The Success Trap with JP Rinylo

Episode Summary

Are you celebrating your business growth while secretly dying inside?

Most service entrepreneurs think hitting higher revenue numbers means they are winning. But if that growth depends entirely on your personal hustle, individual talent, and late-night heroics to save deals, you haven't built an asset—you’ve just built a higher-stakes prison.

In this episode of The Trust Engine, Johnny Terra, CPA sits down with B2B revenue advisor JP Rinylo to dismantle the dangerous myth of the "superstar salesperson". JP spent six years helping scale a company from $1.2M to nearly $11M, only to walk away from a half-million dollar salary when he realized he was merely fueling a broken machine with his own impending burnout.

We break down his contrarian playbook, The Revenue Leadership Ladder, to help you stop reactive selling, take your story out of your head, and build a predictable sales process that runs smoothly even when you aren't in the room.

📍 The Hook

You think missing your revenue targets this month is a sales problem. You’re frustrated with your reps, you're blaming the leads, or you're step-matching your own time to fix their mistakes.

But the hard operational truth is this: Missed revenue is never a sales problem—it is always a leadership failure caused by a lack of structure. You are trapped in the "Hero Trap," using raw effort to cover up a broken process. It’s time to stop being the machine and start building one.

⚡ Key Takeaways (Action Over Theory)

• The $11M Jailbreak: Why JP walked away from a $500k corporate salary after realizing he was "carrying the weight of decisions that wouldn't change".
• The 15-Rep Mistake: A brutal case study of a founder who hired and fired 15 sales reps in nine years, proving that the problem isn't the employee's attitude—it's the leader's playbook.
• The Identity Shift: Moving from the "Player-Coach" who manually closes every gap to the "Intentional Operator" who builds documented, delegable processes.
• The Real Cost of Shortcuts: JP opens up about the devastating physical, mental, and relational tax of masking a broken system with personal talent.
• Junior Rep vs. Expensive VP: Why a founder's first sales hire should be a junior rep to protect client relationships and force operational accountability.

⚙️ The System: Your Monday Morning Move

If you want to stop winging your pitches and start producing consistent outcomes, implement JP's Revenue Leadership Ladder operations this week:

1. Run the 3-Slide Test: Can a 23-year-old junior hire look at your sales material and clearly answer: Who are you? What do you do? Why should people care? If the answer is no, your sales process is stuck in your head.
2. Audit the Deal Cycle: If the owner or CEO has to step into 80% of active deals to define the scope and close the cycle, your process is completely unscalable. Stop. Box up your core offer and fix the price variables immediately.
3. Define Your Position: Are you selling a Painkiller (fast, direct relief for acute pain) or a Stimulant (holistic education for growth opportunities)? Structure your team's messaging around that client starting point.

⏳ Timestamps

• [00:00] The Contrarian Sales Thesis: Why Missed Revenue is a Leadership Fail
• [03:57] The Pushback: "Just Go Sell" and the Trap of Being the Hero
• [08:00] Tracking Demand: How the Business Actually Generated Its First Wins
• [12:45] The Visionary’s Blindspot: Creative Mindsets and the Friction of Ego
• [15:30] The 15 Sales Reps Case Study: Diagnosing the Systemic Pattern
• [17:19] Extreme Ownership: Merging Firms and the Mistake of Dumping Work
• [20:30] The Visible Scars: What "Doing it Myself" Costs Your Health and Family
• [22:45] Shortcuts and Taxes: The Danger of Wrapping Systems Inside a Single Person
• [27:00] Monkeys Swinging from Chandeliers: A Multi-Million Dollar Churn Story
• [31:15] The Scalability Audit: Is the Founder the Center of the Deal Cycle?
• [35:00] The Revenue Leadership Ladder: Building $10M Infrastructure
• [37:30] Cold Awareness vs. Nurturing: What Exactly is a "Lead"?
• [41:40] Advice to a Younger Self: Quit Sooner and Stop Solving Other People's Problems
• [45:15] The Soul Layer: Why the Business Destination is Impact, Not the Dollar

🔗 Links & Resources

• Connect with JP Rinylo: @jprinylo on Instagram
• Starting Point Associates: jp@startingpointassociates.com
• Get the Free Blueprint: Grab the 5-part GMAD System Pack to streamline your operations at https://www.gomakeadollar.com/systempack 

"Time is going to pass so you better not waste it."

