Transcript of Why Sales Avoidance Is Killing Your Business (And No One Wants to Admit It)

And today is another episode with the Vault Unlocked, where we discover the one thing that changes marketing, the one thing that changes business, and the most important, the one thing that changes who we are. Today, we have Mark Gordon, the marketing guru, the agency owner, sold his business, and we are excited to have him here today. Mark, how are we doing?

I'm doing great, man. How are you?

I'm doing awesome. For my audience members that don't know who Mark Gordon is, why don't you just give us a little bit of a snapshot, who Mark Gordon is, and what is it you represent?

Well, I started out as a sales guy in the mortgage space. Graduated to business owner and sold that company in the mortgage arena. Then my plan was to move from New Jersey, where I was at the time, down to Charleston, South Carolina, have an easier life. Started down that road and then got introduced to a guy who was trying to build a national mortgage lender, asked me to do it with him. He was younger than me. He was smarter than me, he didn't know anything about the mortgage industry, but I knew I could learn a lot from him, whereas I had learned everything the hard way. He had read every book and gone to the best colleges. I was like, Man, I think if I can be around this person, it's going to change me. I went down that road with him. A lot of success in that company. And then coming out of that, I decided I really wanted to help other people get to where they wanted to go, which we'll talk more about, and opened this consultancy where now we help business to business Companies unlock their growth potential, and we build scalable systems for them in the marketing and sales side.

So that's what we do now.

Okay, let's dive into that because that's interesting, and I like that. So helping, you said B2B, so B2B, business to business, unlock their potential and scale. What's the approach? There's a lot of marketing agencies that do it, but I know you guys do it at a level of success. What makes it different for you guys?

Yeah, I know people think of us as actually as an agency, but I'll really say it's more of a consultancy program because our best clients don't renew or get addicted to us. They graduate. We usually come in and we do what we call a full go-to-market overhaul. What we find is that even the companies that have a pretty good idea about their messaging, their marketing, and their sales process, and the technology that puts it all together, they don't have alignment. A lot of companies don't even have a good idea of what those three things are. I run into a lot of founders who have been five years building the same company, and they can't concisely tell what they do or who they do it for. We start with that part of our process and then really both internally and externally nail that messaging, build out lead generation systems that are huge differentiators where we get the right people on the phone for our clients, ready for them to close. We rebuild their sales process in a way that is scalable and we help them attract the right sales people to help them grow. Then we make sure their technology is all set up so that those three systems are working together.

That's our core four. It's a pretty unique offering. Again, most of our clients, it's a four-month program. Sometimes we do more if it's a little bit more complex. But the idea is we hand it back over to you and either your team or the agencies that we connect you with, run it long after we're gone. Then next time you hit an inflection point where you can't grow anymore, call us back. We'll come back in and do it again. But I say everybody's 120 days away from having a completely different predictable revenue engine generating business for them.

What do you see some of the common problems these businesses are having or they're coming to you for?

Well, most of the time, all of the problems in a business come down to the founder. And by the way, the good news is that the founder is the problem. The even better news is that they have the potential to be the solution. It's about blind spots and it's about consistency in terms of where they're going in their business. We all have these natural plateaus that we hit, and everyone thinks a business owner is supposed to have the right answer, or everyone's going to be Mark Zuckerberg, where you start Facebook in college. It's a miracle that that guy is still in charge of that company 20 years later and was able to grow as fast as it grew. But that's not most of us. It's certainly not me, and it's certainly not most of the people that I talk to. If you think you're supposed to have all the answers, you're not. More importantly, when you're in the fight, When you're in the fire in your business, you are going to have selective vision because what happens is you can only deal with two or three problems at a time. You'll just ignore this other thing over here that you know is a problem.

Sometimes you need somebody else to come in here and go, No, not only is this This is the problem, but this is the solution. We come in with that extra set of eyes. Really, it's founder blind spots or founder limited skill sets that we work around. Then we make sure we set them up to have the right team or partners after that process so they can get to that next stage.

So how do you... I'm interested because as a founder myself and founders that I know, the truth is what you said is it usually comes down to the founder. I I believe, especially in a 3 to 5 million, even maybe a 3 to 10 million dollar business, it's all founder. The business is growing based on the founder, the CEO running the company. They're a direct reflection of those results. But the founders that I know, they don't want to hear that. They don't want to know that... They know that they're their problem, but they're not going to hire you to tell you that they're their problem. So how do you get around that and get them to actually be able to not just identify what is actually going on and see it from a different lens, but for them to see it to the point where they're ready to change and take your advice and be able to implement the tools, I'm going to assume, systems, processes, things that you're going to implement.

