Anything But Sales, and the Shopify Workflow That Was Quietly Breaking Our Ads

Matt is finalizing a 13-page lending story and three-year forecast ahead of meetings with lenders, while Michael is deep in post-IMTS follow-up and caught in the pinch of being big enough to have big-company problems without the headcount to fix them. Michael shares what diving into the data revealed: a 29-day average time to close, a floor of four turnkeys a month, and the fear of overselling. Matt’s advice: sell like you will oversubscribe, put first come, first served in your contracts, and have the conversation if it happens. In sales and marketing, Matt is down to two sales candidates, preparing an e-book for the printing and converting space, and heading into a run of Pack Expo, TLMI, and a speaking panel. He explains why his network built over the last decade still drives more revenue than every trade show combined. Michael talks through e-commerce volatility after a Google update, sending 46 hardware quotes in a single week, and the attribution problem of not knowing whether LinkedIn, Google, or something else earned the sale. Inspired by the book Oversubscribed, he admits founders will try anything but sales, and lays out a shift toward enterprise customers, distributors, and complete solutions, with Shopify treated as upside instead of the foundation. On engineering, Matt shares a bridge crane lesson that saved real money: one 5-ton bridge with two 2.5-ton hoists instead of a 10-ton system. He also has senior and junior controls roles open. Michael admits to feature creep in his proposal software, compares Loom video walkthroughs against formal proposals, and previews fourth and fifth axis bar feeding. In continuous improvement, Michael explains how logging B2B orders as $0 Shopify draft orders streamlined fulfillment but fed bad conversion data to Google and Meta, contributing to a roughly 30% drop in return on ad spend, and why unwinding a process the whole team loves has to be done carefully. Matt covers ClickUp, SOPs that are finally being used, an aftermarket recurring revenue model, a decision authority table to keep routine questions off his desk, and why he will rent a 3D scanner before buying one.