🏷️ Keywords for Search / SEO Block

Service Business Scaling, Revenue Leadership Ladder, JP Rinylo, Starting Point Associates, Founder Led Sales, Sales Process Blueprint, How to Scale a Service Business, Sales Infrastructure, Escaping the Hustle Trap, B2B Sales Systems, Johnny Terra CPA, Outsourcing Sales Mistakes, Customer Lifecycle Accountability.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our guest today is JP. He helped scale a company from $1.2 million to nearly $11 million in six years. But he realized that hitting revenue targets through sheer heroic is just a high stakes ways of building your own prison. Today we're going to talk about why he walked away from the success to build systems that actually set founders free. JP, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Thank you, Johnny. Very excited to be here, buddy. We were having a lot of chat offline. We finally hit the record button.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

I know, right? I should have recorded because it was a great conversation, but I have the other camera here recording, so I might get a little bit of that.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Oh, crazy. Cool. Very cool.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Yeah, so JP, I'm gonna jump right into it. So, you know, you have a punchy thesis that probably make a lot of founders very defensive. You know, you say that misrevenue is never about a bad sales, but it's always about a failure of leadership. Do you want to kind of elaborate more on that?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Happy to. Um, and and you know, feel free to guide me or ask questions as I go because it's just something I'm really passionate about. Um and and it cut it comes from lived experience. So let's give it some context for that point. Um it's a failure of leadership depending on where the organization is starting from, right? And so, in the case I I don't want to kind of like outline and paint a number of different scenarios or use cases, but it really depends on what kind of company we're talking about. It is most frequently that when you have a small business that is starting to grow and scale, and I mentioned you mentioned in my background, I I joined a company at around 1.2 million, and we scaled it to 11 million. And in that process, I was never a part of the ownership of the business. But one of the things I recognized day one when I got in the doors was that there was no single system or process for how, and by system, I don't mean technology, I mean order of operations. And this is what you and I were talking about offline before we hit record. There was no single order of operations that when I joined, that the founder, the co-founder, the customer success people, the account manager, well, there was no account management, um, that anyone in the business of the 10 or 12 people that were at the comp in the company when I first joined, none of them followed knew the single step for step, what's step one when we have an opportunity to close business with a client or a prospect? What's step two? There were no steps. So that is not a failure on the sales rep, me coming in the door of not knowing what the steps are, because I know what my steps would be as a sales rep. And that's what I ended up building for that company, and that's what we worked together with the leadership team to establish and then systematize and roll out, and then everyone from you know, call it the janitor to the CEO, everyone knew every single step in the system, air quote system. Because as the front line of we'll call it offense, sales has to be able to navigate the field with the fullest confidence that the people behind them know what's coming, know what to expect when it comes, how the delivery of whatever is being sold is expected to be delivered, what the client experience was or was not getting them to the point of engagement, and all of that operational systems process type stuff was is when I first joined that company was super paramount for me to be successful. And I remember the pushback I got from the CEO and the co-founder. We don't need that right now, JP. Just get out there and sell, go do your thing. And what they were hoping for was me to be the hero. Now we had going down a long trail on this conversation, and there's one of two directions to go. Okay. For me, what that led to, that led to my eventual demise and leading leaving that business and just throwing away, like, you know, a half million dollar salary because of what I what I ended up when I heard those words from the co-founder and CEO and that example, and and and I love them dearly, so it's nothing negative towards them. It's I did to myself in that, I chose to do to myself in that moment what was going to be necessary in order for not only me to be a success, but for the business to be a success. That's the first path we could go down. The other path is how can a CEO or a co-founder, and what are the reasons that typically a CEO or a co-founder would need to navigate for why they wouldn't want someone like me to go down that path? Because where that lead led, the first path led, is the day I left, all of the things that had been built that I had helped to build for them and the foundation I had laid for them, it didn't go with me. But all the, what do you call it, the IP, the intellectual property, the understandings for why and how and when and where, all that context went with me. And so that's that's why I say there's one of two paths we could go down in this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

