Founder Bottleneck: Why Your First Sales Hire Stalls (Mark Gordon)

Nate: I got off a call this week with the owners of a painting and cleaning company. It's a two person team. He does the painting, she does everything else. She told me the business felt stuck, and she was sure the answer was social media. Post more, get more leads. I asked her how her three best clients found her. Two of them had watched the crew work on another property and asked for them by name. The third saw a comment she left in a local Facebook group. Here's what was actually happening. Their work sells itself. In person, nothing sells it when they aren't in the room. And the gap behind that is the system gap. Nothing turns a finished job into proof. There's no review request when the job wraps up. The before and after photos sit on a phone. There's no website and no Google profile. And when a property manager does search the name, two other painting companies with almost the same name show up first. So a referral comes in. The buyer checks and finds nothing to trust. More posting won't fix that. It just sends more people to the same dead end or to a competitor whose name is close enough to win the call. And that's this week's growth ceiling.

Nate Grossman: You built the company by selling it yourself. Every big deal still runs through you. You know that has to change, and you probably already tried it once. Hired a salesperson, handed over a few accounts, and watched the pipeline go flat inside of two quarters. So you took the deals back. Today we're talking with someone who has built sales teams from nothing more than once, and we're going to get specific about how a founder hands off the sale without the revenue going with it. So Mark Gordon is the founder and CEO of IGS. TMS, Integrated Go to Market Solutions, where he works directly with founders and CEOs of B2B companies on one problem, moving from founder-led sales to a sales system the business can run. He has been on the selling side for about 20 years. He co-founded Fortran Funding, an online mortgage lender, and sold it in a seven-figure deal in 2016. He then joined Princeton Mortgage as national sales director. Where the team grew the company to more than a billion dollars a year in in originations, and in one year earned a net promoter score of ninety-eight. What makes his view useful here? He spent the first fifteen years learning through pain, then spent the next five reading everything so we can explain both what goes wrong and why. Well Mark, welcome.

Mark D Gordon: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your audience with me.

Nate Grossman: Absolutely. So you've said you've spent the first half of your career learning only through pain. when you sit down with a founder who is still the best sales salesperson in the building, what patterns do you see right away?

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, I mean, the first thing is when you're early on in your business, I don't think we should be critical of founders being the best salespeople. I think it's the right move, it's a bold move. And I think to get things off the ground, the brave founders go out there and and sell stuff, and that's great. The problem is just like anything else in business, what gets you from one stage to the next stage will not be the thing that gets you from that stage to the next stage, right? And so, you know, and what we find is that you can get away with a lot of things that are quote unquote wrong or not aligned. When you're doing founder-led sales. I often think of it as a rowboat that has two paddles. And if you're a solo founder selling, you can you can move both paddles together at the same time in the same way. Because really you're just looking for conversations with people who need your solution and then selling those people. Those are your two paddles. When you move above founder-led sales, or when you try to move above it, it actually becomes four separate paddles. And this is why every company eventually hires a chief revenue officer because they need a captain who can align those four things. But the problem is all these companies in between, how do they go on that journey from founder-led sales to chief revenue officer ready? And the answer is you need to become a different kind of leader, right? As you think about it. And so those four paddles are, you know, messaging and product market fit, lead generation, sales execution, and revenue technology. And so what people often try to do is fix one of those things at a time. But as you know, if you have a crew team with four paddles in the water, if one person starts paddling faster, the boat doesn't go faster, it spins in circles, right? And so that's exactly what

Nate Grossman: Right, right.

Mark D Gordon: happens to people when they try to get out of founder-led sales. They're like, this thing's broken, that thing's broken, and eventually they try to take it all back and they can't get there because it's then it's just one guy rowing with two paddles versus teams of people who have four people and they're rowing in unison. And so what we do is we help companies find that alignment and make sure that those core four are working together. And it starts with the founder and the leader and it has to start there.

Nate Grossman: Makes sense. so on on the show we talk about you know being visible, being found by the right people, showing up where, you know, those people hang out and spend their time. And also building a business that's viable, right? You want it to stand on its own two legs. and both of those together automatically make the business more valuable. so I think what we're talking about here today hits sits right in that viable viability layer. It's because we're talking about the sales process, the handoffs, systems that either carry the revenue without the founder, or they end up collapsing, right? the minute that they step back. So most founders out there may believe that the fix for founder led sales is hiring a great salesperson. why does that first sales hire fail so often, would you say?

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, I'm gonna take it back to something you just said, which I thought was really interesting. You said it's getting in front of getting in the right rooms or in front of the right audiences. And I would say that's part of it, right? and that and for

Nate Grossman: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: a founder, when they're doing founder led sales, that works because they have a clear enough vision in their head of what the company does, or they have the charisma or personality or credibility to navigate what I would call conspicuous messaging. What happens when

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: you bring in that new sales leader? Is that they don't have that credibility from the founder perspective. They don't have that deep understanding. And so you've probably had this experience before where you meet a founder and you Tell what do you do? And it's like three minutes of jumbledness and like you sort of get a vague idea, but they're so afraid they're gonna leave anyone out that they actually end up being for nobody. And then you go to their website and you're like, I don't really understand what this company does or who they do it for. And so it's not enough to get in the room or get in front of the right people. We can spend all the money in the world driving traffic to our website, but what if When our ideal customer gets there, they don't know they're the ideal customer, then it doesn't matter that you spend all that time, energy, and money driving them to the website. And so that's what happens when we hire these sales leaders is take a sales leader who was like, hey, you know, this guy got promoted four times at Oracle and he was the head of this and he's gonna come in here and build our sales motion. It's like, well, that guy thrived in an environment where Oracle knew exactly what they did, who they did it for, had all of the guardrails built. And they were able to operate really effectively inside that bureaucracy, which is a very difficult skill. It's just not the skill you're looking for when you're hiring your first salesperson. Right. You

Nate Grossman: Mm. Uh-huh.

Mark D Gordon: need somebody who can either build that messaging, which makes them a unicorn, or some, or you need to build that messaging in advance so that they're coming into a more organized system so that they can thrive. And so we just see people get this wrong all the time. They're they're looking for somebody because they had it, and you they'll they'll say this to like, well, we've hired two VPs of sales and they both stump. It's like, well, they were both really successful before they got there and they've been

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: kind of successful since. So maybe it's you and it's not them, right? And so I

Nate Grossman: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: think that's why it's hard. It's it's not, yes, sometimes we hire the wrong people or we hire somebody who's in close proximity to us and we hope they're gonna grow into the role and we don't spend the time and energy to make sure someone's the right fit. But most of the time it's actually that our organization is not mature enough to hire somebody who's just really good at sales. And even if we do, maybe we have a marketing person and a salesperson, but they're operating in independent silos and they're going out with different messaging and there's not that alignment. And then our customer success team is going crazy and pulling their hair out because we're messaging one thing, selling something else, and neither one of those is the thing that we actually do. Right. And so I when we really do see this when we go inside organizations, there's chaos around

Nate Grossman: yeah.

