, and in doing so remove my ability to pay myself a salary for about two months. After triple checking my numbers and vetting my strategy against friends and former colleagues to ensure they were conservative enough I was ready to take the jump and expand my business into the world of marketing.
The expansion seemed obvious as so many of our clients were asking for our input and guidance already, and I had run marketing at my last two companies. So why wouldn’t we grow into performing the marketing services for our clients?
Four weeks into our expansion things appeared to be headed down the right direction, we picked up a new client, our pipelines we growing, and projects seemed to be on track. Then week six came and everything changed.
There are moments in every business you know you will never forget. Mine came in week six. That week our entire marketing expansion came to a grinding halt with the loss of a key team member. Then the fallout from that loss caused our company to lose almost all of our clients due to missed deadlines and expectations. It took my worst nightmare and made it look like rainbows and unicorns, and seemed content on ensuring I would never sleep again. It was my darkest moment in my professional career.
Then just as it seemed like the end, my team and I had a strategy meeting to see what we could do to pivot the business and save it. All of us were beyond dedicated to our mission, and could not just let it go and one question was asked that changed everything, “Mike what do you always say makes a company successful?” My answer as it always is was one word, “sales!”
From that moment all of us knew what needed to happen. We needed to remove this marketing stuff from our catalog and get back to our roots as sales experts. So over the next 3 hours our team completely rewrote our go to market strategy. It was time for us to fall in love with sales all over again
Over the next three weeks we were still working through the fallout of our marketing client base to make things right, and were picking up new clients at a steady pace. Just two weeks in we had successfully replaced all of our lost revenue, and had created an even stronger pipeline than before. Best of all, we had a strategy that didn’t just rely on any one person, and was so detailed that any trained person on our team could follow our strategy to ensure a successful delivery to the client.
As I reflect, the constant question I ask myself is, if I could have avoided all of this pain would I have done things differently? The answer I come to is always NO. That miss in strategy allowed our team to double down on our sales strategy, and that clarity is now providing our clients with extreme sales growth.
Today our mission is clearer than ever, “Help business owners fall in love with their sales team.” It did not come through fields of flowers and rainbows. No, it came the same way real sales are done. Through hard work, persistence, and dedication to get shit done!
To You Success & Prosperity!