I I I like the first path, man, like that stench of the the operational failure and just having that friction moment for you, and when you realize that like this is becoming a prison for you, like because again, offline and even before about a month or so ago when we first met, again, the whole process, the thinking of process in a sales model, uh, it was completely brand new to me. It kind of like it blew my mind. Again, I'm a sales, but I'm a process guy operationally, right? Like how to make things more efficient, cut costs, all these things, because that's where the CPA plays, right? But then you know, talking to you, and then it's like okay, you have to have that same thinking from a sales process too, so the team behind you knows what's coming. So, yeah, I want I want to go to path one here. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Let's do it. Um, you know, is there a specific part of the conversation around the that path one that seems most interesting, or you want to hear more about first?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Yeah, no, I I just want to know that moment, like one what did you feel when the CEO talked, hey JP, go do your thing, right? And then what did you do after that? And then then, of course, there was a peak moment where it was like, okay, enough is enough. I gotta go do something else.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Okay, all right. So I we we talked a little bit offline about this, Johnny, around like you know, how we're wired as as kids based on how we're nurtured, right? Or we'll become wired based on how we're nurtured. Um, and some some kids lean into that when they're young and they become very much like their mom and dad would like them to be, as you know, a role model of a student or a role model of a child or whatever. And I I always kind of played the middle of the road. I became and this is the way I like to say, because I actually thought of this this morning too while I was on my walk with the dog. I love rules. I love rules, I love systems, I love black, and I love white. And the reason I love all those things is because the cherry on top of that is I love to know all of them so that I can understand how do I operate in the gray. Because if I get to operate in the gray, if I can, if I can understand them well enough, then that gives me the space to operate in the gray in a healthy, respectful way, because again, of how I was nurtured and raised as a child by my parents, which I'm grateful for. And so when I was challenged with that moment, meeting with the CEO and the co-founder and the rest of the executive team that was part of the business that we were trying, you know, less than two million, five million dollar goal within the next three years, ten million dollar goal in the next six, five years, six years. I was like, well, what do you mean just go, just go sell? Well, you got to earn the right to establish systems, and it was, you know, conflict and friction right away. And I'm like, the point around being a role model child, or or not in my case, was okay, I need to learn the rules. I need to learn the rules and the systems or the rules and the order of operations that they, the business, operate under currently. And then, kind of like an onion, I need to peel back each layer where I can. And at the same time, I need to be showing activity and productivity in the market. And that's what I really started focusing on, like that balance of okay, where what can I get done with what I've got by understanding first what is available. And what I'm referring to is like, how has so the business was already some somewhat successful in general? How did they get there?

unknown 8:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So this is what a lot, like this is what the process is. Like my business is called starting point. This is how I work with clients. How are you selling today what you're selling? What are you saying? What are you delivering? Who are you talking to? What is it that they're getting at the end? What's the experience afterwards? Once I understood that, I then just started using that as like my talking points in market. So back to your question like, what was the friction? Well, I was left to figure it out. So I figured it out. Now it worked, it worked for me. As it worked for me, it was fun. You know, it was kind of like, well, I got about most six, most sales reps. And at that point in my career, when I joined that business, I was like eight or nine years into my sales career. So I I had my I had to earn my stripes in being a successful salesperson. In this case, it was my first time really stepping into a full sales leadership role and having to be the salesperson at the same time. So what what do we call that? Player coach. So I was I was the I was my own player, I was the player, but I was also my own coach. So I'd coach everything on the sideline and then I'd get into the field and I'd do everything I just coached. Um and so you should start to be hearing what's what's happening now. So as I did that, I became very successful of being able to sell the business's offerings, engage the people who I was going to be handing off the sales and the clients to bring them into the dialogue that was necessary to have the conversation, to understand with the client what was expected of the outcomes, the services, the products, whatever it was that we were selling at the moment. And then I also started to refine not only how I talked about it, but how they talked about it then when they engaged with the client. Because remember, like sales typically, you're engaged to the point of conversion, then you hand off. We call it the sales to services transition or sales to product transition. You know, you hand off. And everything that that salesperson said better be 100% accurate within reason, 85 to 95% accurate to within reason to what was expected by the client when they get into the delivery. And so what you're hearing in this lead up is I did what was necessary in order for me to be successful and then to set the business up for success. What I wasn't making sure of in that process was that I wasn't handcuffing myself to all of the things that the leadership didn't want to figure out. They wanted me to figure out. And then when I would figure it out and I'd and I'd push it up, and I'd be like, hey, listen, so here's our new sales process, here's our new sales order of operations, here's the systems we're using across the team, here's the cross-functional resourcing that we're using to accomplish these sales. When I would push that up, and again, this is where a lot of CEOs and a lot of C-suite executives get get defensive. Here's the playbook now that we're running. They would never run the playbook. Most C-suite executives, and Johnny, I'll actually challenge you to see if you'd be like this as well. I'm not sure. When they hear it from someone else for how it's been airquos figured out, Dan talks about this a lot. You make you are you have to be, you know, um, I can't remember the I I'll I'll make up the word for the uh the adjective that he uses. You have to be scrupulous, I'll say, rigorous in your hiring. And then you have to trust uh implicitly and explicitly trust the resources you hire to do their job well.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

