In this segment, the speaker argues that every business should be created with the intention of being sellable at any point. He explains that modern valuations increasingly reward the "people component"—the quality of leadership, operations, client support, and sales teams—beyond pure revenue or EBITDA. Depending on the desired exit (selling to a large corporation that will handle sales versus a strategic buyer who expects a self‑sustaining operation), founders must decide how much to invest in building a robust leadership structure. The speaker warns against the "owner‑visionary‑salesperson" trap, urging founders to stop being the primary revenue generator and instead focus on hiring and developing talent that can run operations, implementation, support, and sales. He emphasizes the need for patience, commitment, and effective teaching to transfer knowledge to sales reps, noting that while building a sales team can be rewarding, it also involves rough spots and requires confidence‑building and strong mentorship.
Chapters
Whenever you create a business, no matter what you think you're going to do, you should be creating that business with the sole focus of selling it at any point in time that you want. And what people don't realize, and you mentioned it earlier, is that when we look at how businesses are being valued, we actually market and sell a lot of businesses now as one of our lines. The people component has perhaps never been a larger multiple put on that in kind of the extra stuff that's outside of revenue and EBITDA and those types of things. And that's how you create enterprise value. So if your endgame is that you're just going to sell to a large giant and a sales team is not going to be needed and you're really going to invest a bunch of money and, you know, at the end of the day, there's not going to be a huge ROI tradeoff in the additional revenue you're going to get on board to sell, then don't do it. And just continue to ride it out and just no sweat. That's cool. That's an exit plan. But if your goal is to maybe sell to a strategic or transition that to someone else who's in the business or sell it to someone externally who wants to come in and run it, then building out that leadership team, not alone, let alone a sales team, but having good leaders that can run operations, that can run implementation, that can run client support, that can run sales is just very, very important to the business. And my number one thing that I'll just go back to is you have to stop committing one of the three sins of sales management, which is being that owner and being that visionary and also being the number one salesperson. Being the visionary and the owner is a full-time gig. And I understand that you got— it's not— we don't just forklift and flip the light switch overnight and all of a sudden you're not. It's a journey that you go on to get there, but it's just changing that mindset to be, okay, my job is not to be the revenue producer. And I know you got to deal when you got payroll to meet and all those types of things for your own internal stuff. I get that., but your sole focus has got to be, I've got to grow this team in talent and they are going to collectively then take this business probably further than you can even imagine if you get the right people in the seats and get them going in the right direction and being that leader that can communicate a vision that they want to follow and go out and execute on. So that's what I always bring it back to is everyone shouldn't start a sales team. It's not, I'm not, it's not for everybody. But for the ones that want to embark on it, have some patience. Great rewards, but there's a lot of rough spots. It takes work, it takes commitment. And what you got to do is you got to get those folks confident, Matt, like you said right away, and you got to become a great teacher and you have to transfer all of that knowledge and all of the stuff that you've learned and you've got to get it over to your reps.
