Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Why C-Students Build Companies (And A-Students Work for Them)

9 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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1:11

Cameron Herold argues that strong sales skills are essential for entrepreneurs because they must constantly "sell" employees, customers, investors, and suppliers. He contends that A-students often struggle as entrepreneurs because they lack experience with failure, whereas B- and C-students develop resilience through repeated setbacks. This excerpt is a spoken monologue from a YouTube video.

Chapters

If you're not good in sales, you'll suck as an entrepreneur. You're selling employees to come and work for you. You're selling customers to come and sell or buy from you. You're selling bankers to invest or investors to invest, suppliers to work with you. You're constantly in sales mode. And if you're not good at that, you'll never be successful as an entrepreneur. Most very, very good students, like the A students, the top of the class students are, are really bad as entrepreneurs because they've never dealt with the adversity. Now they've worked hard and study hard, but because they were always succeeding, they don't know how to deal with failure. I failed at every class. I got terrible grades in school, terrible grades in high school, terrible grades in college. So I was used to failing. I would try as hard as I could, study as hard as I could, and I'd get a C minus. So for me, failure was just called Tuesday. But if you're used to getting as on everything and then you're getting no, you're hearing no, you're getting no, you tend to give up or you start to doubt yourself. But that true entrepreneur is usually the B and C student that knows that they can't cut it in the real world working for somebody else. Nor does our DNA work well for us.