In so on on that moment, right? So you have some warning signs that uh have you from your perspective that you saw as a high performer, that you had to kind of ban that bandage, that's a little bit of that broken process, right? So uh walk us through a little bit like your your thinking behind you know that broken process, because yes, you deliver back to the C-suite and they're saying back, no, we're not gonna do this. So it's like okay, how can I do my job, right? As a leader of the sales team and also the player. And and and what are some early signs that the people that are listening and watching this can can start to perceive, and they're like, okay, that seems like a very common pattern for me as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Well, a lot of executives, especially business owners, are creative mindset. They they think like visionaries. Dan talks about this. Dan Martell talks a lot about this in our in our um business coaching community where you and I are in. And as visionaries and with that creative inspiration and spirit, they constantly think of the impossible as possible. It's it's an it's the nature. And when you as or when I, as a high performance driven person comes in with, hey, listen, remember I talked about rules earlier, you know, black and white. Here are the rules we're gonna operate by as a business, especially if you have a sales leader coming in and he's not part, he or she is not part of the business ownership. And they're saying suddenly, like, here are the rules by which we're gonna operate. If they didn't have the opportunity to co-core co-create and collaborate with the executives on the vision that they had for that process, it's gonna be really hard to get them on board. True. And most, yeah, and here's the thing: most visionary creative business owners I've had the opportunity to work with in both clients as well as former employers. And I don't mean to be negative on this, buddy, but because I I got one too. But they had egos. I think we all do. We absolutely all should. It's one of our most sacred protections of our personality and our id and our who and who we are, but it's also our protectors of that. You know, it's it's the knight in shining armor. We need at all times, but the knight always doesn't have to draw his sword, right? Sometimes it can be navigated with you know diplomacy and good conversation and good genuine understanding and authentic consideration of others. And I think I just had this conversation some with I'm not gonna name names, but there's someone in our elite community who asked a question to Dan, and it's not you. It's just I was like, I'm not gonna be saying and uh and and he asked the question to Dan, and he was explaining how I'll give you a really good example. You might remember this, but again, we're not naming names. Because this is a good example. Uh he was explaining, he asked Dan a question about how he could hire how how he could find a better sales rep. And Dan said, Well, you know, like you know, like what are we working with? And he said, Well, I've hired 15 sales reps, and none of them worked out. And so you and I should understand that I then had the opportunity to connect with that gentleman afterwards because someone in the chat mentioned my name, and then he reached out and we did the whole. Actually, it was funny because there's two JPs, me and then the other one, JP Forno. That's me naming names, but JP Forno would have would love to plug here. He uh he reached out to JP Forno first. JP Forno pointed, he's like, No, you want the other JP. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So when me and that gentleman jumped on the call, um, you know, I asked him, so listen, I heard, you know, 15 sales reps or 15 people, like, in what time frame? And he hired 15 sales reps in nine years. I said, well, how many are left? He's like, none. I said, what happened? He's like, they all had a bad attitude. This is where I go back to the to the to the core of my answers to your question. If it's 15 people that you've hired, and all of them have not worked out for whatever reasons, and it could be their attitudes, it's a leadership problem, buddy. Yeah, because you are the business owner who hired them. That either means your recruiting practices are off, your evaluation practices and criteria are off, you're a bad judge of character, maybe you're a good judge of character, but you're a bad planner and you didn't you didn't arm them well.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

JP, this is so good. I'm I'm I'm gonna jump in here because the the podcast I just launched on May 1st, it's Eagle Trap. And the first thing is that I say is I would just do it myself. How many times have you said that this week? Do you know what? I caught myself saying that this morning, right? And then oh, I'm I'm guilty as charge here too. And then I go in and I talk about a book that you probably have read, and it's about extreme ownership, right? Is the the Marines Jocko Seals Tacton Joko great book. I and the book talks about yeah, it's like the book talks about there's no bad teams on bad leaders. Like if it the the and I go through the the story where I when I merged my firm and I was handing off tax return that I've been preparing for five years and they're not doing as well as I did. And it's like I wasn't sharing that knowledge with them. I just like I just dumped the work, right? And it's like, hey, here, go do this tax return. I didn't give any background on the client, I didn't give any association what this client likes and don't like. I didn't give them any association how this client views the IRS and money and taxes and so forth. So it's like, hey, just go do the thing, right? And then comes back to me, and then I say it to myself, oh yeah, see, like nobody can do as well as I can. So I would just have to redo it all.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

It's a it's it's oh it's Johnny. That's so great to hear. And what I'm hearing too about that example is um the same goes for any hire. If you as a CPA or hire, you know, CPA, I'm gonna say as a CPA as an expert, if you hire someone who's not yet an expert, novice, but they're on their way to expert, they could be the best novice available to you. But if you don't set them up for success and they fail, who's the real finger to point at, or you know, like or or the person to blame in that case? Every time it's going to be the lyric. Because Jocko is exactly the the the extreme ownership is exactly the book I thought of when we were just chatting and I started to share that example because he has this statement. Um Jocko has this statement in that book, and or I'm saying Jocko, but I think there's there's the two guys who wrote the book.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