Okay, a couple of other things. One is I'm not that far into my journey. I was in this for fun for a couple of years, and then really only in June, I started doing this in a full-time way. But we've already brought on a bunch of clients, and I'm meeting with founders every single day. I will just say that in my limited time, I have found that founders are far more more actually willing to accept that they are the problem than I would have expected, especially when it's presented to them as through a series of questions, I ask them about where they are, where they're getting stuck. Then when I start presenting ideas like, Hey, have you ever tried this I never thought of it this way? They're like, No. Sometimes it's like, No, I never thought of that, which, by the way, if you get them to say that, they're sold. Or if it's like, Actually, no, but I haven't been able to get to that, or I didn't prioritize that, or whatever else it is, it's like, Cool. Then once they realize, Yeah, This is just the next step. You said 3-10 million dollar companies.

I think it's true of 300 million to a billion dollar companies, too. One of my favorite interviews I ever saw was Warren Buffet talking about how he passed over Amazon multiple times. He had all these opportunities to invest in Amazon. He just missed it. At the end of the day, he was like, I think something along the lines of our algorithms fail to account for the fact that Jeff Bezos was an alien. When you think about, and that's such a great line. I love that. It's like, There was nothing special about Amazon. They sold books online. Anybody could have set up their own online bookstore tomorrow. What made that company different was Jeff Bezos, right? Yeah. By the way, I think that's humbling. If you're here right now and you're struggling with your $300,000 a year business trying to get it to a million, and you're like, Oh, no, it's me. It's like, Well, yes, I understand that that's humbling, right? But it's also good news because that means that you can do something about it. It's not your industry, it's not your product. You didn't pick the wrong idea. It doesn't come down to that stuff.

Again, I think my time in the mortgage industry was very foundational because in the mortgage industry, every single company is selling the exact same product at the exact same price. A thousand companies, right? Yeah. Some of them do incredibly well, and some of them completely stink. Most of them completely stink. The difference is the leader. It's just it, the leader. Then that leader's ability to attract other leaders and create an environment where motivated people can thrive. I mean, companies are just the people that work there, right? When you're a founder, you need to attract other great leaders. You to create an environment for those people to thrive, and that is the job. Then cast a very specific vision for where you want everybody to go. If I can get really talented people, create an environment where they can thrive, and I have a very clear vision of what we're trying to accomplish, that unlocks the talent in the room, and then you can be that multiplier that moves things forward. I think that's true at any size organization. Now, have I seen founders succeed in spite of not doing a good job with those things?

I have 100%. You will see individual characters who will things happen, who push things, bullies. There are other ways to skin the cat, but the ones who tend to do special things and live a life that I would want to live are the ones who, I think, unlock the stuff that we just talked about.

Yeah, it's unlocking a clear vision is what I'm hearing right there, and then being able to sell that clear vision to great people that help make it come to fruition. When dealing with more, it sounds like you deal with maybe six figures, seven-figure businesses and you get them seven, eight figures. Is that 8, 9?

Almost everyone One that we deal with is somewhere between 5 and 30 million when we engage with them. Occasionally, we do something a little smaller because they're like, they're at 2 million. Maybe they just did a raise or their SaaS company just did a raise on their gross, so they're not quite there yet. But it's certainly people that are looking to grow fast and are willing to go through the pain that's required to do that.

In the pain, let's talk about that. What's some of the pain that they're apt to go through?

Well, I mean, different results require different behavior, and change is always It's painful. When we look at teams, I look at somebody like, Hey, we can't let this salesperson go. They're the reason we got from zero to 5 million. I'm like, Okay, well, let's walk through that. First of all, how committed are you to getting to 10 million? Super committed. Well, what does that mean to you? It means I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Okay, well, let's hold that as a thought because maybe you are, maybe you're not. I actually find that when I hold the mirror up, most people are definitely not willing to do whatever it takes. But that's fine. They have their own room for what that is. My job is just to show them whatever it takes could look like. But then it's like, okay, are you building a family where you don't really choose these people and you're with them forever? Or are you building a professional sports team where, hey, we celebrate wins, we get to go back and reminisce about the good times. But honestly, every year is a new season and we're trying to win a championship and we got to have the right people on the bus to do that.

Which one of these two things do you resonate with more? Most people are just like, Whoa, I never thought of it that way. I'm like, Listen, I have giant season tickets. I They bring back the 1990 and 1986 Super Bowl teams all the time. Those dudes love each other and get along. They're not still on the team. No one can ever take those championships away from them. The things they accomplish aren't going anywhere. But this year's team is about who's going to win the next championship. That's the idea. You have to be able to make those difficult decisions. What vision are you casting for your team? Then, by the way, if you cast a really clear vision, you say to somebody, Hey, listen, we're going from 5 million to 10 million. I have to grow and you have to If you're unwilling or unable to do that growth, we have to layer you or we have to find somebody else because that's what we've committed to this team. I want to attract great people to work here, so I need to be able to tell them this is where we're going. Because no great person is going to come work for a company that's like, Yeah, we made 500,000 last year and we're going to make 550 this year.

You're not going to attract any big thinkers that way.

No.

There's a lot. I know I'm all over the place.

