Over fifteen years I sold everything from pharmaceuticals – which we manufactured at our own production facility – to advisory, analytics, delivery services and risk models – that keep Europe’s banking system (and your money) safe – to complex software and transformation services – which helped FTSE100 companies make daily financial and operational decisions.

They look wildly different products and verticals, but I was able to do it well because the job didn’t change: understand what’s broken today, articulate how my solution would help, identify who had a stake in making a decision, and create a narrative, the assets, and an environment where they could all align on that decision.

Over time, founders, their teams and their investors started ringing me with the same kind of problem. Good product, great team, unlimited hustle, but revenue gone flat. Each of them already had a fix in mind: a new website, more ads, a sales hire. Most of the time they were fixing the wrong thing, and paying for it in months they didn’t have.

Almost always, the leak lived in one of five places: how the company talks about their product and to whom, how they turn interest into conviction, how the conviction turns to revenue, how the team delivers on the promise, and how do they retain and expand each account.

This became the PACED framework, and we started PacedRevenue to apply this framework on every revenue problem to isolate the actual problem to fix, design that fix, prove it works, and then hand the keys back to the team.

What makes us different is that we’ll tell you what we see, even when it’s awkward. The problem might be your price or who you’re selling to. Quite often it’s the founder, and we’ll say that too. A lot of firms in this space recommend whatever they happen to sell. We’d rather tell you the truth and lose the job.

Honestly, the first ones came out of my phone. They were founders I’d got to know over the years, and a few people I’d sold to in my corporate days who had gone off to build their own companies. I didn’t have a proper website. What I had was a habit of telling people straight what I thought was going wrong in their sales, and a few of them asked me to stay and help fix it.

Today, most new business starts on LinkedIn. I write about the sales problems I see every week in plain English, and people message me saying “this is exactly us.” Referrals are the other big source. A founder we’ve helped tells another founder, who’s usually in the same mess.

More and more people now find us through the free self-assessment on our website. You answer a few questions about how you sell, and it shows where things are most likely getting stuck. Plenty of people take the result and fix it themselves, which I’m genuinely fine with. The ones who want a hand get in touch.

Next, we’re building relationships with investors, so that when a company they’ve backed can’t sell, we’re the first call.

The decision was getting specific. For a while we tried to help everyone with everything. Then we looked at how people were actually finding us, and the same searches kept coming up, things like "do linkedin ads work for small businesses" and “when should I hire my first salesperson”. So we listened. Most of our work now centres on specific moments almost every growing company hits, like getting the first 10 customers, to proving a repeatable enterprise acquisition playbook to building a predictable, high-quality pipeline.

The mistake taught me some humility. For a while our website described us as a “GTM infrastructure firm”. I was quite proud of that line. If you don’t know what it means, that’s exactly my point. Who wakes up in the morning and types that into Google? Nobody. I’d spent years telling clients to use their customers’ words, and then I did the opposite with my own business.

The fix was simple. We started writing down what founders actually say on calls, and that resulted in founders coming on calls and saying "I read your page and it felt like you were in my head!".

The biggest change is AI. You can get a sales plan out of ChatGPT in thirty seconds. Claude can put together an extremely sophisticated and personalised outreach campaign for hundreds of stakeholders in a weekend, and every company is now selling AI SDRs. This has led to an increased competence (or at-least, a feeling of it) to founders and sellers, and made the build-vs-buy decision the biggest hurdle to getting a mandate.

People are also much less patient. Nobody wants a six-month consulting project and a thick report they’ll never open. They want to know what to do on Monday morning. Our typical customer now is someone who identified a revenue problem 6 months ago, tried solving it with AI since then, and ultimately decided that what they need is someone who has sat across the table from a lot of buyers, looks at their particular situation and says “this is where it’s going wrong.”

So we changed how we work. We compressed our typical campaign go-live from 5 days to 24 hours, and removed any lock-ins. We got better and faster at delivering the work, so we passed on the savings to our customers in the form of a lower retainer, and instead implemented a success-aligned pricing model where we win when they win.

We also spend a significant amount of time now enabling our customers to do more of the work, if they like, with AI. That keeps them agile and transforms the relationship from a vendor-buyer dynamic to a partnership.

First, talk to the people you want to sell to before you build much of anything. Have proper conversations where you mostly listen. Write down the exact words they use to describe their problem, because those words will become your website and your pitch. I learnt that one the hard way.

Then sell something small, early, for real money. One person paying you teaches you more than a hundred people telling you it’s a great idea.

Ignore the logo, the perfect website, the brand guidelines and the clever tools. A brand guideline is useless until you have a brand. I’ve watched founders spend months picking software to manage customers they didn’t have yet.

And be careful about hiring a salesperson too early. If you can’t explain how you sell, in writing, a new hire can’t copy it. They’ll spend their first months guessing, and you’ll end up blaming them for something that was never their fault. If you’re wondering whether you’re ready for that first sales hire, that’s exactly the question we help founders answer at PacedRevenue.