Mark D Gordon: a lack of clarity. and so I think before you make that first sales hire, you need to have crystal clear clarity across all of your messaging. across your internal and external communication about what is the problem we solve and who do we solve it for. And if I don't know who you're not for, then I'm probably not gonna know who you are for. And if you're so afraid that you might push away that one customer who's on the fringes, then you've become the cheesecake factory. And and I know I'm kind of rambling here, but I'll just share this. Here's what I mean

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: by that. If you want to have a really thick menu where you have a million options, you become the Cheesecake Factory and you do everything at level six

Nate Grossman: Right, right.

Mark D Gordon: out of 10. There's a reason why when you go to a Michelin star

Nate Grossman: Ha ha.

Mark D Gordon: restaurant that they have a prefixed menu, because if you want to be the best in the world at something, if you want to have an amazing experience, you have to be very focused on doing this one thing extremely well, maybe two things

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: extremely well. But I can't tell you how many marketing agencies I see out there that do $2 million a year in revenue and just have 60 things on their website they're supposed to specialize in. What is the chance

Nate Grossman: Hmm. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: that company's gonna do 60 things well? Zero.

Nate Grossman: Yeah, yeah.

Mark D Gordon: Right. And so all they've done is commoditize themselves and make it so that they're going to do average or below average work at scale. And that doesn't scale

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: and it causes constraints. So before you hire that salesperson, you need to be able to say, this is what we do, this is who we do it for. This is what makes us special. This is our unique value proposition. This is the justification for our price point. And you understand those things in a very clear way where you can communicate them at an eighth grade level, or any salesperson you're gonna you're gonna hire is gonna struggle.

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm. For some reason the the phrase bowling without the bumpers came to mind as soon as you started talking about that.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah.

Nate Grossman: basically, you know, they they were they were in a place where all the bumpers were there, right? And then they're coming to you and they're not there and it's like, How do I do this? you know, so yeah, I can I can empathize.

Mark D Gordon: And the only reason I don't love the bowling algae, and I like it. The only reason I don't love it is because it makes it seem like it's it's a it's less skillful to be that person in Oracle. And I actually don't believe that. I just think it's a different skill, right? It's a different sport,

Nate Grossman: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: right? Like, and so I would fail. I would fail in the sales system at Oracle. There's too much bureaucracy, too many rules, too many

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: things to navigate, fill out the CRM. That's not who I am. You'd be like, hey, we have got to go figure out how to sell this thing at this price. a magic when it comes to that, right? And so it's just two different skill sets. And we need to know who we're hi ready to hire and at what point.

Nate Grossman: Yeah. So so what about the founder who says nobody can sell this like I can?

Mark D Gordon: I would say that almost nothing. and so we'll so okay, let me

Nate Grossman: What what's what's usually true about that? What do you say? Okay.

Mark D Gordon: say this. The part that's true is there is a unique credibility as a founder that allows you to get more responses on your LinkedIn connections, more other founders who are willing to talk to you. Like there, there are some inherent advantages to being the founder, but they're not skill set issues. And it what you're really saying is I am un I am unable to build a system. That allows a great salesperson to sell my product. I'm I'm solely relying on founder credibility to navigate my inability to build a marketing and sales process that can scale. And so when you flip it on somebody that would say to like, no one can sell it like it's like, so what you're really saying is that you're a salesperson and not a leader of a company. And they're like, they get mad at me. They're like, what are you, what are trying to say? I'm like, well, I don't know. Does Elon out there being selling Teslas? Right. Like is he out there selling solar panels? No, like that's not how it works, right? He's out there building the go-to-market strategy and then putting really motivated people in a situation where they can go do the best work of their lives. And that's your job. And so when your identity as a founder shifts from I'm the rainmaker to I create systems and hire people who are who are better than me at their individual tasks, then you get very different results. This is why most businesses get stuck in that one to three million dollar range and never get out of it because you can get there through sheer effort, founder-led sales, a leader with a couple of helpers. But it there is no system when you're in the one to three million dollar range. It's much easier to

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: take a company from 10 million to 30 million than it is from 1 million to 10 million. The $10 million company

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: already has those systems in place that allow you to scale.

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm. Nice. Okay, so how about a a real example here? You know, let's say a a founder, you can you can anonymize it, of course. somebody that tried to hand off the sales but then pulled it back. What you have an example of that? What what broke and what would you have done first?

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, I mean, I would say I I I have a hundred examples and I'm like staring at my board of clients right now as I look here, you know, and to say,

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: and and so I the thing that breaks first is the first thing that people do is is they, okay, so as a leader, you have to have a couple of truths that you understand in your head right away. People don't do what you expect, they do what you inspect. So you need to have a clarity in terms of

Nate Grossman: It's funny.

Mark D Gordon: they don't do what you expect, they do what you inspect.

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: So if you're gonna hire somebody and delegate work to them, you better have a process for inspecting what it is that you think they should be doing and monitoring that progress along the way. Because only if founders are like, yeah, this sales guy in the role for eight months, he hasn't closed anything. I'm like, cool, well, what's he doing all day? Okay, cool. Then you're getting the results you deserve. Right. And I'm not saying you have to micromanage people, but you do need to have an inspection process to understand what's going on there and have that visibility into your process. You know, and and then the second thing is is that your job then as the founder in that role is to stay very engaged with that person and remove obstacles that are preventing them from selling. But if that person that you hire for that sales role isn't up your ass, sorry to curse, but like up your butt, telling you all the things that

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: they need from you and they're not getting results, they're not the right person or they have the wrong incentive structure, the wrong compensation plan, et cetera, et cetera. Like if you hire a really good salesperson and they don't have the tools they need, they're gonna be all over you. Right? They're gonna tell you, hey, I need this, I need this, I need this. There's gonna be urgency, there's gonna be demand because they wanna succeed. If someone's comfortable

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: not succeeding, you're not hearing from them, that's not the right person. Okay.

