175 - Your business is not too small to have the problems as big ones

So Rich, let's start off then.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you got into doing what you do.

Thanks, Chantal.

Well, I have to put my hand up to being a uni dropout.

I was very excited about going off to uni and studying modern languages.

But I fortunately, I guess in hindsight, bumped into that inspirational entrepreneur that you just mentioned who had left a large company called Unilever and started a small business.

So I was part of his journey for the first four and a half years of my career.

So it wasn't my business.

I didn't have any share in it, but I learned a lot from working with this guy.

So that was my intro.

And then I've had various businesses throughout the current one.

The virtual sales director didn't start up till about 2012 when I sold another business and started in this one.

So tell us, what does the virtual sales director actually do?

Well, the expression does exactly what it says on the tin.

It isn't quite true in this case.

It does some of what it says on the tin.

I started off because I observed that a lot of companies, not necessarily just small companies, but let's say growth companies, so different sizes, were struggling to grow their business, growing the top line.

They had often good people in control of the bottom line, good financial people, for example, but they really struggled with business growth.

And I saw a pattern in many of them that they would not really know what they were looking for.

They would employ somebody who seemed to have the right credentials.

This would come as a massive cost to their business.

They would they would have.

hopes and expectations and aspirations that this person would work out and unfortunately the story that i got was ah well she he they didn't work out as we expected but it took us a long time to find out and they ended up in a rather uncomfortable financial hole which have then then of course would color their thinking about where to go next so i'd almost bump into people or people would come to me and say Rich, we don't want to repeat this pattern.

Is there some way we can mitigate risk and yet get the experience of somebody who has grown businesses, recruited sales forces, recruited sales managers? And this is a challenge for, I think, some people, I don't want to generalize, but some people from very specific professional and maybe even tech backgrounds.

They've not been through the sales side of an organization.