No, I love it. It is. But how did you find yourself here? It It sounds like you have a wealth of knowledge of being able to... I love you used the word the mirror because I use that, the mirror of the business and seeing what's actually going on. It seems like you have the ability to work with a founder, which is a foundational, but then There's something called marketing, lead gen, sales, then operations, I think you said, fulfillment. I mean, those are the core four. Those are a lot of buckets. On average, where do you see the biggest problem being outside the founder, obviously, but the actual business side of what's going on in the business? Where do you see the biggest problem for a lot of these businesses that are wanting to scale?

In the smaller business side, if you're listening to this and you're somewhere between a half a million and five million, It's almost definitely your problem is a lack of focus and investment in consistent lead generation. Until you have figured out how to get your ideal customer to show up on your calendar and do it in a a predictable way where you understand exactly what it costs you, and you can do it more of it if you dump more money into it, then go figure that out before you do anything else. I see so many companies trying to master their fulfillment process or get the product perfect. The biggest lie ever told is if you build it, they will come. That is not true. I've almost never met a company or very few. I've met a hundred people who built a cool product and then no one ever shut up for it. I've met maybe a handful of people ever in my life that had people beating down the door for something and then they couldn't find a way to build it. If you have people beating down the door for your thing, you will find a way to deliver that product.

That's the biggest piece of it that people are missing.

Well, so my philosophy, it's the very same philosophy, is I say, I do not build it unless you sell it. If you can't sell it, you do not build it. Because I've seen so many people spend so much time on trying to build, like you said, the fulfillment. Think about the offer, think about the offer, They can't even sell it. And they actually go build, do the videos, do the whole course, create the community, and nobody's in there. And then now they're trying to sell something that isn't sellable. They're actually trying to optimize for something that was already broken from the beginning. Why do you think so many... And this because I run the same model as you do. Why do you think so many founders have, or business owners, or let's call them creators, have such a hard time with that concept? Sell before you build.

Well, I think they're Probably weren't... They didn't come up as salespeople. I think I met with a business owner today. Super successful marketing agency. All word of mouth. They're in a very specific space. They grew like crazy. And literally, in their space, they are one of the two or three players that matter. It is a very large space where marketing is a huge piece of the puzzle. They have created some of the biggest brands you know in that space from scratch. She's not even bragging in any way. I had to pull all this out of her. They don't need any marketing or sales. They just had a partial acquisition, and that person wants them to build real sales and marketing. That's how we got on the call. What was the question again? To dial it in. I want to not go all over the place.

No, the question was, why do you think founders, creators, whoever, the small business owner, has a hard time with the idea of selling it before you build it?

For her, sales is a four-letter word. I I mean, even when I started talking about outreach, you could just see this cringiness of like, Oh, I have to go and tell people? I understand it was great. It got you here. Word of mouth. You were in this space. By the way, we also had a couple of big clients that then had 30 brands underneath them. They had these individual... They hit a home run by doing a really good job and being in the right place and having those relationships. But if you want to scale it, the name of the game is sales. I think people think if they build a good enough product, they'll never have to go sell it. Then it gets them to whatever spot they're at, and then they're stuck, and they're like, Well, how do I get to the next step? It's like sales and marketing. What do we do? Who do we do it for? How do we tell those people that we're doing it? How do we get them to want to have a conversation with us? Then once they want to talk to us, how do we get them to give them They give us their money.

That is the next step. I think it's not said to people that way. I think there's probably people listening to this that have never heard anyone say it to them the way that I just said it. Another business owner I was meeting with earlier today, and he's got a small consulting business or whatever, and he's like, Yeah, we don't do any outreach or any other stuff. He's like, Well, why not? He's like, Well, I just don't really have the time for it. I go, Dude, it's the only thing that matters. You just told me you're running an employment center where you're not making money. You have all these people working for you, and you're doing an amazing job for your clients, but you're not making any money. You're running an employment center. You just see the look on his face and he's like, he's heartbroken. I'm like, it's so much more fun to run a business when you're profitable. I've done it both ways. I have done it where you're losing money. It sucks. When you're going home and you're like, How am I going to make payroll? There's nothing fun about it. It's hard either way, but it is a lot more fun when you're making money and you make money by focusing on those front-end processes.

I just don't know that business owners are having these conversations. I don't know that they are... I think a lot of them feel very lonely. Everyone's telling them they're doing a great job and they think that they're embarrassed to say that they're struggling. They're embarrassed to tell anybody that they're stuck. When they are, it's really uncomfortable to go, Hey, no, actually, you have to go out there and sell. I think for a lot of people, it's very uncomfortable. I always say to people, if you're not willing to sell, it's one of two things. You either don't believe in your product. They're like, No, I do. I'm like, Are you sure? Because if you really believe you are the best thing for those people, at least a specific group of people, that wouldn't you want... Aren't you a good person? Don't you want to share that with them? I was like, I never thought of it that way before. When I was in the mortgage industry, I was like, A lot of mortgage guys are going to lie to you. I will never lie to you. I will take care of you. I will make sure you close.

