, CEO is spelled S-A-L-E-S. Not vision, delivery or the title on your LinkedIn banner.
At least not in the beginning.
I spent over two decades working in the media, entertainment and digital agency worlds building things other people sold, before I found that out the expensive way.
I was fifteen years old the first time I made real money, pulling fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a month. I say that not to flex but to give you some context because it was 1998 and we were literally building the Internet, version one. The actual thing. I was in hot demand before I could legally sign my own lease and thank God it stayed that way for years following, moving through engineering roles, building web products for brands you’d recognise.
I was engrossed. I was good. I assumed that was the whole game.
Then I left corporate and put my own foot out into the world, and discovered very quickly that none of it mattered the way I thought it would.
Programming. Project management. Delivery. Two decades of precision in creating other people’s reality. Those skills are real and I’m not diminishing a single hour I spent earning them. But changing your title on LinkedIn to “CEO” is not the same thing as becoming one.
When you are starting a business, CEO is spelled SALES.
You can graduate out of being the primary sales person later. In fact, if you build the business properly, you should. Eventually your job becomes vision, leadership, decision-making, staying close to the market, and making sure the machine keeps moving without your hand permanently on every lever.
But first you have to build the machine. And you cannot build a sales machine if you have never learned how to sell.
No one hands you that as a memo on day one.
It sounds obvious once you say it out loud. It was not obvious to me.
When you open a business, you’re thinking about the vision. You’re telling people you’re starting a company. You start hyper-fixating on the logo. You build the website. You obsess over the offer stack, the colours, the domain name, and the fifteen things that feel like you’re building a business because they produce something tangible at the end of the day.
You are not thinking about the myriad of daily, repetitive, unglamorous activities that make sales actually happen.
For a while, referrals will carry you. Mine did, for years: word of mouth and people I already knew throwing me projects. Someone knows someone who knows someone.
That feels like a sales strategy until it stops happening.
Referrals you don’t systematically cultivate are not a sales system. They are luck with good branding.
And when the tap slows down, you find out the hard way that you need to build relationship capital the entire time: publishing, speaking, following up, making offers, staying in the conversation. Becoming someone people trust before they ever need what you sell.
THE SAME CRUX
There’s a whole generation of content creators, young, hot and magnetic, racking up hundreds of thousands of followers, sometimes millions, acting like that number is supposed to pay the rent.
They are hitting the exact same wall I hit. The exact same crux.
It doesn’t matter if you’re coming from content creation or software engineering or project management or anything else that lives in what we call the back of house, the part of the business where you either are the product or you’re making the product. The moment you expect revenue, your role changes, and it catches almost everyone off guard.
Play this out with a content creator for a second. You think your job is making content. It’s part of the job.
But Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, none of them will hand you the name and contact details of the audience you built. You don’t own a single one of those relationships. You are, in the most literal sense, manufacturing the product that platform sells to advertisers.
They are profiting off your work while you check your bank balance and wonder where it went.
Ten thousand views can produce zero sales. A hundred thousand followers can produce a frighteningly ordinary income. One million impressions are worth exactly nothing to your mortgage company.
Attention is not revenue.
So ask yourself the harder questions. Not, How do I gain more followers? But:
What am I selling? Who am I selling it to? Why would they buy it?
And then the question almost nobody asks:
Who already knows me well enough to start that conversation today?
THE MISSING LAYER IS ACTIVATION
This is where a lot of modern businesses get stuck.
They have attention. They have content. They have an email list. They have followers. They might even have genuine demand.
But nobody is activating it.
Marketing creates awareness. Sales activates awareness.
Marketing says, here I am. Sales says, you raised your hand, let’s talk.
Marketing can put a thousand people around the building. Sales opens the door and invites somebody inside.
There is an entire industry built around helping entrepreneurs get more people to the top of the funnel when a shocking number of them haven’t properly worked the people already standing halfway down it. They want more leads, more reach, more traffic, more followers, more impressions.
More.
Meanwhile there is a former client who loved working with them and hasn’t heard from them in eighteen months. A prospect who said, “I really want to do this, just not right now.” Someone who replied to four stories last month. A customer who would happily buy the next thing if anybody bothered to tell them it existed. A peer who could make three introductions tomorrow.
Sales does not always begin with finding a stranger.
Very often it begins with noticing who is already there.
THE SPLIT
Business really has three jobs.
Marketing gets attention and creates demand. That’s the slow work of turning a stranger who doesn’t know you, doesn’t like you and definitely doesn’t trust you yet into someone willing to pay attention.
Sales turns that attention into conversations, relationships, offers and revenue.
Delivery fulfils the promise after someone has said yes.
That last world is the one I knew intimately. I spent over twenty years in it: product engineering, project delivery, always serving what I’d call an internal order. My CTO would tell me what we needed to build in the next six months, hand me a budget, and send me off to make it happen.
I got very good at that.
What I never had to do during those days of delivery, was face an actual paying customer and ask them for the sale. That’s the piece nobody prepares you for when you finally step into the seat yourself as an entrepreneur.
Sales is the job the business cannot survive without.
If you’re not generating revenue, you don’t have a business. You have an expensive hobby with a logo.
I don’t care if you’ve registered the limited company. I don’t care how beautiful the site is. I don’t care how many followers are watching you do it.
If sales aren’t happening, there is a clock on countdown somewhere whether you’re looking at it or not.
WHEN THE PRODUCT IS YOU
Almost nobody says this part out loud.
