The first two calls went nowhere. He was headstrong — confident in his own diagnosis, certain he understood what was broken in every department. I let him talk. Most CEOs do this. They’ve built something real and they trust the instincts that got them there. That’s exactly why they get stuck.
On the second call I stopped him and asked one question.
“How long have you been trying to hit $100M?”
Three years.
“And you’re still at $50M?”
Yes.
“Then don’t you think you should try a different approach?”
The line went quiet. That was the moment.
He gave me access to his entire executive team. I interviewed every leader separately — Sales, Support, Marketing, Development, Customer Success. I didn’t tell them what the others had said. I just asked each one to tell me what was wrong.
Every single leader blamed a different department. Sales blamed Development. Development blamed Support. Support blamed Marketing. Marketing blamed Sales. No one looked inward. Just six smart people sitting in the same building, pointing at each other, wondering why nothing was changing.
I brought them into a boardroom. I didn’t open with a framework. I told them about my son.
He played college football at the University of Utah. Every player on the field can only see their own view — their assignment, their read, what’s directly in front of them. If they only ever trusted that one angle, they’d never get better. So they watch film. Sideline. End zone. Overhead. Every perspective at once. That’s when you stop playing your position and start understanding the game.
I looked at that leadership team and said: “You’re watching the field from your own position. You’re not watching the film.”
You could feel the room change.
Then I asked them one question. Not whose fault the problem was.
“What can your department do to fix the churn?”
That reframe changed everything. Because here’s what the data already showed — what they couldn’t see until they stopped defending territory: this company was losing 22.5% of their customers every month. But they were acquiring nearly the same number of new ones. So the revenue chart looked stable. Nothing appeared broken.
They weren’t declining. They were on a treadmill. Every dollar of new revenue was replacing a dollar walking out the back door. They had been running full speed for three years and never moved an inch.
Once each leader stopped asking whose fault it was and started asking what they could fix, the answer was everywhere. Development had been over-customizing for top clients instead of building for the whole base. Marketing was acquiring customers that Support couldn’t retain. Sales was closing deals that Customer Success couldn’t service.
Each department found their own lever. Not because I told them what to do. Because they finally watched the film together.
One month later: churn dropped from 22.5% to under 2%. In under eight months, they crossed $100M. Three years later: $800M — and approaching $1B.
I didn’t fix their churn.
I changed what they were looking at.
That is the only thing I do.
