Behind the Scenes at Incite: April 2026
When Comfort Kills Your Marketing Team, and much more.....
Before we get into it, a quick honest moment.
As of the time I am writing this, no one is subscribed at this Insider Access level. Zero people. Not one.
And I’m writing it anyway.
Here’s why. I believe in what I’m sharing here so much that I’m not going to skip it because the audience is a ghost town. The seats are empty today. Hopefully not forever….. The people who eventually find this and decide to subscribe are going to want to read what was happening from the very first month, not just the month I started writing when someone started watching.
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Okay. Onto the month.
Tax season ended a few weeks ago. April fifteenth came and went. We didn’t notice…….I’m kidding. We noticed. Relief is the word that comes to mind.
This was the hardest tax season we’ve had in years. Not because of volume. We’ve handled volume before. It was hard because too many things were shifting at the same time and none of them were optional. Software changes the team didn’t ask for. (Lesson on due diligence there of vendor selection.) Process changes that came from the wrong person making them. (Something called non decision decisions, a phrase I learned from Ryan Deiss.) A major sales vendor relationship we need to unwind. Team members leaving to create a competing business. And people staying who probably shouldn’t be staying.
All these real life experiences will not only be enlighting for you, but I know you will find something that will relate to your own business. And….some golden nuggets of lessons learned which will prevent your need to suffer through some of these situations.
The Sales Vendor Unwind
The biggest story this month is that I told our largest sales vendor I want to unwind the relationship.
Eighty percent of our revenue was sold from one source. By every traditional measure, that relationship is the goose that lays the golden eggs. You don’t kill the goose.
I’m killing the goose.
In the coming months, I will share more about this situation. How we got into it? What was appealing to me about it? What the first signs of concern were? And what ultimately lead to my decision to end it.
But I’m still in the middle of this and I need to hold off until there is a resolution and finality to the relationship.
But one obvious takeaway: Do you know what concentration risk is? Having too many eggs in one basket. If you have concentration risk, which we do here, it will hurt your valuation if you want to exit. But the bigger danger is that it makes your business longevity very vulnerable.
Go through your client list. Do you have a few clients that make up the majority of your revenue? You need to fix that immediately.
In our case, we don’t have client concentration risk. An individual client is less than 1% of our revenue.
But we do have channel concentration risk where we are too reliant on one revenue source.
Decreasing your concentration risk is worth more than $150. Just saying.
The People.. What Could Have Been
Three meaningful exits this month.
Our bookkeeping director quit abruptly. We were working with her on some items that needed improving. Things were amicable. We had paid for a training on a new revenue stream we are going to be offering. Fully trained on our dime, she quits. No conversation with me. Just quits. She made a LinkedIn post celebrating the start of her new business offering the same service she just finished training on within a week.
You may think I’m bitter because I wanted to frame it that way. Because I see posts like this on social media all the time. My team members owe me nothing. She was going to be fired within a couple of months. Why? Because we don’t really owe her anything either. And she wasn’t doing a good job. The base premise of an employee relationship is transactional. I accept that.
We do strive to be better than that, but the argument still holds….employees can quit when they want with no notice and companies can fire employees effective immediately.
I also invested in her. Money for training. Time to advise, educate, and give guidance. But she left. And now, as a more competent individual, she can go out and create a competing company. I hope she’s successful. Sincerely. Why invest in your team? Because what happens if you don’t…and they stay.
Those are some lessons you can apply.
But here is one more from this specific situation. Then we’ll get into a few more situations after that.