Jake SetterlunFounder, Setterlun University™ · 🚀 Helping Scale Your Online Offer to $1M/month @ Setterlun University™ (1,000+ Students) 🏆 2x 2CCX

One of my biggest failures 📉

30 Dec 2024 · 1 min

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0:34

In this segment of his YouTube video, Jake Setterlun reflects on a decade‑long career marked by repeated setbacks. He recounts an early, vivid failure: after securing a few modest clients, he and a friend used limited cash flow to hire a full‑time sales manager on a fixed salary. The experiment flopped because the manager lacked commission‑based incentives, leading to poor performance and no business growth. The speaker extracts a clear lesson – hiring someone does not automatically improve results; sales roles typically require commission structures to align motivation with revenue generation. The anecdote serves as a broader caution about naïve hiring assumptions and the importance of incentive design in small‑business scaling.

Chapters

I mean, I've failed, I feel like, throughout my whole career. Again, I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, and, you know, there's a lot. You know, one of the first biggest failures that just sticks out to me is, you know, it was me and a friend. We had gotten a couple clients paying us a couple hundred dollars a month, so we weren't racking it in. We weren't even paying our bills, but we had a little bit of business money, and we ended up hiring a sales manager, which, you know, there's a lesson there. Don't hire somebody on a salary to do sales for you because, you know, realistically they need to be on commission. Commissioned and motivated. So that was definitely one of the first things that it's like, just because you hire someone doesn't mean that they're gonna do a good job and doesn't mean they're gonna grow your business.