At $200k, you're reactive: handling every estimate and customer call yourself. At $2 million, you've systematized sales with templates, pricing rules, and documented processes that others can follow. The trap is delegating sales without fixing your estimates first, since bad pricing kills the deal downstream.
Walk me through some of the differences you might see in a sales process for a company that's, say, $200,000 versus $2 million. $200,000, likely the owner being out in the field doing estimates while they're doing work as a solo operator. $2 million, much more sophisticated. That's more where Bellingham Shop was when you were the estimator. Right. And so walk me through the differences in those and maybe give me some of the high-level areas of weakness you see in both of those.
I would say there's really two words I would use to define each. So the $200,000 a year company is going to be reactive and very personalized. Okay, so that's what the solo operator is doing, right? They're reactive to when the customer calls, when the customer emails me, when there's a problem, when an estimate pops up, I need to react to that. I need to go and attack that lead, which is a good philosophy, right? Speed to lead is important, but it's very reactive in terms of the process because it's usually solo operator and it's very personal, right? They're establishing a relationship with the customer. They're building rapport with the customer. The customer knows that the person selling me the job is the person that's going to come do the job, is the person the person that's going to bill me for the job. It's a very personal sales process. When I look at a $2 million company, it's going to be systematized and it's going to be predictable. And so when you build a $2 million company, a sales system, like when you put me in charge of sales of your original location, you didn't say, okay, Lee, go do sales and hope— and you hope that the revenue stayed at the same level. You taught me how we meet the customer, how we type up estimates, what our pricing structure looks like on the back end, target margins we had, what target close ratio we had. All of those things were explained to me via the systems you created, and it made it for you as the owner, a predictable process knowing that if I can teach someone these systems, the revenue is then going to be a predictable output from the systems I created. And so that would be the distinction that I would make between the two is you have this reactivity, this personalization versus this predictable system that just churns out sales.
And, and I think for a lot of people listening, they're in that phase of, you know, maybe crossing $800,000, $1 million in revenue. They're starting to think about, I need to find someone to take sales off my plate. And I think for a lot of people it's easy to delegate admin 'cause we hate doing it. Yeah. We delegate operations 'cause we're tired. Yeah. Yeah. We're like, get it off. I wanna get off the truck. When it comes to sales, it's sometimes very risky 'cause we know that everything downstream of the sale is governed by whether or not that job was accurate budget hours, accurate materials, accurate pricing.
