Phil Risher explains why businesses stall at $1M: a contractor doubled his estimates but closed almost no deals because he had no sales system, no customer service staff, and was still doing the technical work himself. To break through, founders must stop hustling and build teams for sales, service, and operations.
So we had a guy, he was about $1.2 million. He did 70 estimates last year. Then this year he did 140 estimates and he still only closed 30 of those estimates both years because he's the number one salesperson and he didn't have a sales system is one example. Another example is they don't have a customer service representative actually answering the phones. And if they do, it's someone either overseas or an office manager that might not be designated specifically to booking appointments. On top of that, they might not have the technicians, right? The owner is still running around doing jobs so they can't be focused on growing the business. It's hard to meet with them because it's like after hours. There's a lot of things that go into it where it's like when you go from a— when you hit $1 million, literally the hustler has to die and the leader has to be born. And you can't be running around doing all the jobs or you're not going to scale. And that's why usually at $1 million, people are like, okay, I need to get a fractional CFO, I need to get a fractional CMO, I need to get all of these pieces inside of my business so that I can go to the next level. And that's where we plug in.
