HARDISON’S TIPS – AUGUST 4, 2021 – Key Investments New Business Owners Should Make (Pt.1)
Anyone currently “playing the corporate game” knows it’s not for the faint of heart. Office politics, a who-you-know culture and a quarterly earnings mentality can hinder motivation and impede your ability to succeed.
I bought into this game for a long time before realizing I would never achieve financial security by following someone else’s plan. I based my success on how other senior leaders viewed me, not solely on my performance. The days of exceeding quotas and being rewarded for it had vanished.
I’d grown tired of participating in the game everyone else was playing. I recognized I needed to focus on a different game: one with less competition, less bureaucracy, and fewer rules. I knew I needed to go somewhere I could be rewarded for results, where I could fail quickly and recover with even faster solutions, and where my value was recognized. So I did.
A New Direction: Fractional Sales Leadership
Starting out, my idea was to pursue sales training and coaching, but I quickly learned many viewed this as a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. Sales coaching is often the first line item dropped from a budget, partially becauseit assumes that a business owner will be able to implement the strategies you propose.
That’s when I pinpointed the disconnect: Business owners didn’t just need a coach; they needed effective sales leadership to build their sales infrastructure properly and lead the team. They also need all of this done in a fraction of your time estimate and within their budget.
After some cursory Google and LinkedIn research, my co-founder, Chad Meyer, and I realized that no other company was addressing this market. Many had already built a fractional model in marketing, finance, and other departmental areas, but they had not followed suit in sales leadership. We decided to make the leap.
At the time, I was emotionally somewhere between being excited to create something new and concerned that it had been attempted in the past and there simply wasn’t a market for this type of service. We knew we’d be solely responsible for educating the owners of small to midsize businesses that they had a choice in sales leadership. Letting companies know they had a unique option — one that they didn’t even know existed—was daunting, but it was something we felt uniquely equipped to do.