I believe that. I thought that no one would work harder for their I believe that. When I said it to people, they were like, I want to go with that guy. In management, I was like, I'm going to do everything I can to help you be successful. Do you believe me? They'd be like, Yes. I'm like, Cool. Come on my team. I believed it. I believed that no one would care about them as much as I did. First thing is, if you're not willing to sell, it's because you don't believe in your product. And by the way, you are your product in a lot of these different things. That's number one. Number two is, if you're really uncomfortable with it, it's because you've told yourself that it's icky in some way. And by the way, that's coming from some It's a preconceived notion because the times you were sold in your life by a good salesman, you didn't even know you were being sold. So what ones that you remember are the bad ones, and you're like, I don't want to be like them. And the short answer is like, great, you don't have to be.

But once we eliminate those two objections, if you believe in your product and it doesn't have to be icky, then why aren't you selling? I don't know. It's like, cool, let's go do it. Then we just start like, hey, get on a call with somebody, divorce yourself from the outcome, ask them questions until you figure out if you can help them or not. If you can't, tell them, Hey, I'm so glad I met you. Have Have a great day. If you can help them, it's your obligation to do it. By the way, in exchange for that help, they give you money. It's as simple as that. I think a lot of times, you just have to have a conversation with the founder, which is, How do we make this feel really good for you? Do you believe the product helps people? Yes, cool. Then go help people. But I think they have a really hard time connecting those dots sometimes.

I agree. I think people are scared of selling themselves. I like what you're saying is they either don't believe in themselves or they have a misconception of what sales is. They want to be sales or icky. But I always say to Henry Ford, like number one saying, right, is nothing happens until a sale is made, period. That's it. I think a lot of business owners, they hide behind the idea of the thought of success and thought of wealth, and they get caught up in the minutiae of doing work, building funnels, building back-end, building operations, but they never actually do the hard work that actually drives the wealth, which is the number one thing is sell.

I'll tell you, every person who I didn't think was a sound entrepreneur or founder, in other words, they're not following the book, they're doing whatever, but they were somehow succeeding, was because they had the ability and willingness to get their ideal customer profile, to have a conversation with them, and they were He's willing to do that all day long. I've seen people, you're like, I can't believe that I wouldn't buy a shirt from that guy, and people are buying $100,000 of software. Why? Well, because he's calling those people relentlessly, acts like he belongs in the room, has those conversations, goes to the conferences, and is hustling constantly to make sure he's talking to those people. If you're willing to do that, you can solve for almost anything. If you're not willing to do that, good luck.

Do you find with these small business owners that one of the biggest challenges they have is they don't actually understand their IPC and the offer to the IPC?

I think they don't know how. I think I hear a lot. I'll give you another example. Somebody will try to explain to me what they do, and they're like, Listen, and They're using a lot of weird terminology or big buzzwords. I'm like, Hey, I'm not really getting it. I'm a pretty smart guy. They're like, Well, it's very industry-specific. I'm like, Cool. I promise you you you're going to fail. They're like, Whoa. I'm like, What? If That is the greatest myth people tell themselves. A doctor is doing something that I don't really understand, but his job is to explain it to me in a way where I can go take action on it or understand what's happening to me. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm like, Cool. If you can't explain to my mom, who is retired, what you do in two sentences and who you do it for, your customers don't get it either. They're like, Well, no, you don't understand. My customers do get it. Man, I work with IT services companies that sell to CTOs. They speak a language I don't understand at all. When I get there, no one's buying from them. As soon as I put it in words I understand, people are booking meetings like crazy.

I've just seen it over and over again. You think people... How many people on this call don't know what an ICP is? Ideal customer profile, right? Most. They're probably looking it up or they're too embarrassed to even do that. They're afraid ChatGPT might judge them. We're talking over people's heads with all of this stuff. We have to be able to explain it. What do you do? I build World Class Revenue machines for B2B companies in 120 days. That's what I do. It's like, okay. And by the way, people go on a website. It's really clear what you do. I know I go to your website and I have no idea what you do. I have no idea what you do. And so I think it's over complicated. And I think that when you're in it and you're building it, you start to think everyone has the same knowledge base that you do. You start explaining what you do in a way that maybe they get. But I'll tell you, those companies that I have those conversations with, when I meet with the other people in the company one-on-one, I go, Hey, what are you guys doing?

Who do you do it for? I'll get 10 answers from 10 different people and none of them are good. That company is struggling because everyone's rowing in their own direction. It's about what makes a company successful? Hire really great people, create an environment where they can thrive, let them all know exactly where we're going. If everybody there knows this is what we do and who we do it for, then you're giving everyone the freedom to use all of their power and knowledge to get you to that place. If everyone's confused about it, good luck. Because then it's like you They almost have to get there by accident otherwise.

