You Need to Do It Yourself First

Hello Predictable Revenue community,

Funny story, I was in SF last week and brought a few books with me. On my way back I had two in my bag and thought it’d be funny to leave them in a book store at the airport with a note saying ‘hey - take this book, it’s not for sale yet so don’t try to buy it or the cashier will be super confused’. Well, someone found it and posted my first review, check it out here. If can reshare with your network, that would be super helpful.

Book update: We hit 235 pre-orders this week, huge shout out to Anthony for ordering 5 more for his team! Get your pre-order in here if you haven’t already. I just added the Cold Email Deliverability Guide and Perfect Call GPT to the pre-order benefits list.

Community update: I’ll be in NY on the 31st and am meeting up with a few founders for a happy hour, let me know if you’re interested.

Onto the newsletter…

You can't scale what you haven't done yourself.

I know, I know. You're thinking, "But I don't have time to be an entry-level employee in my own company." Trust me, I thought the same thing. And that thinking cost me years of spinning wheels, multiple failed hires, and a painful lesson about the difference between adding features and changing business models entirely.

Let me tell you about the time I tried to pivot our entire service offering without ever doing the work myself.

The Business Model Shift That Nearly Broke Us

In 2018, we were running Predictable Revenue as a cold email agency. For six years, we'd built serious muscle around cold email - we had account strategists, proven processes, happy clients. We knew that business inside and out.

But we saw the writing on the wall. Cold email reply rates were dropping dramatically. Our clients needed more than just email; they needed a full outbound approach: email + phone + LinkedIn, all integrated into one seamless process.

So we made the call to pivot from a cold email shop to a full SDR outsourcing agency.

Seemed logical, right? We already had the email piece down. How hard could it be to just add phone and LinkedIn to the mix?

Turns out, I'd made a massive assumption. What felt like adding two channels was actually building a completely different business from scratch.

The False Assumption That Cost Me Everything

Here's what I thought was happening: We were taking our existing cold email service and expanding it. Same basic model, just more touchpoints.

Here's what was actually happening: We were building an entirely new business.

Suddenly, we needed to go from having highly skilled account strategists to people who could be account strategists AND SDR managers. We had to hire, train, and onboard actual SDRs - something we'd never done at scale. We had to manage a completely different type of team delivering a completely different type of service.

I totally underestimated the complexity of that transition.

So I did what felt smart: I hired a Director of Sales Development. Someone with serious SDR experience who could inject that expertise into our organization and figure things out.

But here's the crucial distinction I missed: They knew SDR work incredibly well, but they'd never built an SDR service from scratch within an existing company. Those are two completely different skills.

I thought their SDR expertise would combine with our organizational muscle to create something new. I assumed the people I'd trained over six years could make founder-level decisions like I could.

Both assumptions were dead wrong.

The Four Levels of Work

Here's what I learned the hard way. Every function in your business has four levels, here’s an example through the lens of sales development:

Level 1 - IC Work: Making the calls, sending the emails, using the tools daily. Learning objections, discovering messaging, figuring out where processes break. Most importantly, developing intuition for what "good" looks like in your specific context.

Level 2 - Management: Teaching others to replicate what works. Creating structure, cadence, and accountability. You can only do this effectively if you've walked the path yourself.

Level 3 - Leadership: Hiring and coaching managers, making strategic decisions, scaling the system. This requires deep knowledge of what happens at Levels 1 and 2.

Level 4 - Executive: Allocating resources, shaping strategy, driving performance through metrics and structure.

I stayed at Level 4 and hired someone to handle Levels 1-3 simultaneously. Even worse, I expected them to build something entirely new while operating at those levels.

How could they possibly succeed when I hadn't built the foundation myself?

What I Should Have Done (But Didn't)

The fix is obvious in hindsight, but I was too stubborn to see it: I needed to do the work myself first.

Here's what I should have done from day one:

Start at the IC level and work my way up one role at a time. Spend time making the calls, writing the sequences, learning the tools, mapping objections. Actually doing the work within our specific business context, for our specific clients.

Only after I'd figured out what worked could I move to the management level - hire someone and train them based on what I'd learned. Only after I'd proven I could teach someone else could I move to the leadership level and scale the team.

Instead, I tried to skip directly from executive to executive while expecting someone else to build everything in between.

I never did go back and walk that path myself. We kept cycling through hires, and eventually I shut down that part of the business at the beginning of this year. It's only in hindsight that I can see the mistakes I made - and hopefully avoid them next time.

When to Do the Work Yourself

This isn't just about service businesses. This is about founders not digging in and doing the foundational work when they should.

Here's the key distinction: Is this a net new capability you're adding to your company, or is it an extension of something you already do well?

If it's just extending an existing capability - your current team and structure can probably handle it. But if you're building something truly new, you need to start at the IC level.

The most common example: building your first sales team. Most founders try to skip straight to hiring a salesperson to "figure it out" instead of stepping into the sales IC role themselves first. But you can't hire someone to build what you haven't built yourself.

The only way out is through. You have to step into the IC role and work your way up.

The pattern is always the same: Start at the IC level, figure out what works, then hire someone and train them based on what you learned. Only once you've successfully hired and trained someone can you move yourself up to the next level.

The Bottom Line

You can't scale what you haven't done yourself - especially when you're building something new.

Great people can't build on a foundation that doesn't exist. They can only scale what already works; they can't create something from nothing. That sort of magic is reserved for founders.

Do the IC work first. Build the foundation. Then hire someone great to make it bigger.

So I'll ask you: What foundational work are you trying to skip right now?

Collin 

PS - I’m making progress in documenting my sales process to turn it into a set of agents. I found an MCP server for n8n and actually made some progress on it myself using Windsurf which was super fun. If you’re keen to be an early tester and you’re ok recording calls via zoom, then drop me a note. I may have something in the next month to play with.

PPS - here’s the shot of me being cheeky at SFO…