In a company, the founder sells a thing the company makes. In a business of one, most of the time, the thing you’re selling is you: your time, your taste, your judgment, your experience, your brain, your ability to walk into a problem and solve it in a way no one else can and know what to do next.
This means every act of selling can begin to feel like a referendum on the self. Every “no” feels a little more personal, because in the plainest sense, it is. This is why so much sales advice bounces right off the people who need it most.
Hand someone a script and watch them still apologise into the close, bury their own price, offer the discount before the customer asked for one. Watch them say, “I totally understand if this isn’t the right time,” three seconds after making the offer.
Someone absolutely brilliant can become almost incomprehensible the moment they have to state plainly what they are good at and ask another adult to pay them for it.
Somewhere underneath, a much younger version of them learned it wasn’t safe to say what they wanted, ask for it plainly, or believe they could have it.
A truth is that you do not need to completely fix your relationship with rejection before you learn how to sell.
You need to learn how to sell while it still feels uncomfortable.
You make the offer with the dry mouth. You follow up while your brain tells you they probably hate you. You state the price without explaining it into the ground.
When you do enough repetitions, your nervous system realises that you are still OK, a ‘no’ did not kill you, a non-response is not moral judgement. You begin to relax into the process.
Sales is a skill. And skill comes from reps.
My Messianic Rabbi told me something once that’s never left me. Every morning he drives into the car park and looks out at hundreds of cars, and he feels the full weight of it. He’s responsible for making sure there’s enough revenue coming in to sustain everything those cars represent: people, families, payroll, a building, a mission.
A church is still an organisation.
Every leader carries some version of that weight, the difference is whether you learn to carry it deliberately.
BEFORE YOU FIND ANOTHER LEAD, LOOK HERE:
This is your first exercise.
Open a note on your phone and make five lists:
1. People paying you now. Current customers or clients. Who is getting a result? Who might need the next level of support? Who needs renewing? Who have you not actually asked what they need next?
2. People who paid you before. Former clients. Customers. Alumni. People who already crossed the hardest trust barrier once and then disappeared into the CRM graveyard because nobody stayed in contact.
3. People who almost bought. The consultation that didn’t close. The proposal that went quiet. The person who said “after summer.” The lead who loved it but needed to speak to a partner. The DM conversation that ended with “let me think about it.”
4. People already engaging with your work. The names you recognise in the comments. Story repliers. Newsletter readers who write back. The person who keeps asking intelligent questions. The quiet follower who suddenly downloaded three things.
5. People who can open doors. Referral partners. Former colleagues. Peers. Customers with strong networks. People who serve the same audience you do without selling the same thing.
Now circle ten names.
And next to each name answer one question:
What would be a natural reason for me to talk to this person today?
Maybe a past client crossed your mind because you saw something connected to the work you did together. Maybe a warm lead wanted a particular result and you just saw something that made you think of them. Maybe a current client has just had a win and there’s a logical next problem you could help them solve.
Maybe a referral partner deserves a thank you. Maybe somebody keeps interacting with your content and you genuinely want to know what they’re building.
You have more leads hiding in plain sight than you think.
THE DAILY REVENUE HOUR
Now give those relationships somewhere to live.
One hour. Every single day. Same time if you can manage it.
Not: “I’ll get to sales when the real work is done.”
Sales is real work.
One protected hour where the primary objective is revenue-producing human contact.
And no, this does not mean sixty minutes of firing cold DMs at strangers like a malfunctioning LinkedIn bot.
Start close to the money. Start inside-out.
A current customer. A former customer. Someone who already expressed interest. Someone who came to an event. Someone who replies to your content. A referral partner.
Then widen the circle.
Use the hour to send the specific message about the specific thing. Follow up on a conversation that went quiet. Ask a current customer how things are going. Invite the right person into the right offer. Thank someone who referred business. Leave genuine, intelligent comments on the work of people you actually want relationships with. Reply to every person who has raised their hand. Make an introduction. Ask a question. Send the voice note.
Make the offer.
No pretending admin counts. No redesigning Canva templates. No tweaking the website. No “research” that somehow ends with you forty-three minutes deep into YouTube.
If it doesn’t create, deepen or convert a real relationship that can move the business forward, it probably doesn’t belong in the hour.
And here’s the part people miss: you do not begin the hour by deciding who to contact.
Prepare before you arrive.
Have your names. Know why you are contacting them. Know which offer fits. Know which conversations are waiting for follow-up.
The hour is for execution, not rummaging through your inbox trying to remember your own business.
Do this well and something changes. Sales stops feeling like a giant emotional event you perform whenever the bank account scares you. It becomes hygiene. A daily practice.
Boring, even.
That is what you want.
Because predictable revenue is built out of predictable behaviour.
Your business is a mirror.
DO THIS TODAY
Take the ten names you just wrote down. Choose three.
Send three messages.
Not tomorrow. Not after you finish the new landing page. Today.
Three names. Three real reasons for reaching out. Three messages. Each with one clear question or invitation.
That’s it.
You cannot close a conversation you never open and you cannot build a business by permanently waiting to feel ready.
If that exercise already surfaced three, five, ten people you should have been talking to, the next problem becomes obvious:
How do you keep track of all of this without becoming annoying, giving up too early, or wasting three months trying to sell an offer nobody actually wants?
That’s what the paid section is about.
Next I’m giving you the follow-up system I use to stay in the relationship without chasing, and the three-part market audit I use to decide whether an offer deserves more effort or needs to be killed.
These are the systems that turn the hour from a good intention into an operating rhythm.
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One useful article is nice.
The point is to build the business differently.