That's a hard one because you're asking founders to think differently in that. If they're in that gap, is to get clear. What I found in my experience, too, is, again, we're going to use buzzwords, but getting them to niche down first. But I can help everybody. As you know, you try to go help everybody, you're helping nobody. Then there's this gap of trying to help the right somebody, and then knowing how to speak to them. From what I'm hearing From you, though, it sounds like you do a lot of more sales. You help with the sales process, but you also do marketing.

Is that-We do whatever is necessary to fix the entire go-to-market process. I have a client right now that's on board this week. The sales guy who runs their sales team is elite, probably the best in his industry. This is a company, there's 50 companies in this space. This guy is really, really good. I'm not messing with him or his sales process at all. This company has a product that is better, faster, and cheaper than the competition. I always say, if you have one of those three, you can build a company. If you have two of those three, it's a no brainer. If you have three out of that three, you shouldn't even need a salesperson. The problem with this company is they have no marketing, none. They're growing like crazy. They're doing really well. They have no marketing. The sales guy is doing a great job. But so with them, it's all going to be messaging and marketing and lead distribution.

Yeah, like driving leads.

Driving leads. Maybe I'll break that sales guy, but he's built big companies before. He understands sales. I've met with him. I don't think I need to mess with that, so I'm not going to. For them, I'm coming in as a chief marketing officer, and we're going to go ahead and fill that out. For another company who's like, Hey, listen, our sales guys generate leads. They're the ones dialing whatever it is. That's their sales process. It's a lower ticket thing. Cool. Then it's a sales gig. Everything's about messaging. We have to get the right words and we have to really dial into what moves our ideal customer to move forward with us. But then once we get that messaging, we fix whatever is broken. Some companies, it's a founder doing sales and I'm building out everything from scratch. Sometimes I'm coming into a company that's pretty well established in one or two areas and we're just fixing the third. But through the discovery process, we do a diagnosis. Really what we need is perfect alignment between messaging lead generation and sales process with the technology underneath it, holding it all together at the end of the four months.

We plan it, we build it, we test it, and then we let right off into the sunset.

And then ready for scale. Let's take a step back a little bit because we're talking a little technical here. I want to take a step back about who you are. Mark, how did you get into this space? What did you learn? It sounds like you had a quite successful year with mortgages. Sorry, not a year, but a- Career. Career. Tell us a little bit about that. How did you end up going from owning mortgage businesses to consulting businesses across the nation?

Well, it all started because I was a horrible student, and that's how you end up in the mortgage industry. Because if you get really good grades in college, you don't usually end up selling mortgages. It was the one place where my grades didn't matter. But I found that call center and moved up and then started companies from there. I would say I wasn't even necessarily a naturally entrepreneurial person, but I knew what work I wanted to do and how much money I wanted to make. At some point in the mortgage space, it just became obvious that that was the way to do it. The The thing that made it very difficult for me is I'd not come from a family that was entrepreneurial or in the mortgage space or built companies or businesses. I was very closed off to the idea that business was similar. I didn't read any books. I didn't ask anybody for help. Consultants, I'd be like, How's anyone going to help me with my business? My business, how's anyone going to know more than me about this? I told myself all these stories. Then I ended up selling that company for pennies on the dollar.

If I could go back and knowing what I know now and talk to the kid who sold that company, I'd probably still own it and I would have made 100 times as much money. What happened was I sold that company and I moved to Charleston. Then I met this guy, Rich Whitel, who was about to take over Princeton Mortgage. He hadn't really build anything, but he went to Cornell. He knew all the right people. He would call CEOs of Fortune 100 companies for conversations, and they would take his call. I never dreamed of it. He'd read every book, and not only did he read the book, but he'd pull the book off the shelf and turn to the page. He'll be like, This is remember, I was just so blown away by this guy. I know 10 years later, I still am. I did this six years with them. In the first four of it, I was just playing catch up. I was reading all the books. I was having all the conversations. What it did is it took all that stuff I learned through pain, millions of dollars in mistakes. And by the way, I wouldn't trade any of that for the world right now because it gives me such an authenticity when I'm dealing with people who are bootstrapping it and building it.

I've done that. I've been there. Then all of a sudden, I had all these frameworks where I could suddenly explain very clearly what I had learned in a way that other people could understand. It wasn't just me saying it. I was like, Hey, this really smart person said it. It wasn't just Mark's school. I thought it was that next step. Did very well in the mortgage industry with Princeton. But then when rates went up, I was like, Hey, I just started my '40s. I'm still in build mode. I don't want to wait around for the next refi boom. I want to go. I took a year off, really trying to figure out what I wanted to do. That time, I kept helping my friends and family build businesses, and I Loved it. I got to learn about new businesses. I was having such an impact on people. I was doing something I thought was so obvious. It was like, What do you mean you're not doing that? What do you mean you're not doing this? They're like, Dude, no one's ever said any of that to me before. I was like, Well, I think there's a business here, maybe.