So one of the two yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Yeah, one of the two that wrote it, um, he talks about that moment where he faced his entire platoon after a failed mission. And everything had gone wrong that they had planned or not planned, and there were variables that they could have never anticipated. At the end, he stood in front of the whole platoon and he said, Guys, there's only one person to blame. And he said, and he like we are like, you know, we're we're the omnisci omnipotent reader. We know all the things that went wrong, and all the people who were involved that went wrong, um, and and who and where all the failure points were, where the ownership could really be, could really like. But that leader stepped into the room and he said, I'm the only person to blame. And that takes not only so much courage, but it takes, and this is the point of the of the ego, it takes so much, oh God, I mean like balls, dude. It takes balls, it takes confidence, it takes it take empathy, it takes uh you know, self-awareness. And look, I I don't want to give give any you know false, false pretense that everything I did at the business that I was referring to earlier, where you know I had to make it work, so I just figured it out, I didn't do it right, but I did it in a way that worked for me, and I did it in a way that worked for others. It didn't work for the leadership in the in the end because there were decisions that were made that ultimately led to me leaving because I found that what I had done for myself was in order to not have to explain how to complete that IRS tax form in the way that the client expected, like in your example, I just did it myself. How much did that cost you? About 40 pounds. Um about probably 10 years early graze. Uh it almost cost me a relationship with my kids in a way that I would never be able to repair for from the age that they were at. Um it also it also cost me some relationships with with the folks at that company that I feel really I feel really badly about. You know, I mean, like it's not this is not a blame game. Like I don't want to get this, you know, get this misconstrued. This is I recognized what was necessary in order for me to be successful in the job that I was just responsible, required to do. I now recognize that there were failures on my part and there were failures on the leadership team's part part, and there were failures in other areas of the business that led to the ultimate decision that I made to leave. But it was because I recognized that I had handcuffed myself to my own ego's feeling of defensiveness against trying to teach others or go through the exercise. This is the thing, it's a patience exercise, I think, exercise with patience. To be patient enough, not only with the leadership, but with other parts of the business and with myself, to just do that extra work. Dan talks about it all the time, right? He talks about, you know, you can find shortcuts, but there is a there is a tax that comes with every shortcut. The tax for them, for that business, when I their shortcut was hire me. The tax that they under unfortunately didn't recognize that they were gonna have to pay, and I that I ended up having to pay myself, was that we wrapped it all up in a single resource, or we wrapped up a lot of the things in a single resource, and that led to you know, a failure point to you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

I I didn't and uh one of the things that I've heard Dan also talks about there's like and I think comes from uh uh Zig Ziggler, uh greatest one of the greatest salesmen out there.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

I know Zig yet.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Well, um he talks about there's no elevator to success. You gotta take the stairs, right? Well so and if you don't implement a framework, a system, a process, a sequencing of events on your sales process, you're going to see a lot of these monking swings from the chandelier that sales rep promised to just to meet their quota, right? Because the leadership has not given them the framework. So we all have war stories, so I want to hear this. Like, hey, can you tell them is like the most absurd or damaging thing that you have ever seen a salesperson promised to a client because the founder of the C-suite kind of refused to document that process, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yeah, um again, unfortunately. I mean, like there's there's a couple, but I mean, like, again, we're not naming names, so I'll just tell the story and I'll I'll use sure I'll use different references. I I love what Dan said recently, by the way, for us to do well when you're telling stories, change the sex and change the age or something.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Go back two years.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

You go back two years, yeah. Well that yeah, and that's for yourself too. Um yeah, yeah, yeah. So so I think um I I I think a good story to share around that example is you know, when I was hired at that company as the head of sales, the refurbished, or well, I'll say it this way. When I was head, when I was head of sales at one of the companies I worked for in the last 15 years, the function that I was asked to accomplish and involved not only establishing sales process and being like a shining example of sales in that sales process, it also was to scale it. You know, JP, you're great, go be great, and then find another way to make others be JP great. And there came a point in growth for that business where I want to be careful here because like the demand coming in was higher than the was forcing us to make critical decisions around do we have enough staff on hand to support the demand both operationally as well as also from a sales perspective. Now that's a great problem to have for any business. And I made recommendations in that scenario to let's let's take the step the system that we've established for how sales is done today. Let me hire junior rep, I'll build them as a shadow to me, and this is what this is how we'll make success, make progress. And talking about conflict, there was an impatience in the business, and I'm sure there was an ego in the business that did not want to take that length of time and decided to take a shortcut and hire outside of me a peer, essentially to me, to operate. So remember, I had like in this in this example I was describing, I was player and I was coach.

