Focal Point

Surviving the ownership trap

There’s no better salesman than the owner of the company.

That’s his name up on the door, or maybe it’s dad’s name or uncle Ernie, but it’s a name that means something to the customer. It’s a legacy he’s going to preserve and that means he’s committed to keeping the customers happy.

If the owner is the founder of the company, so much the better. She’s been there from the start, building it up from scratch. She knows the customers and she’s the only one on the team who can make a commitment on the spot—and make sure it’s honored.

Sure, there’s a sales team that’s handling most of the accounts, but people want to talk to the owner and the owner is the key to closing the sale and the owner knows exactly how to make the customer feel special and…..one day….sales growth simply stops. Perhaps sales are still growing, but profitability isn’t rising as fast as it should.

And then the questions begin:

• Why don’t we have more leads?
• Why aren’t we making more presentations to the bigger buyers?
• Why haven’t new sales doubled since we doubled the size of the sales force?
• Shouldn’t we be making a better total margin as overhead is spread across a larger revenue base?
• If we’re doing a good job, why don’t we get more referrals?

The answers can be unsettling. All too often, it’s the owner, the chief sales rep, who is the source of the problem. At the center of the sales process, providing the leverage to make things happen, the owner becomes less catalyst and more bottleneck. As customer ranks grew, the owner maintained a successful model until, one day, there was no extra bandwidth available to take expand the company’s reach.

The solution is reduction and refocus of the owner’s engagement. Something must be handed off, or jettisoned entirely, in order to create capacity for the most important activities. The alternative is to work 24 hours per day, but that solution works for less than a week.

At some point, for every job, reassessment is required. That includes the top job in the company, even if the boss has grown comfortable with the devil he knows.

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