I started doing a little bit more and a little bit more. Then in June, I was like, Man, I love this. I get to help other people get to where they want to go, which has been the unlock for me the whole time. Everything in my career that's happened that's good is because, Hey, how did you build this company? Well, I hired a bunch of salespeople and I obsessed about how to help them hit their goals. Then we did. It was always thinking that way about it. It was my first conversation with Rich where he said, What do you want people to say about you at your funeral? I said, I want there to be a lot of people there who helped me get them, who I helped, who say he helped me get to where I wanted to go. Now I get to do that in such a real way with founders, with their teams. We got a quote earlier this year where there was a company that hired us and we do sales, sales and marketing. The head engineer calls me up and he goes, You did more for our sales and marketing in 30 days than what we were able to do in the last 30 years.

I was like, What do you mean? He's like, Dude, I couldn't tell anybody what we did or who we did it for. We were scrambling around to take every client to walk in the door. We were trying to find a way to help that person because we had no clear definition of who we were trying to help and what we didn't, didn't do. He's like, You just cleaned all that up and told us internally what our jobs were. And suddenly we're all moving in the right direction and the clients are showing up. When you're getting that feedback, it's like, Wow, I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I've always felt like I was doing what I'm supposed to be doing. But in this moment, I never felt more like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

I love that. I mean, if anybody was listening, they could probably hear your conviction the whole way through. But you used a word, and I wanted to jump on it because I think it's very important, and it sounds like you're in it right now, but use the word earlier, which is called alignment. Yeah. How important is alignment for businesses, for individuals, for companies?

I would argue it's the most important thing other than the fact that you can't have alignment unless you first declare very specifically what you're trying to do and where you're trying to go. So first thing, I would say, the most important thing is like, Hey, we're trying to get the 10 million ARR and I'm going to sell. Cool. If you know that going in, that's a very clear path. We know what to get there. If you're like, Hey, I'm building this business. I want to work here for 40 years and I want to give it to my kids and I want to be doing a billion dollars a year. That's a very specific thing. So first thing is, what are we doing here? Why are we doing this? Where are we trying to go? Second thing is an alignment, which is both In terms of your thought process, what your team thinks, the direction they're all moving, and then how you guys talk about that both internally and externally is the hack. If you have a bunch of smart, motivated people who all know what you're trying to do, and they the freedom to operate in that with some rules of the game in place, we call them culture and values.

What are our rules of the game? That's the unlock. But I will tell you, one out of 100 companies that I meet with where it feels like there's alignment. I see founders tolerating misalignment out of fear or what they'll say is prioritization. But how many times you see a sales team and a marketing team with different leaders who don't talk to each other? All the time. I'm not saying they don't get along.

They They might like each other, but they don't talk to each other.

It's like, okay, if I'm using this language to generate leads and my sales team is using this language in the first five minutes of the sales call, you're teaching everyone out of the gate not to trust you. You have a cynical buyer base to begin with. They are looking for signals of, can I trust you or not trust you? So simple. And by the way, this is happening at a subconscious level for your buyer. They go, Wow, I clicked on this lead because it said you guys could do this. By the way, the company can. The sales guy comes in and starts talking about this other thing that they do or this from this other angle. This person goes, Wow, that's interesting. Suddenly, they have this feeling of like, I think I'm in the wrong place. Then they don't buy and you'll never even know it. It's because of misalignment. I see this all people are like, Why do you spend so much time on the words and the language and the messaging. It's because when you have unified words you use, it allows everything to move 10 times as quickly. It's almost like if you're in a kayak rowing crew, it's like if one person is rowing against you or just not rowing at all and holding their thing in their hole, their paddle in the water, the boat just spins around in circles.

You can all paddle very slowly. But if you're in unison and doing it together, the boat will go straight and it will move. As soon as one person stops paddling, we just go in circles.

I call it doctrine. I create doctrines for companies, which is the messaging, the marketing, the psychology at every layer of where they are part of them. I'm going to say the funnel, online funnels. And it's not a marketing plan. I tell them this is the doctrine, this is the Bible of what we actually represent and where we come from. If we waver off this, we have problems. If marketing is talking at different layers than what the doctrine says, we are going to have problems, whether it's sales, marketing, fulfillment. So it is all about alignment. It is all about making sure that the signal, you just said the energy, the signal is also to on the same wavelength alignment so that the prospect, whether it's cold, never heard from you, all the way to on a call with you, all the way to basically making a buying decision, they're getting the same frequency from all departments.

I love that, by the way. Let me ask you a question then. When you think about that, what company do you use as your North Star or a story or a book where you were like, Oh, man, that founder, that company did that in a way where that's what these other should be emulating? What's your go-to example?

My go-to example on that one for me personally is the company that I got to work with and build. I was a partner in it in 2018. We went from, not massive, but we went from zero to 38 million in 18 months. And what I saw, it wasn't all great, but the vision that was sold and the way that everyone operated is what takes This is what I saw it takes to build that type of company. Now, is the vision coming from a good place? That's a different story. But when I look at what I know what it takes, I think of what we did back then. And then other big companies, I think about that that withstand the founder, meaning you can keep growing and the founder is not part of it because it created its own mechanism, an organism, and it built. Founder there or not, or companies big ones like Apple, for instance. Steve Jobs is no longer here. The company is still thriving. Is it on the same mission? No.