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: So those are just some like warning signs, right? That you don't have the right person or the right structure. But the last thing

Nate Grossman: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: is that if you don't have a playbook that you can hand to somebody on their first day that says, this is what we do. This is what makes us different than our competitors. This is how we talk about it differently. These are this is our culture and value, how we how values, how we make decisions here. This is the information that I'm handing to you, which will give you a 51% vote on how you handle things out in the field, but a hundred percent responsibility for the result. Then you're not ready to hire. Right. Because what you're really saying is come in here and learn from me by watching some videos and hope you get it right. Or even worse, like, Figure out on your own how to sell this thing that you don't really understand. And because we can't, we can't explain it, but now you need to go explain it. And that, and that's just a recipe for disaster. And we see it all the time. This is not, if this is happening to you and you feel attacked right now, good news, you are not alone. This is the standard, right? It

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: the standard is through sheer willpower and through founder-led charisma, you've been able to muscle the company to that one to three million dollar range. If you are stuck there, it is because you have not. gotten clarity on your core for. You don't know what you do and who you do it for. You can't explain to somebody in two sentences at an eighth grade level. You don't know exactly what your differentiation is. You don't know why your pricing is what it is. And if you don't know those things and can't explain them, then there's no chance you're going to hire somebody into your organization who's going to be able to do it.

Nate Grossman: All right, so let's let's get into the four core a little bit more here. You you I think you've you c sort of explained them by explaining what they do, but I think earlier you had said it's messaging, lead generation, sales execution, and revenue technology, correct?

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, and I'm gonna throw people into the revenue technology thing to make sure

Nate Grossman: Okay.

Mark D Gordon: you have the right people in the right seats on the bus. But yeah, those are your four.

Nate Grossman: All right, fair enough. So i is the order important?

Mark D Gordon: Yes, very

Nate Grossman: Okay. Why is that?

Mark D Gordon: Because if you get your messaging right, the other three get much, much easier. In fact, we've actually boiled this down to what we call as a revenue acceleration score. and we can we can run this on your company just by getting your website. And it gives us a score zero to one hundred. We've run this on on almost a thousand companies and we've got really great data on it. But we can see very clearly when a company is ready to scale because of their public go-to-market presence. How they talk about what they do, how their website is set up to discuss it, how their lead capture mechanics are set up, how their automations are set up, how their ads are running. And we all of this is out there. We can see it. Your reviews that you have on all these different platforms, your case studies, your use cases, everything that's available in the public. We score that on 25 different categories and we give it a score. And if you're in the the average company, by the way, is like 51 on this 100 point score. But if you're not if you're not close to 70, when you try to scale, you're gonna hit you're gonna hit roadblocks. Right. If you're if you're gonna

Nate Grossman: Hm.

Mark D Gordon: scale and you're not at 70, it's because you have some sort of channel-led sales advantage where you're no longer competing for business. You have like a captured audience through a channel. There,

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: there are ways you can succeed without it. But if you're gonna go to

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: market and compete, you need to have that score close to 70. And and it's all those those kind of little things on the messaging and product market fit. So what happens if you try to do lead generation? You can do all run all the ads you want. You can run all send all the cold emails you want. You can do all the LinkedIn annoying outreach you want. And if people get to your website and they go, I don't know. I don't they're, you know, I don't know what they do. Maybe they can help me, but like I can't really figure out what they do or how they do it or what the cost is. And they click off and they have three second attention span and they're gone.

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: When when your ideal customer finds your website, they should have a moment of serendipity. They should go, holy crap. This company solves exactly my problem for people just like me. And it took me three seconds to figure it out. And here's all their credibility. Here are the numbers of credibility. Here's the Google reviews. Here's three other founders and videos or pictures to their LinkedIn account that are telling telling me they went through this process and they, my God, they're saying they they felt just like me at the beginning and I solved their problem at the end. And if you're not having that moment of serendipity, if that website isn't specifically for your ideal customer, then Lead generation becomes harder, sales execution becomes impossible, et cetera, et cetera. So understanding your product market fit and understanding how to communicate that effectively in seconds so that everybody gets it. But more importantly, your ideal customer gets it makes everything easier. And without it, it's like pushing a boulder up a hill. Right. You're gonna spend a ton

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: of money and you're gonna burn through a million leads if you don't have that messaging and product market fit right first.

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm. Well, okay. so what about sales sales execution?

Mark D Gordon: Yeah. So I would say if you are really good at messaging and product market fit and you're pretty good at generating leads, then the difference between an average salesperson and a great salesperson is the difference between closing 23% of the deals that come across their desk or 35%. And what I'll say is that that's a 50% difference over time. So I don't mean to make it, you know, insignificant, right? Like that that adds up over time. Well, here's what I would actually say that I'll kind of blow people's mind. I am a salesperson by nature. I spent most of the first 15 years of my career. Hiring and training thousands of salespeople. And if I could go back and do it all over again, I think I'm I spent most of that time, wasted most of that time. I would say if I had spent the same amount of time recruiting good salespeople to begin with and making sure I had an exceptional message with an exceptional lead generation strategy, I could have gotten by with average salespeople and done a really good job. yes, having a great sales team can make a huge difference. And even Fight, you might even find one magical salesperson that can bail you out and sort of do founder-led sales without the founder if you get really lucky. Although I don't know why that person would come and work for you. You, you know, you better have some kind of a magical personal relationship with them. But if you want to be able to scale it, you need to have a process that's so good on the messaging and product market fit and so good on the lead generation strategy that even an average salesperson is a profitable salesperson. And and then on top of that, if you don't want average salespeople, you need to have a process for attracting the best salespeople in the business and a culture that keeps them. And so I that's why I think sales execution is third because it's important. But again, the best salespeople are generally going to be 50% better than the than than the average salespeople, right? Whereas like the best lead generation or marketing person, that's a 10x job. Right? Like it really is. You know what I mean? And there are certain industries, by the way, where the top like if you're a mortgage originator or a real estate agent and you're a top 1% producer, that is a 10x job because there is no lead generation, there is no messaging apart. You are all three of those things. But actually what that that realtor gets paid a million dollars a year for if they're at the top is not sales. It's marketing. The the the the thing that makes a great realtor a great realtor is not what they do once they have somebody they know that's buying or selling a house. You can be average then it's how do you have those conversations? How do you get yourself on the billboard? How do you get people to call you first? And so that's why people are like, sales is a 10X job. Sales is a 10X job if it includes the marketing part of it. But if you actually do, if you actually

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: have great clarity and you're market on product market fit and you actually have great lead generation, now sales is a 50% difference, not a 1000% difference.

