For a long time, I believed sales solved all problems. Win more customers, book more deals, and you’d solve most business problems. Unfortunately, when you are scaling a mid-sized firm between $10M and $50M, that’s a dangerous lie.
Sometimes, more sales simply sucks more cash and creates more stress. Instead of making the business healthier, growth becomes a cash sucking cycle. You aren't scaling; you’re just amplifying your inefficiencies.
The highest-performing companies operate as a cohesive team. Members share a common goal, collective ownership, and a willingness to put the team's needs ahead of individual agendas. But to do that, you have to agree on what winning actually looks like.
The first decision; the strategy decision, is defining the measure of success. Many entrepreneurs leave this vague. Those who do define it often fall into the revenue trap.
I see it constantly: a team is high-fiving over hitting a revenue target while the CEO is awake at 2:00 AM, wondering how they’ll cover payroll or fund the next capital expenditure. The team is satisfied, but the owner is frustrated because they lack the cash to scale.
“You can't hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.” — Zig Ziglar
I quote Zig to business leaders because it diagnoses the execution gap perfectly. You want more cash, but your team doesn't even see a measure for cash. In football, if the offense doesn't know the score, the time remaining, or the down, they can't make the right play. Sometimes you need to score; sometimes you need to bleed the clock to secure the win.
Without a clear scoreboard, you are robbing your team of the chance to help you win.
Revenue is seductive. It’s a vanity metric; fun to talk about at cocktail parties and easy for even a junior clerk to track. But in the world of Scaling Up, we live by a different hierarchy:
To move from vanity to valuation, align your Senior Leadership Team (SLT) around one of these real measures of winning:
If your sales team is incentivized only on revenue, don’t be surprised when they bring in low-margin, high-maintenance dogs that pay in 90 days and drain your team’s bandwidth. When behavior is driven by the wrong metric, your execution falls apart.
It isn't enough to show the SLT a spreadsheet; you have to teach them the mechanics of cash. In Scaling Up, we use a tool called the Power of One. It’s the ultimate "Aha!" moment for a leadership team.
The Power of One analyzes how a 1% shift in seven key levers impacts your bank account. The most neglected lever? Price.
Most SLTs are terrified of price increases. They fear a 3% hike will send customers sprinting to the competition. But here is the reality: a 3% increase in price flows 100% to the bottom line.
Now, look at the inverse: The volume trap. If your team discounts the price by 10% to win the deal, they don't just need 10% more volume to break even. If your gross margins are 30%, a 10% price cut means you must increase your volume by 50% just to maintain the same gross profit dollars.
The Exercise: Sit your SLT down and run the ratio. Show them that chasing volume through discounting is often a "Cash Sucking Cycle" that requires more headcount, more overhead, and more drama for the exact same result.
Price to Volume Sensitivity Matrix
When the head of sales sees that a tiny price adjustment is more effective than a massive, cash-draining sales blitz, the silo begins to crack. They start thinking like owners. You aren't just giving them a target; you’re giving them the "steering wheel" of the business.
In Texas growth firms, we work hard. But if the only reward for hitting a goal is a slightly different number on a monthly report, the team will eventually burn out. To drive accountability deep, you must celebrate the right definition of winning.
If your annual goal is Gross Profit Dollars, your quarterly critical number should be the execution bridge that gets you there.
When the team hits that quarterly target, you don't just send an email. You create a winning experience.
The Scaling Up Celebration Rule: The celebration must be proportional to the sacrifice. If the team stayed late to clean up the AR aging or spent weeks refining the pricing model, the celebration should reinforce that specific win.
If you hit your utilization goal, maybe the entire company takes a Friday afternoon off for a high-end team experience; something that highlights the freedom they’ve earned. This isn't fluff; it’s neurobiology. When you celebrate the right win, you hardwire the team to crave that specific result again. You move from pushing them for results to pulling them toward a shared victory.
The final piece of the puzzle is the post-game film. High-performing teams don't just move to the next quarter; they reflect.
In our quarterly planning sessions, we use reflection to turn data into wisdom. If we missed our gross profit target, we don't look for someone to fire; we look to the market for what it's telling us.
Reflection is where the Scaling Up disciplines of people and strategy meet. It prevents the "CEO Trap" of repeating the same mistakes year after year. It’s the difference between a company with 20 years of experience and one with 1 year of experience repeated 20 times.
When you reflect as a team, you foster a growth mindset. You show your SLT that you value their insight as much as their output. This is how you build a legacy. You are creating a leadership team that can think, pivot, and execute without you being in the room.
If you are tired of the finger-pointing and the shoddy results, it’s time to change the score.
Stop measuring vanity. Start measuring the levers that actually create fortune, freedom, and fun. Align your SLT around gross profit and cash, teach them the Power of One, celebrate like champions, and reflect like scientists.
That is how you stop the profit drain and start building a business that represents your true legacy.
Next Step: Identify your Power of One. Take your P&L from last year and calculate exactly how much cash a 1% increase in price would have added to your bank account. Then, bring that number to your next SLT meeting and watch the room change.
