A 5-minute read that will help you more than your last sales strategy meeting
If your only plan to improve profit is “sell more”, this one’s for you.
You can absolutely grow a business by increasing revenue.
But if you’re honest, you probably already feel like the effort required to squeeze out the next bit of growth is getting heavier, not lighter.
And a big part of the reason is because you’re trying to grow on top of leaks you haven’t dealt with.
Selling more is not the only way to improve a P&L.
And in most businesses I see, it’s not even the smartest first move.
The profit you don’t see
Most leaders can tell you their revenue targets off the top of their head.
Very few can tell you what disengagement is costing them.
Or how much value is being lost because managers were never taught how to manage.
Or how much productivity evaporates every week because people are cognitively exhausted and working in inefficient ways.
None of those show up as a neat line on your P&L, but they are there. Every day.
You can spot them in other ways:
- Work getting re-done because expectations were not clear
- Managers doing the work for people instead of building capability
- Long meetings with no real outcomes
- High performers quietly burning out
- “Good enough” becoming the standard because everyone is “tired” or “busy”
Sure, you can try to sell more on top of that, but it’s not going to be easy (or produce great outcomes).
But Jess, “just sell more” feels easier
Look, I get it. It’s completely understandable that leader’s default to revenue.
You can measure it clearly. You can rally people around it. You can tell the board you’re “chasing growth”.
It feels like you’re actively doing something…
It’s much more confronting to ask:
- Where are we leaking profit because people are disengaged?
- Where are our managers out of their depth?
- Where are we wasting energy?
It’s confronting because it feels harder to fix and less tangible.
But there’s a problem with “just sell more”.
When you chase more revenue, every extra dollar has a cost.
But, when you fix the leaks, that money drops straight to the bottom line.
Disengagement is not an HR problem
Disengagement is often treated like an HR “nice to know”.
It is not.
Disengaged people do not:
- Look for opportunities
- Do great work (or much work for that matter)
- Go the extra mile for customers or the business
- Stay when a better offer comes alone
They do:
- The minimum
- Stay quiet when something is off
- Cost you in errors, delays, missed opportunities and high performers
Estimates put the cost of a disengaged employee at roughly a third of their salary in lost productivity, not to mention the lost opportunity costs of higher profitability, higher sales, lower turnover and higher customer loyalty …
You don’t need the exact number for your business to know this: If you have managers who cannot create an engaging environment, you are paying for it, big time.
(on that note, I do have an exciting disengagement calculator coming soon where you can calculate the exact numbers – pre warning, it’s scary!)
Wait, why managers?
There’s a pattern I see again and again.
On paper, the structure looks fine. The strategy is clear enough. The tools are decent.
And yet the CEO feels like a bottleneck and managers are overwhelmed.
When we dig in, it’s almost always some version of this:
- Managers promoted for technical excellence, not people skills
- Little to no proper training on how to manage people or energy
So they:
- Solve problems instead of coaching their people
- Avoid difficult conversations
- Push decisions up instead of making them
- Do the work instead of delegating
They aren’t bad people – they’re just under-equipped and set up to fail.
And under-equipped managers are expensive.
The tax you’re paying but not counting
There is also the cognitive side.
You can have smart, capable people who care about the business, and still get poor results if their energy is being spent in the wrong places.
Every extra context switch, every unclear priority, every unnecessary meeting, every “quick question” drains cognitive energy.
Once energy is low, you get:
- Slower thinking
- More mistakes
- Shorter tempers
- Less creativity
- Short term decisions just to get things off the plate
- Burnout
Enter: “we’re so busy”.
A different way to look at your P&L
Here’s a simple lens I often use with clients: Growing profit is not just about adding more revenue, it’s also about reducing friction.
Revenue is what you add, friction is where you leak.
Disengagement, ineffective managers, wasted energy, lack of clarity and poor ways of working are all friction.
The question shouldn’t be, “how do we sell more?”.
The better question you should ask, is: How much more profit would we keep if our people were led well, engaged and working in ways that protect their energy?
That’s not fluffy, It’s operational optimisation.
And it’s where high performance lives.
Where to start (without blowing everything up)
If you’re reading this thinking, “oh s**t, this is us”, you don’t need to burn the house down and start again.
It’s not the end of the world, but you’ve got some work to do.
Here’s some starting points:
- Invest in your managers! Stop assuming they will just “figure it out”. They won’t. Give them real development on how to be an effective manager – coaching, accountability, feedback, communication and energy management. This is the highest leverage move you can make. If you do nothing else, this will move the needle in powerful ways.
- Clean up one source of friction at a time. Pick one: meetings, decision making, rework, inefficient systems, ‘always on’ expectations… Decide what “good” looks like and fix that system first instead of trying to fix everything at once.
- Make engagement a leadership metric, not an annoying HR report. Use engagement data as a starting point for conversations with managers. If they don’t know what their people need, how can they fix it?! (I’d suggest Gallups Q12 as a great starting place)
- Talk about energy, not just time. Ask your leaders when they do their best thinking, when their brain is most on, and what drains them. Then work with them to optimise their day around their energy. Small shifts in how they structure their day compound quickly.
None of this is overly glamorous and won’t make for a sexy slide for an investor deck, but it will move your P&L more than another generic “sell more” target ever will. And that is sexy.
The bottom line
You can keep pushing for more sales while your business continues to leak profit through disengagement, ineffective managers and inefficient ways of working.
Or you can decide that profitable growth means tightening the system, not just turning up the volume.
If your team are working hard and the numbers still don’t reflect the effort, you don’t have a motivation or strategy problem.
You have a performance system problem.
And the good news is it can be fixed … if you want to fix it.
That’s the work I do.
Instead of treating symptoms individually, I integrate management capability building with neuroscience-based performance optimisation.
Because when you fix both the execution gaps AND the unsustainable work practices simultaneously, that’s when you get exponential improvement rather than incremental change.
If you know your organisation should be performing better given your resources and strategy, this is exactly where I can help.
It’s not about adding more hours or more people, but through systematic transformation that turns your existing people into a high performing team that consistently performs.
What you need to do next
If you’re a CEO or senior leader, and you suspect your business is bleeding profit in ways your P&L is not showing you clearly, contact me now! I’ve got limited space available, so reach out now.
If you’re not the final decision maker, forward this to whoever is. Selling more is great, but fixing what is broken under the surface is where the real margin lives.
Here’s to profit that comes from smarter performance, not just harder selling.
Jess
