The #1 Cause Of Slow Business Death (You’re Missing It)

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Are you

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leading a business, or are you just trying to make everyone that works there happy? I want to share a real conversation that I had with an MSP business owner last week.

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Highlighting why I'm asking that question and the importance of the answer on the growth of your business.

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Hey what's up? I'm Ray green, founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we help companies scale sales,

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I had a conversation with an MSP owner recently, and he was about six, $6.5 million,

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and he was telling me that he wanted to get coaching for, his sales rep because, you know, he had seen sales drop off, the trend was down and he just wasn't,

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you know, he wasn't getting the results he wanted.

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I said, okay, how'd it go? And he said, well,

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he didn't he didn't want coaching.

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he said he didn't think it would help.

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I said, okay, like, is that because he knows everything there is to know about sales or he knows he's doing everything perfectly. And he said,

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no, it's not that.

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I just don't think that he thinks coaching is the right answer

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because that's fair. Like it's not always the right answer. So what are you guys going to do instead?

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And he said,

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well, you know, I offered some training and offered some other stuff. And he just wasn't he wasn't really into it. So I'm going to let him, you know, figure it out.

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And if he doesn't turn it around, then I'm going to fire him.

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said, is that the best solution for you guys? Like, is that is that what the outcome that you want? And he said,

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well, no, of course not. Like if I, if I have to fire him, I got to wait for him to, to suck for a couple of months.

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I've got to go find somebody new. I've got to train them. I've got to, you know, ramp them up in a snap.

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And I said, well, like, not to be harsh, man, but I what I'm hearing is, you know what the problem is in your business. You think you know what the solution is and you're allowing that problem to continue and maybe even implement like an alternative solution that you don't want that's not optimal for the business

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because you don't want to hurt their feelings or the person that is the problem doesn't want that particular solution.

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so we had this conversation and never mind the mindset of the salesperson. Right. Like that's a that's a topic for another day. I think it's it's odd to me when people like refuse help when they're, when they're not doing well, and don't have an alternative solution.

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But let's, let's table that for another video for now.

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the thing that I wanted to highlight in this was the decision making process,

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this is a business owner who has a problem in their business and they are not implementing the solution because they don't want to disrupt or hurt the feelings of the person. That is the problem,

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And I see this a lot, not just in sales. I see it in HR issues when it comes to compensation, right? I see it with HR issues with like performance just in general.

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letting letting people who are subpar for operating the business for for years. Right. I see it with vendors. I see it with, you know, other partnerships.

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What it comes down to is

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avoiding hard decisions, avoiding tough conversations. And

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by doing that, allowing problems to continue in the business. And

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it reminds me of something Ben Horowitz says doing. Horowitz is the, you know, the co-founder of Increase and Horowitz, which is a, you know, really successful VC firm.

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And he says

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leaders add value the moment that they make decisions other people disagree with.

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And that's always stuck with me because I've thought about it and said

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it makes complete sense, right? Like if as a leader, you see problems and you believe you know what the solutions are and you don't implement those things, you're not leading

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I'm observing. I'm watching these things happen. If you're going to let people do what they were going to do anyway, if you're going to let teams operate the way that they were anyway, if you're going to let the business essentially go where it's going to go organically and naturally without you guiding the ship,

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there's not really much of a purpose for you,

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you are no longer leading anything. You're watching it happen. And this also Horowitz concept, this creates what

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he calls management debt over time and management debt is something where you you avoid making these decisions or you make suboptimal decisions for the business. And those decisions start to accumulate,

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right? They start to accumulate in how your team is built.

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They start to accumulate and how your processes operate. They start to accumulate and what the strategy is. And you know, any of the partnerships that you have because

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you're avoiding these, these really important a difficult decisions and conversations. And

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as those accumulate and as they compound, they start to create dysfunction throughout the entire company.

