Playing Hide and Seek with the Revenue Nut

Glen Hellman September 13, 2011 Tweet

In most startups, the CEOs typically wear multiple hats.  You arrive at work  in the morning and put on the CEO hat. One hour later, you try on the COO hat, and then you switch to Marketing, and then to Sales.  It’s exciting, challenging and fun, and all too often it provides a CEO with a great place to hide.

Let’s look at that big, bill-paying, 10 gallon cowboy hat…the sales hat.  That’s a great hat to be wearing when contracts are flowing into the company at such a brisk clip that it dwarfs the rush of water flowing over Niagara Falls.  Yet, there is no worse hat to be caught wearing when the landscape is barren and rainmaking has yet to begin.  Make a cold call? Go to a networking event?  Or maybe you could put on that old marketing hat and tinker around with a nifty new product plan.

The issue is that, in most small businesses, it’s probably a good idea to have 1 person solely responsible for making your revenue nut.  Someone needs to have their butt on the line for the sole responsibility of making rain.

Where does the buck stop on generating revenue in your company?  Is there a person in your company who has no place to run and hide from the responsibility of making your revenue nut?