Nate Grossman: I I I think you know, the the you what you th you're gonna cause some fights here.

Mark D Gordon: I'm ready. Bring it.

Nate Grossman: so what about what about revenue technology? And and this seems to me to be the one that everyone jumps to first.

Mark D Gordon: what a waste. So it's

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: fourth for a reason. And it and I would argue it's never the reason a company goes from one to three million to 10 million. there is some blocking and tackling that you need to get right. But what I would say is that most companies get to their RevTech way too early, spend way too much money on it for what is almost zero product differentiation. They use 10% of the features of every product they buy, and they don't buy them. in a way that in in in they don't they don't put them together in a way that makes sense. And actually what they do is they just frustrate their entire team by not keeping up with it once they're there. I would argue that in the beginning it can be just as effective to work out of a spreadsheet and then build some basic automations in tighter in front of people. Again, that's another thing people will be ready to fight me over.

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: Right. But like go high level is essentially free as a CRM and it's everything you need until you have an enterprise sales team. Now, once you have an enterprise sales team, some of those tools do make a ton of sense. Although I would say now with AI, unless you have hundreds of salespeople, which no one listening to this podcast probably does, you can build your own tools to kind of make to kind of get yourself over the finish line with that stuff. Right. And so

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: I would say that by the time revenue technology can be a differentiator for you and your business. You're you're no longer in need of this podcast, right? Like there's you're you're facing different problems. If you think

Nate Grossman: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: that some software that you pay for is gonna make a meaningful difference for you in your business and your ability to generate revenue, I have a bridge to sell you. And so I and

Nate Grossman: Ha ha.

Mark D Gordon: I and again, I know this is controversial, but if there's a reason it's fourth, and you can't get away with having nothing. You need to have really good lead capture on your website. There are things you need to do and grade out. But it is not the differentiator. The differentiator is how is is product market fit and is lead generation. Maybe it's your sales process. but last is it that that that that revenue, that revenue package. And again, those things can be multipliers. They can make a difference, especially if you're in a highly competitive marketplace. But but they're not the differentiator. And it should always be the thing you get right. In fact, if you get it, try to get that right before the other three things are right, you're actually just magnifying the problems that you have. Right. If you don't

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: have the right messaging, the right product market fit could could automate everything all day and then automate your poor messaging to group of people that don't need to hear it. Right. And like that's what

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: you end up doing. And so like you have to get the first three right first.

Nate Grossman: Yep. Yep. All right. So messaging first. you said you said that you can read a company's front page. I think you just said this earlier. You can read a company's front page and know how well it explains, what problem it solves and for whom. So what are you looking for in that case and what is what in your mu in your opinion is the most common miss?

Mark D Gordon: I mean, so you know it you almost it if you go to our website, okay. Like I'll just say if you go our website, it is first of all, we have a category that we own. We are the first and only go-to-market transformation partner that I am aware of in the world. Okay. So I am not a consultant, right? We are not a fractional chief revenue officer or a fractional CMO or whatever it is. We could be all of those things. Those are all things that we know how to do, but we have a very specific way that we do things and a very specific pro. Process that we follow. And so we have differentiation right out of the gate. We have a category we own that, by the way, as soon as you hear it, you sort of understand what it means. If you're in our space and you know what it is, great. Then it says, we will we will build you some sort of like world-class B2B revenue machine in 120 days. Okay. You know right away if you're interested in that. That it has eight industries that we specialize in doing this in, list listed right there. Okay. So if you are a founder who is looking for predictable, scalable growth. And you are in one of those eight industries, you have a serendipitous moment instantly. Then it says the billions of dollars in sales that we've generated, how many clients we've done this for. We have a scroll bar at the bottom with all the clients going forward with it. We have our Google review score of 4.9 stars at the top. So you can see it right there. And so you have all the credibility that supports what I'm saying right there on the home page. And we have movement to grab attention in the Instagram generation, right? We have that scroll at the bottom that makes them go, ooh. We also have a human face on the front page of our website because the research shows that keeps people looking at the website longer. More importantly, you know if we're not for you, if you're not looking to grow your revenue, if you're not in the B2B space, if you're in e-commerce or whatever else it is, like we're probably not the right place for you. Great. If you don't know who we're not for, you don't know who we are for, right? And so It's listed there. If you're in SaaS, FinTech, you have an agency, you're a coaching service, like we have a huge track record of exploding revenue for those organizations. And so you have this serendipious moment where you're like, I finally found the guy who understands my problem. It's not just more leads, it's not just more sales, something is broken here, or it's all relying on me. I'm tired of any somebody's gonna come in and fix it and they can do it quickly. Okay. If you don't have that experience, if I go to your website and it says something like, 38 years in business, number one, number one team in South Carolina. I don't know what that means. And then you're like, okay, cool. You know, we do heating and air conditioning. It's like, okay, fine. Now I'm using my imagination to figure out what it means to be number one. I'm using my imagination without any credibility here to figure out: am I the right person? Do you do commercial? Do you do residential? So, like, if I can't figure out who your perfect customer is, when I come to that homepage of the website. Then when your perfect customer gets there, they're not gonna know it either. And you spend

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: all this energy getting somebody to come visit this website, building this website, doing your SEO, your AEO, your GEO, and all this. And then they get to the website and they're like, I don't think it's for me. And you're like, my God, but no, we're perfect for you. But because you tried to be for

Nate Grossman: Okay.

Mark D Gordon: everybody, you ended up being for nobody.

Nate Grossman: Hmm. Okay. very good. So the maybe like the top miss in that case is lack of what what is the word I'm thinking of? I'm

Mark D Gordon: Well

Nate Grossman: it's I'm at a loss all of a sudden. But narrowing it down, right? Like they're not narrowing it down. They're it's they're trying to kind of be a catch-all, so yeah. niching. Nishing, that's the word I was thinking of.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, here's the way I like to explain it. Real. Of course. Yes. And so here's the thing,

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: right? So you're a founder, you start a small business. Every dollar matters. You're like, man, we got bills to pay. I got payroll. I got to feed my kids. I got all this pressure, right? And so this idea that you would turn away any customer that wants to pay you for your service is like

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: insane. You're like, I gotta take on everybody. I don't want to push anybody away. The problem is that's how you become the Cheesecake Factory, right? It's like, no, no, no,

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: like this person is gluten-free. We have to make sure have gluten-free options. We to make sure we have the dairy-free option. We have to make sure we have the vegetarian and vegan option. We have to make sure that we have steak and pork and chicken and shrimp and all the different things. No matter what someone's into, we got to have the solution. And then it ends up being watered down and you end up with level six, right? No differentiation.

