Are you the person trying to run your business and lead the sales function at the same time? If you are the business owner and the head of sales, that combination is going to lead to a cash roller coaster. In this episode, Marco Soares explains why this happens, what it costs you, and the practical steps to get the right people into the right seats so your business can grow.

Why Running Sales and the Business at the Same Time Creates a Cash Roller Coaster

As your business gets bigger, as you start to bring more people in, as the volume of work increases and your business gets more complicated, running everything yourself becomes increasingly difficult. Your operational tasks increase, your managerial tasks increase, and what starts to happen is a sales and marketing roller coaster.

You put lots of time and energy into sales and marketing, then pull back to solve a problem or get involved in something else. Before you know it, cash is not looking great, so you jump back into sales, get a few big deals over the line, look after a few key customers, and then get distracted again. That cycle is exhausting and expensive.

This is a perfectly normal journey for a growing business. One of the hardest parts of growing a company is the gap between roughly £3 million and £10 million. That stretch catches more good businesses than almost anything else.

A Real-World Example: When the Wrong Seats Stall a Business

Marco worked with a client who was Head of Sales, Managing Director, and frankly doing everything else the business needed him to do. As the business started getting bigger and more complicated, this business owner became increasingly stretched. His time and attention could not be on sales as much as it needed to be, and as a result the business started experiencing the cash flow roller coaster.

One month he would be all over sales, pushing hard, having the right client meetings, getting results. Then he would step out of it, dip into something else, and the roller coaster would begin again. Cash flow difficulties followed.

The Operations Manager Who Was in the Wrong Seat

Meanwhile, this business had an operations manager who had fallen into that role out of convenience over the years, as happens in many businesses. This person had done all of the different roles in manufacturing and simply happened to be the most convenient person to put in place to run operations. The operations function was not being scaled the way the business needed it to be.

However, this same person was gifted with clients, able to get things over the line, and capable of putting time and effort into sales. The trouble was that both the owner and the operations manager were dipping in and out of sales, and neither role was being done properly.

One Decision That Unlocked Three Problems

What Marco did was get the business owner to remove himself from sales entirely. The operations manager moved into the head of sales seat. And a new operations person was hired.

That one decision unlocked three problems at once and released the business. It helped the business owner stay focused on strategic things, managing the team, people planning, development. It helped the operations manager move into a seat where he was in flow, doing good work consistently and to a high standard. And it brought in someone who could actually structure the operations function, bring in the right equipment, introduce automation and lean manufacturing, and drive real results.

Why Your Organisational Structure Must Be Deliberate

It is incredibly important not to let your organisational structure drift and morph into something that is merely convenient. You need to be deliberate about designing the structure your business needs, and aligning it to your growth goals.

As the business owner, you cannot have your fingers in all of the pies. If you do, there will be consequences, and for most business owners trying to cover the sales seat whilst also being the managing director and everything else, what that creates is a cash roller coaster that is symptomatic of a sales and marketing roller coaster underneath it.

Under £2 million, everyone can muck in and do whatever needs to be done. But as soon as your business gets bigger and more complicated, you have to build a management team of specialists around you. That way you can focus on leading that team, setting a direction, and helping them formulate a proper strategy for growth. That is how you get out of the stuck point that catches so many good businesses between £3 million and £10 million, the point where you become the bottleneck and stop your business from being able to scale.

If this resonates, it is worth reading Don’t Be the Bottleneck in Your Business for a deeper look at how staying in the wrong seat limits your growth.

A Simple Exercise to Find Out If You Have the Right People in the Right Seats

If you are experiencing any version of this in your business right now, here is a simple exercise to work through.

Take your team members’ job descriptions or scorecards and score each area as either in flow or out of flow. In flow means those tasks that give them energy, that they can do to a high level, where they have the aptitude. Out of flow is where something is really hard, takes huge amounts of energy, and where performance is mediocre and unpredictable. Next to that, give each key area of responsibility or task a performance score out of five, where one is low and five is high.

That exercise will give you a clear picture of where team members are out of flow and where they are underperforming. In most cases, it is not a performance management fix. You need to consider whether that person is simply in the right seat. Often you can move them into a position where they are playing to their strengths and contributing significantly more value to the business.

This connects directly to the broader challenge of 3 reasons why your management team is not working, the right structure with the wrong people in the wrong seats will always underdeliver.

Your Responsibility as Managing Director

Your ultimate responsibility as the managing director of your business is to ensure you have the right strategy in place, that the financial targets are being met, and that your team is structured correctly, the right people in the right seats. Sit down and do this exercise to help you understand whether you have got that right, and what you need to do about it.

For more practical business insight like this, explore the full Mind Your Own Business series or subscribe to the Marco Soares YouTube channel where new episodes are published regularly.