Every engagement starts from a different need state. Some businesses have hit a wall on growth. Some are underperforming and can’t say why. This one needed talent, culture, and sales discipline before growth outran the business underneath it.
Growth wasn’t the problem. The company was beating plan every quarter, led by a talented CEO who had built almost everything himself.
That was exactly the issue.
He had hired the last two VPs on gut instinct and a handshake because there was no HR function to run the process. Both were gone within a year. Sales territories were assigned by habit, not data. Nobody had assessed who was ready for what came next.
What brought us in wasn’t a bad quarter. It was a good one.
Growth was strong enough that the CEO and PE partner started asking a harder question: how do you sustain it without stopping to catch your breath?
There’s no pausing to rebuild when the business is working. The task was to fix the engine while the plane was still flying.
We went to work in the order that mattered most: talent first, culture second, sales operations third.
Talent came first because nothing else holds without the right people in the right seats. We ran executive interviews, a 9‑box assessment, and director-level interviews to identify the gaps, then recruited six executives through our own network.
No outside recruiters. Nearly $700,000 in avoided fees.
Each new hire arrived with a real 100-day plan and was mentored through the first quarter rather than left to find their own footing.
Culture came second because new leaders don’t stick in a place that can’t support them. We ran engagement surveys, reviewed attrition, and built a communication plan. We introduced pay-for-performance programming, launched a mentorship program, and built a nine-month effort to teach the organization how to become a high-performing team, not just hire one.
Sales came third. We interviewed the team, reviewed performance data, and analyzed results territory by territory. Then we revamped territories and routing, redesigned trade spend management, introduced tele-sales, and installed reporting so performance stopped being a mystery.
We estimated the sales work alone at more than $2 million in productivity gains.
None of it came from a deck someone else wrote and walked away from. It came from staying in the business for as long as it took.
For this company, the need was talent, culture, and sales discipline. For the next, it may be something else.
That’s the job: find the real need state and do the work to close it.
Growth doesn’t wait for anyone to catch up.
Our job is to make sure it never has to.