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: And so if you want to be a a great steakhouse, you have to be the best at making steak. Right. And so what that really comes down to is an unwillingness of the founder to say, we're not going to take these this client on. Because we've all had this experience where you take somebody on that you know you're not supposed to take on and you're like, I need this money right now, but then it becomes a huge distraction for your team. It's like, well, we'll figure out how to do it for this group over here. But now everyone's taking their eye off the ball, you're no longer focused on your core product or your core customers, and everyone's pulling their hair out, you're doing a bad job, they put a bad review on the website, they asked for a refund, and it was all because you were chasing a thing that you kind of knew how to do. Where you just would have said no, you'd have found three other clients that need exactly what you do and your real expertise. And so

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: The real issue is fear around pushing away any potential customer in favor,

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: you're in favor of making sure you say yes to everybody, as opposed to saying, no, we're gonna go be the best at this thing. We're gonna be the absolute world class at this thing. And you can't be world class at multiple things, right? Especially not when you're small, but even when you're big, even when you're a huge company. It's why Apple can't fix Siri after 10 years. Right? Like they just try to do too much. They the company makes a billion dollars a day and they can't fix Siri. Right. And so it's like these are real problems that companies face. It's hard to be it's hard to be great at a lot of things.

Nate Grossman: Hm. I think w Cody Sanchez, she's famous for talking about buying boring businesses and whatnot. if you don't try to be great, you won't even be good, is what she said. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah. Obsessively, obsessively trying to get better. Right. Actually, one of the things that I think is really hard if you're if you're a good founder early on is you see a hundred things in your business that are broken. And tolerating the 98 that don't matter right now in favor of truly fixing the one or two that matter most is a skill that most founders never figure out. Right. Like I look around my business every day and I'm like, I'm just like cringing. I'm like, I want to fix this and that and everything. I want I could be over here. But like from the outside in, you you might not even notice all of those different things, right? They're not

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: the priority today. Right. You can only have so many priorities at a time. And so that's why it's like, you know, we can't be everything to everybody. And so yeah, you have to want to be great. You have to have a passion for what it means to be great. And you have to be able to measure what it means to be great. Like so many different companies, I'm like, I think we do a really great job for our customers. How do you know? Do you do surveys? No. Well, they told, you know, three customers told us it's like maybe they were being nice. You know, if if if the truth is, if your customers are canceling on you, you're probably not doing that good a job, or certainly not doing a good enough job at the price you're charging, because that's an indicator, right? And so I think we have to be able to figure out what it means to be great. And then we need to be driving everybody in our team for that greatness by setting very specific measurable goals and then giving those people the autonomy to pursue those results.

Nate Grossman: Awesome. All right. So to make it concrete a little bit for our listeners out there, let's say, you know, doing a little bit of a hypothetical situation, we have a service business that's doing, let's say, two between two and three million, maybe a team of twelve, and the founder is closing eighty percent of the revenue. Wha what what does month one of the handoff look like when working with you?

Mark D Gordon: Well, who are we handing off to?

Nate Grossman: First question.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah. So I g what I mean by that is where okay, so if where if we have a steady flow of leads that are coming in from qualified people then and that people that want your product or service and you Then hiring a really good salesperson, you're ready for it. And if you hire a good salesperson, you give them the tools and the training, you're probably gonna be okay. And maybe your numbers come down a little bit, but you can afford to do that because you'll have all this other time now to focus on improving the other aspects of your business and adding more leads, et cetera, et cetera. Right? It becomes scalable. If you don't have a steady stream of leads coming in, And you're heroing it by because you're in some founder's networking group and most of your deals are coming through that, or you have these specific relationships and those people only want to deal with you, right? Well, then you've created a prison for yourself, right? And so you have

Nate Grossman: Mm. Mm.

Mark D Gordon: to have your messaging and product market fit and your lead generation down before you hand it off. So if you're the question is, are you doing 80% of it because you don't have a salesperson, because you love doing it, because your identity is attached to it, or are you doing 80% of it because What you're doing literally cannot be done by somebody else, and you haven't invested the time and energy to build those first two in the core four, right? Because if you don't have that's why they're in the order they're in. And so you talk handing it off to a salesperson. If you have, if you're, if you're, if your leads are strangers, you're doing cold email, you're doing meta ads, those are the deals that you're closing and they're coming in and they're coming in an efficient way, you're ready to hire salespeople. Okay. If it's community. Fural based, whatever else it is, and those people only want to deal with you because your face is on the billboard. Well, then you then you have to fix that first.

Nate Grossman: Mm. Okay. so you you have said we I think you talked about this earlier too, about how you only take 120 days, right? To to put basically to whip things into shape, let's say. and

Mark D Gordon: Complete the transformation.

Nate Grossman: that's the word, thank you. Complete the transformation. okay, so why build it that way? where it's only a hundred and twenty days to complete this this this transformation.

Mark D Gordon: I think that's how long it takes on for especially for businesses in the size that we're talking about. we need 45 minutes a week with the founder, and then we need a team of executors. And whether we bring that team in, we bring in agencies that we have relationships with, we bring on sales agencies or hire a sales team. We figure out what the formula is to grow that business based on, you know, we factor in what's your total adjustable market, what's an acceptable customer acquisition cost, what are the channels that we can go after. How do we improve our messaging and figuring those things out? and so it takes us three to four weeks to figure out do we have the right product market fit and do we have the messaging right? And then if we don't, we got to fix that. Then once we have that, it's okay, cool. What is our, what is an acceptable customer acquisition cost on a marketing side? And how much scale do we need in our marketing reach to be able to achieve those results? Are we targeting

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: CMOs of Fortune 100 companies or are we targeting founders between one and three million? One of those groups has a hundred people in it. And one of those groups has millions of people in it. And so we have to know what we're targeting, who we're targeting it for. and then and then we can start testing out early generation strategy. Then we're getting sales at bats, we're recording every sales call, we're using our AI to analyze every sales call, we're building an AI trainer for each individual company based on their sales model and our IGTMS principles to build that forward. And we're and we're helping that that train that team up, or we're helping replace the team in place if they're not getting the job done. And the revenue technology part of it is all being done in the background once we make these decisions. and and you work directly with our team or we work with your team to to get those things all set up. and so we move fast, we move aggressively. and you know, if you're gonna go through a transformation, we need founders who are gonna be all in. The transformations don't take two years for small businesses. And if they do, you're dead in the water because the world's moving too quickly. You know, we put our our

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: twenty twenty six AI budget in place in December and we had to redo it in March, and we had to redo it in June, and we're gonna have to we we're gonna have to redo it now, right? Like the world is moving too fast for you to have a transformation

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: that lasts longer than a hundred and twenty days.