But does that- All I know is that my Siri still doesn't work. It's 2026 almost, and Siri never got there.

It's well because the company's changed. For sure. Therefore, they want money. I mean, look at the iPhone. Has an iPhone really been upgraded in the last 10 years? No, it does not. The innovation isn't there. But what I see with a company Anything like that, though, is it still... It's taken on its own mechanism, organism. That thing is going to go as long as they have the right CEOs in place. Now, is the right mission, is the right thing that we want to agree on? No. But does that thing still make... They're printing money over there. Printing money, yeah. Printing. So I think about companies like that. Amazon, I don't know much about Amazon. I just haven't done the research on what Amazon's done. I'm just being transparent here. But massive. I don't even can't even. My brain can't even comprehend honesty. If you try to even understand how big that company is and what that company does, Amazon trucks on the road, different people, different countries, products, all that, my brain explodes just even thinking about it.

Yeah, those are good examples. I'll just share. One of my favorites that people really relate to is Netflix. I like that one for a couple of different reasons. One is Because Netflix has been three completely separate companies when you think about this, and each time has just completely eliminated their competition. First time was we're going to mail people movies. It sounds like an insane idea, right? But they put Blockbuster out of business by mailing people movies. They created a business around that. They did it through a subscription model, which is like they came up with new ways to do it. Second thing is they really invented streaming technology. They were the first ones who could do streaming, and they At one point, 80% of all internet traffic was people streaming stuff on Netflix. They invented the technology to be able to do that and dominated in that space. While they were doing that, they created this model of buying content where they were early to it, people had completely undervalued it. They understood the value differently than everyone else, and they made a fortune. That's great. It's two different companies and two completely different companies, and they dominated it.

Then they go, Hey, I know Hollywood's been making movies and TV shows for 100 years, and it's been the same players most of the time, building those big production companies. We're going to come in. By the way, within a couple of years, we're going to win all the awards. We're going to get all the viewership. We're going to get all the proceeds stuff. We're going to attract all the biggest people to work with us, and we're going to dominate. And they did. It's insane. Team that they were able to do that to a 100-year-old industry in that disruptive way. You said, How did that happen? This company is famous for their culture deck. They know who they are. They are run like a professional sports team. By the way, the idea is attract the most talented people you can and give them the most amount of freedom that you possibly can to achieve a very clear mission and support them and get out of the way. And by the way, you get a 51% vote on what you're doing, and I get a 51% vote on whether or not you work here. Cool. You're running this project, you're doing it.

By the way, here's my notes on your TV show. You get to run it wherever you want. By the way, if people watch your TV show, we'll give you six more TV shows. If people don't watch your TV show, we're not working with you anymore. And that's our 51% vote. How do you attract the best directors in the world? You give them creative freedom. You give them a big budget and creative freedom. Then create amazing shows. Hbo was the first one to do that with creative freedom. It was like, No, you guys do it your way. Suddenly, all the best shows are there. There's so much we can learn from that. But Netflix, super... By the way, most people work in Netflix, work there for a season or two, four or five years. It's a really grinded out culture of doing great things. We're doing great work. We get to celebrate those. We get to make a lot of money while we're there. We get to pay people well. We get a ton of creative freedom. We get to learn stuff. We attract really great people to what we're doing in our mission here. Then we have that culture.

Bridgewater, Ray Dalio is another guy I just really admire with this stuff. To exactly what you're talking about is, let's create a framework for what our company is, what we do, and how we talk about it. Then let's set really ambitious goals that attract big people who want to do ambitious things, and then give them freedom inside of that operating model that we very clearly defined to go accomplish those goals. 51% vote, 100% responsibility for the result. Then we make it really clear and go. That's what we bring to these companies, and I think it's awesome.

I love the... I play sports, so I really do love the analogy of you're building a sports team here. When you take it from that perspective, if you're building a Super Bowl, I'm just going to use the Super Bowl for this case, whatever, the Super World Series or a Super Bowl sports team, year after year. They cut players, they trade players, they cut staff faster than ever. Why? Because they're trying to optimize for the win. It's not personal, it's just the name of the game, right? So I like that idea. Ideology and thought process. It's like, okay, if I was a professional sports team, just even as a business owner, agency owner myself, who's on my winning team? I always looked at it as if I went to war, who am I bringing and who can I Trust. Yeah. And I had my business last year, I had to make the... I fired 50 % of my staff because of that. 50 %.

And that's not a weird number.

The funny thing is when you do that, all of a sudden, we become more profitable, we get more clients, we move faster, and we see more money, which is a very interesting thing, right? And all those other people, they all went on. Some of them went off and done greater things, greater things that they could ever do here. Why? They were never actually in alignment here. It doesn't mean I'm less than. It doesn't mean I couldn't provide them the best opportunity. What it means was the opportunities that I had here weren't in alignment for them. It's a good thing. It's a good thing.

