Referral Engineering: Six Questions That Separate Growing CEOs from Lost Causes
An insurance company lost three people in quick succession: the CEO, the best salesperson, and the second-best salesperson. The business still exists. Sales still happen. But here’s the question that matters: Is it now a lost cause?
Most CEOs make the same fatal mistakes—mistaking sales for sales growth, promoting stars into irrelevance, restructuring while relationships die. After 40 years in business, 20 years running my own company (trading millions with zero institutional funding), I’ve identified six questions that reveal whether a business can be saved or whether it’s already dying. If you can’t answer them, you might be the next insurance CEO.
I’m serializing the complete book on Substack, one chapter at a time. Start with the opening story and find out if you’re building a business—or managing a slow-motion collapse.
Read Chapter 1: CEOs: Sales Without Growth Is a Death Sentence
Chapter 2: Stop Being a Salesperson, Become the Sales Director (And Watch Your Business Die)
The insurance company made its second fatal mistake: it promoted its best salesperson to sales director. It felt like the right move—reward excellence, right?
Wrong.
One great seller + management duties = zero great sellers. The math is brutal and simple. The best performer stopped producing. The business lost its engine. And nobody saw it coming because it looked like recognition, not destruction.
If you can’t promote your best people, what do you do with them? The answer isn’t what most CEOs think.
Read Chapter 2: The Promotion That Kills
Chapter 3: What Is Sales, Really?
I’m an electronics engineer. I never saw myself in sales. Most technical CEOs don’t.
Then I spent two years at Xerox learning something that changed everything: Sales isn’t what you think it is. It’s not techniques, scripts, or closing tactics.
Sales technique is nothing more than relationship building based on authenticity. Simple to say. Brutally hard to do. Even harder to bottle, describe, and repeat.
But here’s the real question: If sales are relationships, and relationships aren’t systematic, how did I run a business for 20 years without institutional funding? How do you make authenticity engineerable?