unknown 25:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

And so I was saying, hey, listen, let me hire another player and I'll be player, player, coach. Or I'll have player, me be player and coach, and I'll be coach. And they just they didn't replace, they peer matched the player side of me. But didn't force that person and made it close to a peer, but didn't make it that per didn't make that person, didn't make me responsible for that person. And so when that person came in the door, and this is getting to your example, where it failed miserably and it resulted in impacts to revenue and business, etc. With that context now, that you had you basically had a player who was gonna operate outside the lines. And that's what occurred. And so for especially the first six to twelve months of that person coming in the door, it was like, hey JP, they're not gonna report in this example, don't that they're not gonna have you report you're uh you're they're not gonna report to you, but you need to make them successful. So it was like, again, I should have seen the writing on the wall for myself at this moment, but I digress. Um I made them as successful as I possibly could without them reporting to me, and them knowing that and being able to say to that point, I don't need to follow your process, I have my own process. Oh. And that led to the demand was still there, so we started to split the demand up across the team. And as I'm running sales and the sales and the and the operational function of the business is looking to me like for everything that comes in for direction on what's coming in, how's it going to work, what are they buying, what are they getting, what are the expectations, what are the timelines, all that. This other person who was new to the business didn't necessarily understood those things, but didn't have the same level of respect for it because, again, they were able to operate outside the lines. And that led to when they closed a very large deal with a very large client for that bit for the type of business we were, you know, Fortune 500 business, and it was of a couple million dollars in value over the course of years. There was no definition of scope that was clear to the delivery team or to the operational um to the delivery team as a function or to the operational delivery team to know what the how to go do. The handoff was messy, and six months in, that client was ready to churn. They weren't paying their invoices. The customer success team and the account management team were at odds with not only the rep, but with the client. And this is where I made the mistake back to the first path conversation I mentioned a little while ago. I made the mistake of making myself available when everyone in the business started saying, like, this client's gonna churn, we can't, and the CEO and the and the and the and the executive team saying, we can't afford to lose that revenue. We've made banks, you know, or we've made um, we've banked on that revenue, so we've made decisions in the business, all the risks associated to losing that revenue. We need to fix this. So in this case, this is where salespeople get, I think, a bad rap rap for being reps. The sales rep sort of like backed out of the equation and said, rightfully, because like in their mind, well, we'll just figure it out. Like, like, like guys, just got like, hey, I did my job. I got you the client, I got you the climate. Yeah, it's like I did my thing. Yeah. And I was the guy as the head of sales and the guy who's been building the business, you know, alongside the executive team, trying to navigate it when necessary. I had always protected them from all the fallout from these types of situations by just doing all the work myself, rightfully or wrongfully. And that led to me for to the sales rep being seen as like a non-participant in the in the fixing of the thing and me being a fixer. But more importantly, it led to so many people in the business needing to step in to fix the problem for the client, and the client still turned less than a year later, anyway.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

It was always and it always comes back to this. Is a that that was a failure of leadership, it was a failure at the top from the decision in the beginning to hire that rep outside the lines.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

So and I've I'm here some great things here, and uh and uh I want to turn this conversation um a little bit more uh tactical right now. So it seems like you have a sequencing of hiring or a six sequencing of when you do your consulting um work right now that you when you're looking at a new business or an existing business and you for a new client for you, there's there's certain things that you like, hey, let's let's look at this first, this second, this third. So for the service business out there that are listening and watching our podcast here today, um, what are the first like three steps that they should be looking at? And then if they can't figure it out, the fourth S is go hire JP.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Um, you know, I I don't know if it's the first I gotta know if there's three steps. I I'll I'll just kind of walk you through the way I've taken the conversation. Oh, by the way, like this is a really good question. We can take this a couple different directions, but the first thing that comes to mind, it's not step one, two, or three. It's just the first thing that comes to mind is if the way services business especially, if the way it's sold requires the CEO or the business owner to be involved in order for the whatever's being sold to be defined and sold every single deal or nearly every single deal, 80% of the time, it's not a scalable process. It you can't hand that off to a salesperson. Because what I've found most frequently is when I step into like one of the businesses I'm working with right now, when I stepped into the business, there was one person who was running every deal cycle at the center of every deal cycle, and that person wasn't a salesperson, but they had a salesperson. And when I asked why are you involved instead of you know so-and-so as like the key quarterback, it was because and you could list all the different reasons that they stated, but all of them had to do with because it was a failure of definition in the business for what is sold, how it's sold, who it's sold to, and ultimately who is responsible for what related to each of those things. And can I put that into steps?

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Yeah. The first step is what do you sell? Like what is it you sell? Can you define it? Can you box it up and say 80 or 90% of the time, this is what we sell and this is how we deliver it? And if the answer is yes, you go to the next thing, okay. How is it, you know, how is it defined and how much does it cost? Right? Because another thing I found is they might answer that first one because they'll like squeak by and they'll say, Oh, we we're always selling consulting and we're always selling it as hours, and we're always delivering it across three months, right? Okay, that's me. I like me. Cool. And how much do you charge an hour? And sometimes they have that answer, and then other times they'll have that answer as a well, it depends. Why does it depend? Well, it depends on who's involved or what we're doing. It shouldn't depend. In I mean, it can. Again, you'll get to a million, two million, five million with it depending, variable. But if you want to truly scale a business, you need it to be locked tight. It's why Dan has told us all the time niche down, niche down, niche down. He tells all of us, don't try and do like um Meg Brady House, like you know, was talking to him recently, and she started up her coaching program. And her coaching program was fired and she's doing really well, and she's thinking about now doing this other thing. And he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Where are you at in revenue? Where are you at in scalability? How much are you doing responsible? How much are you responsible for? How much have you delegated? And if you remember, Meg was like chewing it back. She's like, Well, you know, like I can't really you can't chew it back. You gotta, you gotta stay focused. Pick the one thing you're really good at. And this is where I say, if you really want to scale, if you're a services business, you really want to scale, scale your company beyond yourself as the founder, and you want to build a sales team, you need to pick what is the one thing that you can hand off tomorrow that is crystal clear. You could write a build a playbook around it, you could say step one to sell it is this, step two to sell it is this, step three to sell it is this, step four equals sale. If you can get to that with just one of the say three, five, twenty things you sell, now you're going in a direction of being able to scale your sales function. Good.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