Nate Grossman: Hmm. Gotcha. okay, changing with the times, it sounds like.

Mark D Gordon: You better be.

Nate Grossman: All right. Okay, so

Mark D Gordon: If you I always say if you don't like change, you're gonna like being irrelevant even less.

Nate Grossman: Yeah, touche. okay, so you've you've said that a founder has to give you has to give you forty five minutes a week of undivided attention. So what what happens to the founder in the in those four months? What do they what do they end up letting go of?

Mark D Gordon: Well, their identity. and and I mean that like in a in a very real way. Those forty-five minutes a week, which I get very jealous if they even like take a phone call. I can't help it. I I need all the attention. but that forty-five minutes

Nate Grossman: Hmm. Mm hmm

Mark D Gordon: a week gives them a brand new way to think about what their role is as CEO or as founder. You know, we we think there's really four four kind of key jobs, and some of them are related and some of them are not. But number one is don't run out of money. It's the number one job, founder, right? Number two job is to have a very clear vision of where we're going and how we're and and how how where we're going and why we're going there. Third thing is get the right people in the right seats. And the fourth thing is to create an environment where motivated people can thrive. Okay. If you get those four things right, sky is the limit, right? But there's a lot that goes into those four things, right? And when you're when you're kind of the founder. What we do when we're inside that company for those four months is get razor sharp on creating the principles and operating mechanisms that allow you to do those four things, particularly around revenue generation, particularly making sure that we have the right messaging in place. and they and for that founder to really understand what it means to build scalable marketing and sales systems. I can't tell you how many founders I meet with that don't really understand what customer acquisition cost is, or that got to two million a year without running any ads or running doing any marketing ever. And they're like, well, how where do I go from here? And it's like, well, you're not scalable. So you don't go anywhere from here unless you completely change how you got there. Or more or even worse, they've been like, hey, we have great margins. It's like, well, you have great margins because you're spending zero dollars on customer acquisition cost because you're doing it all yourself. But as soon as we build sustainable customer acquisition costs, you're actually your margin goes to zero. You've been relying on being cheaper than everyone else because you were doing it all yourself. That's not a sustainable business plan, right?

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: And so We we change the way they think about how they operate their business and the scalability of their business. Essentially we do is we come in and we go, this is what private equity would do to your company if they bought you. These are the efficiencies they would do. This is how they would fix, this is what they would clean up. We're gonna do it. And you can sell the business at the end or not, right? You know, whatever, you keep it forever. But like there is a playbook to making this radically more efficient in 2026. but you need to understand the fundamentals of your business and how to measure your progress going forward. What what KPIs matter, how to who who on your team should be in charge of what and how to inspect those things like we talked about earlier. So going through that four month process really changes them from individual contributor with a bunch of helpers to leader of a team that has big goals. And so and and with the with a plan on how to how to get that team in place to get there.

Nate Grossman: Nice. So in order for this, once once you once they've worked with you, right, on getting this set up in their business, what needs to be true in the rest of the business for this new system to actually stick?

Mark D Gordon: You need there needs to be a bunch of people that are willing to follow your lead. you know, and you have to have done the work that it takes to become a great leader and to have people that are willing to follow. You the only time these transformations, there're only two things that can screw up a transformation for us. One is the founders didn't show up for those 45 minutes ready to go every week. Two, they don't have a team that's on board with the mission, vision, and values. It either one of those two things becomes is a cancer and and it and then it takes a lot longer than four months to pull one of these things off, right? But if you get those two things right, you know, the sky's the limit. And what we find is that because teams know we're only coming in for four months, we get much less pushback than like a normal fractional executive, right? You bring in a fractional CMO on an indefinite plan, everyone's now fighting that person for resources and status. They want it to be their ideas. They feel this threat. I'm like, hey, we're gonna come in for four months. I'm gonna make everything in your life easier. And at the end of this, you get take all of the credit forever and ever and ever. Like it gets

Nate Grossman: Mm. Mm.

Mark D Gordon: to be it's your resume, it's your goal. You were the guy in charge, right? We're just here to help. And so usually we get very little pushback as long as people are are are aligned on what the mission is.

Nate Grossman: Nice. All right. So let's get into the next segment here, talking about the multiplier effect. So I think I mentioned earlier about how on this podcast we talk a lot about the the growth system in three parts, right? Visibility, viability, and value in a business. so what you're describing, like I said, lives in that middle layer, and I want to look at that a little bit more a little bit more deeply here. So at Princeton Mortgage, one of your previous gigs, the team earned a 98 net promoter score in one year, which seems impossible in mortgage lending. So and you've said

Mark D Gordon: I agree.

Nate Grossman: that you've said that you said that is a customer service story that folds into a sales story. Which is interesting. So tell us how those those two connect.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, so I mean I don't I don't know how deep to go, but just to put 98 in perspective, that was the number one score in the world that year for any company in any industry. And number two was Tesla, just to give it some some context. And that was

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: thousands of loans that we did that year and and and several thousand people responding to the survey. What we did is we hacked the brains of our customers to change the way they thought about what it meant to give great customer service. And here's how we did it. And we stole all of this, right? And when I and and I gotta give credit to Rich Wydell, who's the CEO there, smartest guy I've ever around. I I now meet two founders a day, every single day. I've never met anybody I thought had higher potential than him as a founder. Just brilliant, brilliant guy. He'd read every book, and he's inspired he's the one who inspired me to go on that journey where I read all those books over those five years. because he would like pull a book off the off the shelf and turn to the page to remember the thing he wanted to show me. Just an incredible guy.

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: But we we read the same books and and Jim Collins talked about having this catalytic mechanism, right? And so in in either good to grade or built to last. and you know, we're okay, what is ours? And so we said, well, we want to come up with this thing called the Princeton promise and we'll just see what happens. We were very small at the time, we were really building from zero. And it was okay, we'll offer every borrower a thousand dollars at closing. If they're unhappy for any reason, no questions asked. We'll email them four times during the process. If you're unhappy, click this button, get a thousand dollars. And when we rolled it out to the team, we had a person on the team literally pack up their desk and quit. She's like, You're crazy, you're doing this to get me in trouble. Everyone's gonna take the money and you're gonna fire me. It's like, okay, this is working better than we thought. People who have bad attitudes or don't want to be held responsible are leaving right away. We had another

Nate Grossman: Perfect.

