“I’d have got rid of Dean four years ago. I just can’t.”
Rob runs an industrial packaging distribution company. Six million in revenue, thirty-one staff, decent margins, the sort of business a trade buyer would look at twice.
Dean has been his sales manager for eleven years. In that time he’s driven off two good operations people, one of whom Rob is still angry about. He doesn’t sell much any more, turns up when it suits him, and talks to the warehouse like they owe him something.
He also owns the top fourteen accounts. All of them. The pricing history, the reorder rhythms, who’s about to retire, who hates being rung before ten. None of it sits in the CRM, because Dean stopped updating the CRM in 2019 and nobody made him.
So Rob does the sums every year and lands on the same answer. Getting rid of Dean is a bet that fourteen customers stay. He isn’t willing to make that bet, so he keeps paying a man he can’t stand and calls it commercial pragmatism.
It isn’t. It’s a ransom, and he renews it every January.
I asked him what he’d say to a buyer in due diligence when the question came up. He went quiet. A buyer doesn’t see a strong salesman in Dean. A buyer sees sixty per cent of revenue living in one bloke’s phone, and prices it accordingly, if he bids at all.
The problem was never Dean. Dean simply noticed what Rob had built and did the obvious thing with it.
So who in your business could walk out on Friday and take a slice of your revenue with them? You already know the name. Most owners do. What most owners haven’t done is count how many names there are, and work out where else the business leans on a person instead of a system.
That’s what the Critical Systems Scorecard is for. Twenty-five questions across the five systems every business runs on, and you get a written report back showing you exactly where you’re the hostage.
Tell me I’m being unfair to Rob.
Cheers,
George