No, no, this is great. I think um, you know, from zero dollars in revenue to about five hundred K, all you're trying to do with the market is proving that you know what you're doing. Proof of concept, yep. Yeah, proof of concept, you're good at what you're doing. Then from 500k to about three million is like you need to learn a little bit of leadership and delegation, and then from 3 million to 10 million, it's like no man's land because nobody wants to invest on the infrastructure that you're talking about of systematizing the sales process so you can hand it over to somebody and then it becomes a scale business, right? And you're gonna have to hire some higher players. You're gonna have to get into the 200, the 300, maybe the 500k salaries in that three to five million dollars in sales for you to go to the next level, whereas the 20 million, the 30 millions, the 50 millions, and so forth. And then at that level, you know, JP is it's more about your infrastructure, right? Like your know-how is is your data points, you know, everything about that customer, do you know everything about what they're going through, their life cycle, you know, the churn and their KPIs and all that stuff. And I think a lot of people don't realize that the person that you were at 500k and the things that you're doing at 500k are not going to work for you to get to the million, three or ten million.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Yeah, yeah, Johnny, it's a really very valid point. Um, and and I think also Dan has Dan has built that um the replacement ladder. It's in his book. Um, and there's a reason why sales is towards the top of that replacement ladder. Uh marketing is in the middle of that replacement ladder. You and I know it as it's it's you know, first it's administrative delegation, then it's operational delegation, then it's marketing, then it's sales, then it's leadership. Like that, those are the five stages of it. Sales is towards the top because in order for you for any services or any any organization, any business of any type in its early stages, in order for it to be able to scale, for sales to step in and help it to scale, you need to be able to hand them a playbook the second they walk in. And in that playbook, you need to be able to tell them where the demand is, well, what's being sold, how much it's sold for, what the messaging is that resonates with the market, and where does the demand for this thing come from? That one, that last one, is one of the things that Dan talks about, but it's so subtle. And this is when I had that conversation with the gentleman from one of the elite community calls um later about. He was so convinced that it was the one of the 15 reps that he had hired and fired in nine years' fault. It was all their fault, actually. And it was their bad attitude, but he was so convinced by it because when I asked the question, well, where was the demand for what it is that they were selling? Because he was, he he had a playbook, he said. He had all the things. I never saw it, but I mean I'm taking him at his word. I have a playbook, I have all the things that you're saying, like what's sold, how it's sold, how much it is, who it's you know, who it's targeting. I said, okay, well then what's the problem? Like what did you not like about their attitude? Well, they just did, they were lazy. They didn't follow up with the leads. And this was an interesting conversation because it kind of articulates this point around uh scale. And Dan talks about this very he talks about it, but it's quiet in the way it's delivered against everything else that's being said when he's talking about it. It's he said, Well, I I had we I had generated, we had generated 650 leads or 700 leads. This goes down a very slippery slope quickly because when you make a statement like that, because that sounds like a lot of demand. If I'm a small business owner and I have 650 or 700 leads, that sounds like a lot of demand. I'm overwhelmed at the demand. Dan talks about it all the time. Sometimes when you're not ready for that kind of demand, you don't know what to do with yourself. You're scared to act. Right. But in this case, it was all the reps' fault each time all this number of leads were being generated because they weren't following up. And what I learned, there's a couple of different ways, against starting point associates here. Okay, define a lead for me. You're saying you gave them 650 leads. Was it how how ready, how sales ready was that lead? And this is where the conversation got even more interesting. It was that the leads had been generated basically from a form capture for an asset that was somewhat related to what the company did for services. But they only engaged one time.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

