Built to Keep (or Sell)

What it actually costs to be your own salesperson

The owner is the best salesperson in the business. That's how it got to where it is. It's also why it can't get any bigger, why the pipeline runs like a sine wave, and why a buyer one day will offer you significantly less than you think the business is worth. Being the best salesperson works beautifully for a while. The owner understands the buyer's problem better than anyone in the business, walks into the room with credibility a hire can't easily replicate, and closes deals nobody else could. Until they run out of capacity. Then the hiring starts. And then the firing starts. Most owners conclude, after the second or third attempt, that salespeople are useless and go back to doing it themselves. They're wrong about why it keeps happening. The hires aren't the problem. Three specific things weren't in place before they started with you - and one of them is the belief most owners struggle to say out loud, even to themselves. Name those three things and the next hire stands a chance. Skip them and the merry-go-round keeps spinning, the pipeline keeps running up and down the page, and one day a buyer arrives and prices in everything you didn't fix. If you own an engineering, manufacturing or complex B2B business in the £2m–£15m range and you're still the sales engine, half an hour now will tell you which of the three you've been missing, why your last hire failed even though they looked perfect on paper, and -  more usefully - what the fix actually is. It isn't another recruitment round. It starts somewhere most owners would never think to start, and the owner's own selling gets sharper as a side effect. Press play now.

Client Concentration Problem

What Client Concentration Actually Is Most business owners know client concentration is a risk. Fewer can tell you what the threshold actually is — or why the percentage is the wrong thing to focus on. In this episode, Richard McMullan breaks down what client concentration means in practice: where the 15% guideline comes from, why the real threshold depends on your margins and business model, and the single question that cuts through the noise and tells you whether you actually have a problem. If you're not sure how exposed your business is to your biggest client, this is the place to start.

Early warning sign your business will trap you

From the outside, the business looks successful – multi-million sales, decent profits, loyal customers and team. On paper, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. And if you’d asked the owner five or ten years earlier what they were trying to build, this is probably very close to what they had in mind.  Most owners would expect, at that point, for things to start to feel easier, less stressful, more freeing.  Because, as the business grows, as the team improves, as the processes mature, and you break through the £10m mark, you’d expect the weight to come off. You’d expect to be less involved in the day-to-day. Less pulled into problems that shouldn’t need you anymore.  That’s the expectation. And in a small number of cases, that is what happens.  But for many owners, it doesn’t feel like that at all. Yes, they’re making good money. They’ve got the lifestyle and toys to go with it. From the outside, everything looks fine and people envy them for it. But alongside that, there’s something else running underneath it.

Why Most Businesses Stall below £10m

At first glance, it looks like our UK manufacturing and engineering businesses are growing  strongly as the number of companies doing between £10m and £50m turnover has increased from 7,550 in 2019 to 9,535 in 2025. The growth seems impressive, doesn’t it? But don’t be fooled. Those revenue bands don’t allow for inflation, which was 28.3% over the period. If you’d been doing £8m a year in 2018 and increased your prices at the rate of inflation, you’d have broken through into the £10m+ bracket last year without winning any new business.