Have you ever seen a speaker who said something that changed the way you think?
The most memorable speech I can remember hearing took place in 2002 at the executive education campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Along with 61 other entrepreneurs, I had been going to MIT for three years to learn how to build better companies. Most of my classmates were from the U.S., some were from Canada, and a few came from around the world. All of us were selected to meet the same criteria: own a company with at least $1-million in annual sales, and be under the age of 40. Although I fit the bill at the time, I sometimes felt out of place among such accomplished classmates.
The curriculum was designed by Verne Harnish, the program's founder and an adviser to many of the fastest growing companies in the U.S.
During our first session, we heard from Jack Stack on the benefits of employee ownership. The next year, we heard from Pat Lencioni, who taught us how to avoid the temptations of leadership.
In the final year of the program, we were scheduled to hear from Stephen Watkins, an entrepreneur who had recently sold his business. To be honest, I was going to skip the session. I'd never heard of the speaker and was a little tired of the trite, rags-to-riches success story of the magazine-cover entrepreneur.
In the end, I decided to attend the session, and I'm glad I did because he said something that forever changed the way I think about entrepreneurship. He began by canvassing the room to see how many of us were involved in selling our product or service to our customers. I, along with virtually every other entrepreneur in the room, raised my hand.
With that, he proceeded to scold us all for spending too much time selling our products and virtually no time selling our company. I'll try to paraphrase his message for you: "Your job as an entrepreneur is to hire salespeople to sell your products and services so you can spend your time selling your company. You make a few hundred or thousand dollars when you sell your product, but if you turned those same skills to selling your company, you can make exponentially more. You have the right skills, but you're selling the wrong product."
He paused, took a long pull from a bottle of water and let his message sink in.
He explained that entrepreneurs add the most value when they design and start their business; the return on their time invested starts to go down rapidly as the business gets going. The entrepreneurs who earn the best return on their investment of money, time and energy are the ones who get in and out quickly.
And there I was, spinning my wheels selling our services when I should have been marketing my company.
From that day forward, the way I envisioned my role changed. I started hiring salespeople to call on customers. At first I missed the adrenalin rush of personally making a big sale, but in time, I came to enjoy even more seeing other people make sales.
I still went out on sales calls, but they were to people I thought might one day buy my company, not my product.
Special to The Globe and Mail
John Warrillow is the author of Built To Sell: Turn Your Business Into One You Can Sell . Throughout his career as an entrepreneur, Mr. Warrillow has started and exited four companies. Most recently he transformed Warrillow & Co. from a boutique consultancy into a recurring revenue model subscription business, which he sold to The Corporate Executive Board in 2008. He is the author of Drilling for Gold and in 2008 was recognized by BtoB Magazine's "Who's Who" list as one of America's most influential business-to-business marketers.