I see.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

You can't expect the sales, at least I don't believe you should expect the sales rep to take them from what now essentially is a cold awareness stage through to an engagement stage, through to call it uh a nurturing stage or a growth stage through to a conversion, through to sales, or through to sales ready, through to conversion. Like you if you do, then you better be patient as hell, or you better hope that your product is fire and it sells itself. And I think this is what like this is coming back to that point of like if you don't have a very crystal clear playbook for how you sell your business that you follow, and you don't know where your demand is coming from day in to day out, you can hire all the salespeople you want. They'll never, I mean, you might get lucky, you might find one that comes with a book or comes with a Rolodex of contacts, which is what a lot of reps try to do. I've been that rep that's been hired. I've been the first sales hire, first, you know, air quotes, five times in different you know, capacities across different businesses. And each time I was hired, it was because I was either coming with a Rolodex or I was coming with an acumen or I was coming with a uh a panache that they were looking to add or uh or level of experience. But yeah, shit, it's like again, there are trade-offs you have to be expect willing to accept when you try to take shortcuts to you know scaling a sales organization. And if you just want to hire and let them figure it out, don't be surprised if you it's really hard to find those diamonds in the rough uh when it comes to salespeople.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

Yeah, again, and and if you hand someone and you don't know, and you the the other thing too is measuring, right? Having dashboards and you having those metrics of like, okay, where part of the price the process broke down, so you know and you can attack that with all the resources that you have to fix that little bottleneck. Yeah, um JP, we're on the 42 mark, and I want to talk so much more with you right now, but we gotta wrap up. So here's a final question, and I'm gonna CC already asked my final question that I told you I was gonna ask, I'm gonna change it up a little bit. Great. Keeping me in the hot seat, I like it. I know, I love it, I love it. I know you can talk so much more about this, and I'm gonna have you again on the show because my goodness, this has been so good. I hope so. Um, here's my question. If you have to go back and tell that JP that was in the middle of that fire, and and you were sitting in the room that this when the CEO told you, JP, go figure it out, and go back to that moment and knowing what you know now, what would you tell him and why?

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Oh, that's a great question. Um I've thought about this actually.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

I know you have. That's what I meant.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

Part part, yeah. What what what is the uh what are the steps stages of alcohol? Alcoholics Anonymous? The first step is accepting you have a problem. Um the the thing I would tell him is something my wife has taught me, which is she's taught me through repetition, is you can't solve everyone's problems. And I try often and often too hard to help people solve their problems that are not my problems to solve. And you know, while it's an admirable, I recognize, you know, to that young JP, it's an admirable quality, it will lead to your demise because you will pay so much attention focusing on solving other people's problems, you'll forget to focus on solving your own. And the problem I created for myself, like if I summarize that in a different way, I'd say quit sooner. Like recog recognize that you are in a tailspin and pull out sooner. Get get like get out of it before it no longer serves you completely. And that was that's good, that was the hardest thing. My my my wife has helped me know several times since uh to quit sooner. And I don't know, man, or Johnny, if this is a uh a male thing, or if this is like just the way some guys are and girls are wired, but I often say, and I said this to Dan, and he he told me, he's like, you need to inspect that. I remember he's like, you need to inspect that. I said, Dan, we were talking about winning and losing, and I said, Dan, you don't you don't know this about me, but I'll say I hate to lose more than I like to win. And he said, he's like, you might want to inspect that. Now I know now, I believe now, that what he was referring to is that is a very lonely road, man. But you will end up in a very dark place very quickly if you stay on that perpetual path of constantly trying to not lose. Because you have to accept this is the this is the this is the thing about hating to lose more than liking to win. You have to accept that you can't win all the time at some point. And when you're fighting constantly not to lose, it's hard to make decisions that are always in your best interest before they're in someone else's. And that's what I would be talking to that JP about. I love it, man. That's a hard one for me as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Again, I you speaking to me as he's talking to him, and it was like, oh yeah. Um, I think I truly believe that people out there that have the heart that you have will do more for other people than they will do it for themselves. I think that is just a fact, right? And that's a spirit of stewardship, right? That's a spirit of know who your creator is. That's a spirit of knowing what do you want to do with your life. Because at the end of the day, it's not about the dollar, it's never about making the dollars, about the impact, right? And the perpetual impact and the legacy that you leave. So, JP, if people want to find out more about you, want to learn more about your sales process and your frameworks and work with you, where they can find you.

SPEAKER_01 45:57

Best place to find me these days is Instagram. Uh at GP Renolo, uh, is my Instagram handle. I uh I would say that is probably the easiest place to find anything you want to find out about me. Uh, another place who just you know, shoot me an email. It's gp at startingpointassociates.com. It's not that complicated. Um I'm excited lately about the growth of experience on Instagram, so I would encourage people to reach out there first. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Yeah, I think Instagram for for you and I have been a tremendous uh growth in the lately. And then I think that just the fact of having a conversation with people uh in the in on Instagram and the DMs, I think that's great. Yeah, JP, um, I cannot tell you how much I'm thankful to have you today on the show. We'll definitely be in touch. I'm gonna have you again on the show. Awesome. And we're gonna go circle back and see how much uh you you and I have grown since this first very episode. Once again, thank you, my brother. I appreciate you. Likewise, Jeff. Thank you, buddy.