When did one of the highest-paid professionals on the executive leadership team become a temp-worker?
This stark fact is at the heart of what makes growth so challenging in start-ups, and it's the biggest contributor to risk with your career, your company's performance, and the investor's fund performance. Everyone loses.
An all-too-common absence of intellectual honesty perpetuates a turnstile-employment of the only leadership professional on the SLT with the skill and drive to maximize organic growth - your REVENUE leader. Something's broken!
BOARDS .... "lies, damn lies, and statistics"
Boards struggle to get the visibility, transparency, and intellectual honesty you need from your portfolio companies ... what you get is spin and narratives.
When Boards make "suggestions" they're often received by the SLT as commands. And when a non-revenue-expert Board, is unduly influencing a non-revenue-expert CEO, the revenue-expert sales leader is in an impossible position. And now the risk profile of your investment just went parabolic.
Most Boards lag behind the learning curve of their revenue leaders by 5 or more years. FACT. We get it, it's not your day job.
Boards focus on Pipeline and ARR ... both of which are important KPIs, but there are a dozen other metrics that paint a clearer picture of the health of the business. If you're not tracking them you're making a lot of mistakes.
Never compare the sales leadership of one portfolio company to the sales leadership of another ... they are not similar sets ... and they never will be.
CEOs ... "deck chairs on the Titanic"
CEOs struggle to distinguish between a great revenue leader and a not-so-great revenue leader, even when you [the CEO] was a revenue leader in a past life. This one blind spot alone will cost you millions of dollars each year.
When CEOs aren't tracking the right revenue KPIs, you're making the wrong investment decisions in your operating budget every quarter and losing millions in ARR every year.
CEOs can't be expected to be 100% immersed in 100% of the revenue data, 100% of the time. And because of this, you defer to the 1 or 2 KPIs your Board is focused on. This ends badly for everyone.
REVENUE LEADERS ... "turnstile-employment"
Your CEO and Board have given you a budget and headcount and told you to "grow". You reply that expanding headcount isn't the answer. They don't understand that revenue always leads headcount and you haven't found repeatable ARR yet. Brush up your resume, this isn't going to end well for you.
You're trying to educate your leadership through data-fueled KPIs that explain the true performance of the business; but, your leadership believes the problem is the quality of your sales team, and/or your sales enablement materials. Brush up your resume, this isn't going to end well for you.
As a revenue leader, you've been handed a quota that has no grounding in the realities of your business; but no one is listening when you explain that it's going to be nearly impossible to achieve based on historicals and the current-state of the pipeline. Brush up your resume ... [you know the drill]
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