When I first started companies, I used to think that if I let somebody go, they were going to die. Like, literally, the personal responsibility I would take is like, what are they going to do? How are they going to pay their bill? They all made it. I'm not saying that losing your job isn't incredibly painful or scary or anything else, but it's better ultimately than being stuck in a place where it's not optimal for you to do the best work of your life and for you to thrive. We very clearly define what it means to thrive, and we will help people get their next job, and we like to do severance and all those different things. But at the end of the day, yes, we're trying to win a championship. By the way, you see it with professional sports teams all the Where do the veteran players go for discounts when they're free agents to the organizations that are committed to winning? By having a commitment to winning and showing that you're willing to do the difficult things, people are like, Oh, if I tell people that we're going to let them go up the end to perform, we're not going to be able to attract winners.

It's the opposite. A players don't worry that you're going to cut them. They're 100% sure that they're going to crush it, whether they're right or wrong. I've never once looked at somebody and I'm like, Dude, I don't know if I can hack it there. That's just not how I think. It might be true, but I want to win. I I want to go join a team where I'm the weekly- Hey, listen, A players hang out with A players.

A players don't want to hang out with C players. So if your culture is a bunch of C players, you're never going to attract an A player. Problem is you're going to think a B player looks like an A player because you have all C players. That's a big problem I see. And then the other thing I see with people is they're not holding their own. Founders are not holding their own rules and their own accountability. So they're saying X, but displaying then wondering why there's disruption.

I often say to people, how much would your behavior at work change if your wife and kids were in the office with you? For me, it was a real thing. I had my wife and kids in the office when I was building my own company. I'm the same person. For better or worse, you get the same version of me wherever you are. My version of integrity is like, I don't lie about anything. People are like, What do you mean? I go, Well, if I'm walking down the street with my wife and a beautiful woman walks by and I'm looking at her. My wife goes, Were you looking at her? I go, Yes, I was. People think that's crazy. I go, I would rather have the discomfort. I'm telling my wife I was checking that person out than the dysfunction of being somebody who lies to my wife. That's it. Discomfort over dysfunction. I do the same way as business. I'm the same way as my family, with my friends, whatever it is. When I see business owners out of alignment, it's the same thing. It's like, if you're willing to behave one way here and one way here, then what you're really saying is you're hoping nobody notices that you do whatever you like whenever you feel like it.

That's really what it is. That does create a toxic culture. Again, I'm not saying you can't succeed that way. I've seen, in spite of these things, people who are really good at enough one or two tricks to get it all to work. But there's always friction. There's always Ajma.

It shows up in other places. If it's not showing up in the business, it's showing up at home. It's not showing at home, it's showing up in relationships. If it's not showing up in relationships, it's showing up within the relationship themselves. Shows up in their own spirituality. Again, it's the world of the economy. You You can't say you're doing X and then doing Y. There's what we call this full alignment. Hard place to get to as a founder, but I know once you do, everything clicks, everything just becomes a little easier. Not saying it's always going to be easier. It just becomes a little lighter, a little easier because you're allowing for a little bit more freedom. Then that freedom is where all the great stuff happens.

One of the things I always preach, too, is I preach radical transparency. We share almost everything at my companies with almost everyone. You tell people when you're losing money, I'm I need those people to be the ones to do something about it. Otherwise, I'm owning all of it myself, and these are the ones who have to go out and do the work. Again, I'm unwilling to walk around pretending anything. You know what I mean? It's just not Once I'm out of alignment that way, I'm not doing my best work. I'm not feeling good about what I'm doing. I think there's tremendous freedom in just saying things the way they are and showing everybody what's the truth. Again, if you know what the mission is and what the rules are, you'll attract the right people who want to go on that journey with you, even when times are tough.

I totally agree. So as we really do come to an end here, for anyone listening, founders listening, that might be in this spot, might not be in a complete alignment, might have a marketing message or a sales message. Where can they find you? How can they work with you? How can we get them? How start having you serve them?

I appreciate. So my website is IGtms. Com. It's integrated. Go to market solutions, IGtms. Com. You can find me, Mark Douglas Gordon on LinkedIn or Mark D. Gordon on Instagram. Reach out to me, book a call. My phone number is on LinkedIn, my calumni is there. I say this because no matter what stage you are as a business owner, again, if you're not at least doing two or three million, it's probably not a fit. I'd still like to meet you. I'd still like to help. I genuinely enjoy meeting entrepreneurs, genuinely enjoy learning about what people are doing in their businesses. I do believe very much that the more of those conversations I can have, the more it's going to be good everything about who I want to be and what I want to do. If you're out there right now, no matter what stage you're at in your business, if you're feeling stuck or you have some specific questions, you think I might be able to help, reach out, book a call. Happy to meet with you. That's where you can find me.

Awesome. Thanks so much for being here. I appreciate you. That's another episode of the Vault Unlocked.