Mark D Gordon: guy in the team, his name was Matt, and he was so well intended. And he was like, he comes back the next day and he writes like six pages of rules that someone has to follow to get the thousand dollars. And we're like, actually, we're gonna do this with no rules and see what happens. And we had so few customers at the time and a big enough balance sheet that if every customer would have taken the thousand dollars from us, we would have been fine. We would have learned our lesson and we moved on. But the truth is that first month, I think like 10% of our clients took us up on it. And every single one of them deserved the money. And we learned what we were doing wrong. It exposed problems that we didn't know existed. And more importantly, those customers left happy because they hit the button. Me or Rich immediately called them and said, What's up? We fixed their problem. We gave them a thousand dollars and they were like, this is great. And suddenly, like, they're giving us positive reviews on the website. The company does what they say they're gonna do. I had one problem, they fixed it. Usually the problem was communication. Somebody owed them something, they didn't respond, they couldn't get anybody on phone, hit the button. And so we had all this information now about what was going wrong in the company. We also had other employees leave. In fact, in the interviews, people would tell them us they didn't want to work with for us because there was too much pressure. And was like, great, we only want warriors here anyway. We want people who are attracted to the idea. That if you're great at your job, you're gonna get recognized for it because no one's gonna take this money. And so we started building this process. And it went from 10% in the first month to like literally 4% in month two, four percent in month three. By six months, it was like two percent of our clients were taking us up on it. A year later, it was a half of one percent. And what happens is when you tell somebody at the beginning of a mortgage process, if you're unhappy for any reason, I'm gonna give you a thousand bucks. And then you email them four times. And they go, no, thank you, no, thank you, no, thank you, no, thank you. And at the end, you go, on a scale of one to 10, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or family member? The obvious no-brainer thing to do is give you a nine or a 10. Right. And so what we did is we hacked their psychology of the process to say, we we're not perfect, but I promise you we are going to do everything we can to make this an amazing process for you. We're gonna make it effortless, which was a joke because there's no effortless anything, let alone mortgage. So we're gonna do everything we can to make it effortless.

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: And then we would try and they would feel

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: that we tried. What was really interesting, by the way, is that after that first year, when people hit the button and we called immediately, like within seconds, we'd be on the phone with them and they'd like, I just hit the button five seconds ago. I go, I know that's how seriously we take this. What can we do to fix the problem? And we fixed the problem. Most people, like three out of four, would tell us to keep the thousand bucks. Mind blowing. People just were so

Nate Grossman: Wow.

Mark D Gordon: impressed that they got somebody at the top of the company on the phone with that little thing that we did, right? And by the way, those

Nate Grossman: Wow.

Mark D Gordon: people all gave us nines or tens. Even those who took the thousand dollars, every one of them ended up giving us a nine or a 10, writing us positive reviews because they couldn't believe that we had this process in place. They might have been frustrated for a moment, but they we fixed it. No one ever fixes it. Everyone, the bar is so

Nate Grossman: Wow.

Mark D Gordon: low, right? So by setting a very specific expectation and

Nate Grossman: Right.

Mark D Gordon: living to it, we attracted better employees. We hacked the brains of our customers by telling them what to expect. We We sold more deals because people were like, well, if they're willing to stand behind us for $1,000, I'll give them a shot if all things are equal, right? We had a story to tell our realtor partners to refer us business. And so we had this flywheel that was created by this catalytic mechanism that we stole from the idea of Jim Collins. And by the way, what did it cost us? I think in in one year we did 4,000 loans and we paid out $27,000 in Princeton promises. We the company Our October profitability was $3 million for the month. We paid out $27,000 to have this catalytic mechanism that led to world-class customer service scores. So the question is: is that as a business owner today, are you brave enough to hold yourself accountable to the standards you set? Is your team on board enough to will and willing to hold themselves accountable to a different level of standard? and then how do you go forward with that? And so for us, it's very simple. Like we tell everybody at the beginning of a transformation, we are not going to stop working with you. You pay for four months. I'll work with you for free as long as it takes to you give us a nine or a 10, probably be to recommend us to someone else because that is the standard. And so if we didn't get done in four months, we'll do it in five, we'll do it in six, but we're not leaving until we get it right. And so by setting that tone up front, and then we go at the end of month two, I Would you give us nine or ten? Yeah, so far. What do we need to do to make sure? And so now that is a standard that we set through the entire four-month process. So if we get to the end and we go, you ready to give us nine or ten? What are they gonna do? Say no. We checked in every

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: month for four months. If you had a problem, we fixed it. So it's It's obvious that we get the nine or the ten because that was the standard that we set for ourselves and that we lived up to.

Nate Grossman: Nice. That's that's going going at it with a pl with a plan in mind there, I guess, you know. That's yeah, yeah.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah, well, there's no, it was not an accident in any way that we got that 98. That was like a we are gonna, we are going to deliver a different level of customer service. And we are going to get every person to say that it was a great experience from us because we believe that was a real differentiator. And and now, since I left, Rich has done the same thing on the cost side of the business using AI, they now do it loans cheaper than everybody else. So not only are they consistent on their customer service scores, but now they're doing loans cheaper than everybody else as well. And so you can do big things. If you have a leader who's willing to take bold strokes and you have a culture that allows people to do their best work and you have an inspection process to make sure it's getting done, what that Princeton promise was was an inspection process. I didn't have to worry how good a job my processor

Nate Grossman: Mm. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: was doing. My customer would tell me if they weren't doing the job.

Nate Grossman: Yeah, you you're allowing the customer to inspect you in that case. So wow, talk about empowering. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: I'm incentivizing the customer. I'm incentivizing the customer to complain if they're unhappy. Right. And so and that and and and that's what we want, because we want, we want to bring problems to the surface. Great companies bring problems to the surface. They don't bury them. They don't hide from them.

Nate Grossman: Yeah. Nice. All right. So so when a sales system is is working without the founder, what would you say starts working that the founder did not expect?

