Built to Sell Chapter 4: When Your Own Team Pushes Back

You can handle angry clients. You can deal with late payments. You can even survive losing a big account. But when your own team starts fighting you? That hits different.

Chapter 4 of “Built to Sell” by John Warrillow (ISBN: 978-1-59184-582-9) is called “Pressure from Within” and it is exactly what it sounds like. Alex is trying to change his company, and the people inside it want things to stay the same.

A Bad Morning Getting Worse

The chapter opens with Alex having one of those days. You know the type. Everything is annoying and nothing is getting done.

His copywriter Tony keeps turning in bad work. Not bad in one specific way that Alex can point to and fix. Bad in every possible way. Alex can’t even figure out where to start with the feedback, so he just writes REWRITE across the draft and walks away. Not great management, but I get it. Sometimes you look at someone’s work and you just don’t have the words.

Then he catches Sarah, one of his designers, browsing vacation websites instead of working on a client project. She’s already given notice, so she’s clearly checked out. Alex doesn’t even bother hearing her excuse.

And the money situation is still tight. He needs $24,000 to cover payroll and rent, and he’s only got twelve business days to find it.

So here’s what happened next. Elijah, the junior designer whose mom works at their biggest client MNY Bank, walks in with a smug grin and squeezes Alex for a $2,500 raise. Alex has to give it to him because the MNY Bank connection is too important. This is what happens when your business depends on relationships instead of a product. People hold you hostage.

Ted Says No More Side Projects

Alex meets with Ted for their weekly session, and he’s excited. He sold a logo project to Spring Valley Homes. But he also tells Ted about a potential advertising campaign from an old client. Radio ads, newspaper, maybe TV.

Ted’s face says it all before he even speaks.

He asks Alex a simple question: when will you actually get paid for that ad work? Alex does the math. Six weeks to produce the work, then thirty days to get paid. That’s 75 days from winning the project to seeing any money.

Then Ted asks who will actually do the work. Sarah is leaving. Elijah is too junior. Chris will be busy with logos. There’s nobody.

Here’s the thing Ted tells Alex that I think is the most important idea in this whole chapter. He says: “Clients will test your resolve every day. They’re used to bossing their service providers around.” If you say yes to everything, you never become a specialist. You just stay a generic agency that does whatever people ask.

Ted uses a line I really like: “It’s why heart surgeons don’t set broken ankles.”

And then he drops another truth bomb. When you specialize, you become more referable. If you’re just another marketing agency, nobody knows how to describe you to their friends. But if you’re the best logo design shop around, people remember that. They tell others. For every ad project you turn down, you win a logo project.

This is Ted’s Tip #6 in the book: Don’t be afraid to say no to projects.

Writing the Instruction Manual

Ted gives Alex his next assignment. Write a detailed instruction manual for the Five-Step Logo Design Process. Think of it like an assembly line with five machines, and you need to teach someone how to operate each one.

A big check from MNY Bank finally arrives. $52,000. Alex can breathe again. And with that weight off his shoulders, he sits down and writes the manual. Every question to ask clients in step one. Every detail of the personification exercise in step two. How many sketches to draw in step three. What paper to use for presentations in step four. Which color combinations work for style guides in step five.

He writes it so clearly that his 83 year old mother could follow it. That’s the goal. If your process needs you to explain it, it’s not a real process yet.

The Team Meeting Goes Sideways

Alex calls all seven employees into the boardroom. He’s nervous, and honestly, he should be.

He gives a solid presentation. Uses Southwest Airlines as an example of specialization. They only fly Boeing 737s so every mechanic and pilot knows one plane really well. He shows the Five-Step Process on PowerPoint. Reads a thank-you letter from a happy logo client. Passes around the instruction manual.

Forty-five minutes later, he opens it up for questions.

Rhina, an account director, is positive. She likes the idea of getting really good at one thing. Chris, a designer, is excited about doing more freehand sketching.

But then Elijah speaks up. “Specialization sounds great, but I thought advertising was supposed to be creative. What you’re talking about sounds like working in a factory.”

And that opens the floodgates. Dean says he wants to be a “trusted marketing adviser” for all clients, not just sell one service. Sarah says she doesn’t want to be “pigeonholed” by following rules.

I’ve seen this happen in IT so many times. You try to introduce a better process, and people resist because they think structure kills creativity. But here’s the problem. Without structure, you have chaos. And chaos is not creative. It’s just exhausting.

Alex Loses Another Employee

After the meeting, Alex pulls Elijah aside. He asks him a direct question: why did you become a designer?

Elijah talks about being creative as a kid, liking art class. And Alex tells him something blunt. This is a business first. If you want total creative freedom, go somewhere else.

Elijah sits there for a minute. Then he says he’s leaving. They shake hands and Elijah packs up his desk.

Alex feels powerful for about five minutes. Then reality hits. He’s now down to one designer. And Elijah’s mom works at MNY Bank, his biggest client. That could get ugly.

But then Rhina knocks on the door. She tells Alex she’s excited about the new direction. And that small moment of support keeps him going.

My Take on This Chapter

I have worked in places where management tried to change direction and half the team pushed back. It is painful. And the natural reaction is to compromise. To say okay, we’ll do logos AND some advertising on the side. Just to keep people happy.

But Ted is right. You can’t be “kind of” a specialist. You either commit or you don’t. The people who leave because they don’t like the new direction are the people who were never going to help you build something sellable anyway.

The instruction manual part is also really important. I think a lot of business owners skip this step. They have the process in their head but never write it down. And if it’s only in your head, you can never step away from the business. You ARE the business.

What I find realistic about this chapter is that change is messy. Alex loses another employee. He might lose a key client relationship. The team meeting goes badly. But he pushes forward anyway. That’s what it takes.

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