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that's why as as leaders, part of our job is to find those uncomfortable things and go,

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I it's probably a flag for me to to do something about this, right? If it sounds like

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a tough decision that needs to be made or hard conversation that needs to be had, that's probably a flag that I should be involved in that thing, not something that I should avoid.

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and for me as a leader in my own business and in other businesses that I've, that I've run, I find that is where the real hard work is,

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what we tend to associate hard work with the long hours and with the effort and with the activity.

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And that certainly plays a factor.

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the real hard work, the thing that great businesses do and great entrepreneurs do that others don't

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is they make those calls

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and they practice real leadership, which is making decisions that other people disagree with.

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sometimes you may not even know that you're going to be right, like you think you're right, but you may not know that's your job,

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The lack of certainty is just the environment that we operate in. And as leaders, when we spot problems and we believe we know what the solutions are, our job is to implement those solutions, even if it means people disagree with us.

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it's actually really similar to something that's happening in, in Kabul right now. So I live in I live in Los Cabos

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we have like many people, we've seen traffic just get gradually worse and worse or worse.

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So, people bitch about it all the time,

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roundabout and traffic accumulation, congestion, blah, blah, blah. So the city comes up with this really,

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pretty significant plan, like an overhaul,

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straight through the most popular intersection that that causes the congestion.

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It's complete with underground tunnel and, you know, revamping everything and open up like and you look and you're like, damn, that's awesome. So initially everybody was really stoked. Like, everybody's really happy. They're passing around this now

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and then they broke ground. And what happened? Well, it caused a little bit more traffic, right? Because now what was already there is an infrastructure needs to be fixed.

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It's a problem. But to fix that problem, it's going to require some disruption. And that disruption is going to temporarily create more traffic.

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So now people are bitching. They're bitching about the traffic to begin with. Then when they fix it, they're bitching about the the solution to the problem. Now

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this is why as a leader, you're like, hey, it's better to be liked and respected in the long run than it is in the short run, because I'm picturing somebody, or at least I'm hoping somebody in the city of Cabo is going.

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They're going to thank me later,

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12 to 18 months. They're going to be really happy that they went through this. And the lesson for me is in this scenario or, you know, the business scenario, whatever it is,

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somebody is going to be unhappy,

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At some point people are going to bitch about something, right?

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What you want to do as a leader of a city of a business is

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implement decisions that are going to fix the problems that you look on

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the horizon and you say, maybe a tough transition may require some effort, may upset a few people,

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but we're going to implement that thing because that is what's necessary to get the solution that we need.

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I need this salesperson to level up on skills and execution. That is the solution. That is what I believe is the solution. That is what we are implementing. And if you believe that's what solves the problem,

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that's the obligation you have as a leader. So my challenge to you is just think like do an audit like reflect on the things that are happening in your own business and maybe look for the things that you're avoiding, maybe look for the things that are creating some discomfort or the hard decisions that you're kind of kicking the can on, or the hard conversations that you know, deep down that you that you have to have

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ask yourself,

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why are you really avoiding that? And what is the impact of really avoiding that, like the real impact,

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think about that and say, you know, if we solved this, what does that mean? Like what is the potential of that? If we replace this person, what does it look like when sales are 50% higher, 100% higher?

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Then go be a leader, right. Like go be the person that says we're going to solve this problem, even if it requires a little bit of disruption, a little bit of discomfort on the front end.

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as a leader, I'm going to run towards the pain.

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I'm going to go find it, I'm going to go fix it, and I'm going to make that my pattern and make sure that I never accumulate any management debt.

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So that's the conversation that I had. It was very enlightening for me. It was a great reminder for stuff in my own business to to make some decisions.

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And I thought I'd share it with you because maybe it'll help you to.

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if it has been helpful, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Or you can join my email list. Link is below.

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Or if you're an MSP, you can hop in and get free access to the MSP sales toolbox, which has templates, playbooks, processes, forecasting models like things we put new stuff in there every single month.

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So you can get access to that and all the resources that are in there

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until the next video. Adios.

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You.