Mark D Gordon: I think when it's working the right way, and this is a really important piece of this that incentive structures and compensation structures are set properly. What you find is that The team as a whole can deliver better results in many ways than you were able to deliver on your own. And depending on how you qualify, what a lead is, you can have different conversations about close rates and different things. Although I think everyone manipulates close rates in their own way based on what they consider to be a qualified lead. but what we find is that when we have teams that can learn from each other, compare compare themselves to each other in terms performance, have real accountability and training. and clear goals and then have the authority to make decisions on the fly. And that really comes from transparency, right? Like, does your sales team understand the economics of the product, the business? Can they make those decisions they need to to get a deal over the finish line and get that going? Do they feel like they have authority and they can be the CEO of their life and work? I think you well, oftentimes what you'll find is that they find new ways to sell things, potentially higher margins, different efficiencies. and your sales team can end up being the thing that drives product innovation inside your company because they're the ones on the front line talking to the customers. And so I think there's a lot of advantages that can come from it once it's once it's all rocking rolling.

Nate Grossman: Mm-hmm.

Mark D Gordon: But I've never been asked that question before, so I don't have a canned answer.

Nate Grossman: That's fine. That's fine. okay. And so the last one for this section, what what's what's a excuse me, once a founder is out of the sale, right? They're n they're no longer being the one who does all the sale selling, I should say. where should the hours they get back go first in your mind?

Mark D Gordon: making sure their economic model is sound, right? So in other words, what as we scale, does my profitability scale, does my business scale, do I am I running a healthy business model? I think becomes a really big part of that. tracking expenses and where your money is going. And you know, most sales based founders hate the accounting part of the job, they hate making keeping track of where the money goes. Forcing yourself to have a time block on your calendar every month where you go through every expense and where you're making sure that you're you're saving money is a is a huge time saver once you have product market fit and a s and a sales team. You you dollar saved is a dollar earned and being it's not being frugal, it's being smart, it's having an inspection process around spend. No one's ever gonna care about that money the way that you will. and then it's really just can every founder I know that is out of sales is under investing in recruiting. Recruiting, systems for attracting talent, systems for retaining talent, but even more attracting talented people. Being able to take being able to go get the best person in the world for the thing that you need done at a fair price is essential. And here's one more thing I really want founders to hear as I listen to this. This is it's always been true that the best companies had fewer better people paid above market for exceptional work. Fewer better people paid above market for exceptional work. In the age of AI, it is a it is there is no compromise on this. Because now average employees do three times as much average work because of AI, and great employees do three times as much great work as as and so it it's not it's no longer, hey, if I can get a great employee for 120 grand and an average one for 80 grand, it's like, well, they're doing great work, so it's worth it. Now they're doing three times as much great work because of the AI. And so that $40,000 difference becomes nothing because I'm getting so

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: much better output from somebody who's great. And so if you haven't already

Nate Grossman: Mm.

Mark D Gordon: changed, if you're running your model based on the fact that we have cheap labor and you know, we have these people that we keep in the corner over here that we don't pay a lot because you know, we our systems are so good. Man, I think that's gonna be a very expensive way to run your business pretty soon with AI if it's not already. I think fewer better people paid above market for exceptional work, people that are are obsessed and un with understanding your business model and Creating efficiencies with the technology that's available to them. I think that's gonna be mission critical for where founders should should be putting their attention right now in 2026.

Nate Grossman: Nice. All right. we're gonna get wrapped up here. This is the rapid clarity round. I'm gonna ask you some questions. Just give me your for you know first thought here. It's kind of like a Roar Sharp test, if you will, without the

Mark D Gordon: All right.

Nate Grossman: without the images. All right, so one question every founder should ask. Their sales process this month.

Mark D Gordon: their sales process this month. Am I moving my deals as fast as they could be moving? And if I'm not, what is the obstacle to to getting them to move through the pipeline faster? Time kills deals.

Nate Grossman: If a founder has never had anyone but themselves sell, what is the single first step that they take this week?

Mark D Gordon: Call me. You have to be a r the Rorschach test, right? Yeah. I mean I I really do

Nate Grossman: I I kind of set that one up, didn't I?

Mark D Gordon: I I think you I think if you've never been a salesperson, you never had anybody else selling for you and you're not used to building a sales culture, I think it is a very, very difficult thing to figure out on your own. I really do.

Nate Grossman: yeah. All right, the one metric that tells you a founder is ready to hand off sales.

Mark D Gordon: consistently generating qualified leads at an acceptable cost beyond what you can f the beyond what you can fit in your calendar.

Nate Grossman: Doing too good, in other words. yeah.

Mark D Gordon: Well yeah, if you if you if you have re if you have consistent lead j lead lead generation that it that can exist without you and you don't have time to sell it, then you can then it's time to then it's time to build the team.

Nate Grossman: Gotcha. Yeah. All right. one book that changed how you sell.

Mark D Gordon: There's so many. Never split the difference. I think is a good one. Sales acceleration formula in terms of the way I lead sales certainly was super influential. Principles by Ray Dalio, which is not a sales book, but it's absolutely a huge impact on the way I sell. So sorry, I had to give you three.

Nate Grossman: That that book is dense. I I can only take it like a few pages at a time.

Mark D Gordon: It's a it's absolutely life changing. And what most people don't know is there's actually like a children's version of the book, which is still a which is still a three hour read and you get most of it out of it. But I give that as a gift away

Nate Grossman: Yeah.

Mark D Gordon: all the time.

Nate Grossman: Nice. He there there's a there's a really cool video about it too, but which is very profound.

Mark D Gordon: Yeah.

Nate Grossman: all right, very good. so the founder led sales trap is not a talent problem, as we've found out during the com course of conversation here. It's a s it's a system problem. And Mark just showed us that the system starts with how clearly you explain what you do. Long before anyone picks up that phone. When the sales stops depending on the founder, the company starts to be worth something without them in it. Which, you know, is true value, right? All right. So if what Mark shared resonated with you, go to igtms.com and take the free GTM score. We'll put the link in the show notes. It shows you where your go-to-market system is strong and where it's leaking. You can also find Mark on LinkedIn at MarkDouglasGordon and his own show, Say It So They Buy It. And if this conversation made you realize that you're not sure where your biggest growth constraint actually is, that's what we dig into every week here on this show. You can subscribe to the newsletter at thegrowcealing.com. Each week you get one real growth constraint and how to spot it in your own business. Whether that is founder-led sales or something else entirely. And finally, subscribe to the Growth Ceiling wherever you listen. And if this episode helped you see something differently, send it to someone who needs to hear it. Mark, thanks a lot for coming out and enjoy the bachelor party. All

Mark D Gordon: Cheers.

Nate Grossman: right, take care.