The business was built on outbound product sales and the drive of its directors. The model worked, and worked well.

But it ran on hustle. Product sales are lumpy and inconsistent, and the team’s focus held up mainly when one of the directors was on the sales floor pushing it.

Take the director away, and the energy dips. There was an outbound sales team — but very little sales management discipline around it.

You couldn’t really see what mattered. Limited visibility and control across calls, conversations, quotes, orders, and billing meant performance was felt rather than managed.

Margins were softening without a clear rhythm for managing them; there was no clear data on what was selling from a catalogue of thousands of lines, category focus was weak, and there was no key account strategy for the multi-academy trusts (MATs) that increasingly hold the budgets.

Underneath lay a familiar problem: performance relied on a few strong people, and without performance management, the rest could coast while those few carried the slack.

And every attempt to fix it through a frontline manager had stalled — the right person in the right place at the right time, but without the skills, knowledge or behaviours to actually manage a team.

With the last manager, I spent a morning walking through what managing really means and laid out simple, concrete tactics: clear goals, observed calls, feedback on performance.  When I came back, none of it had been done. I recommended they not lead the team.

The current manager is a better bet — right attitude, genuinely willing. Still, he’s being swamped by the size and quality of the team he’s inherited, with too many people needing coaching and development all at once.

Recently, we built a business plan around five areas:

• Products — out of literally thousands of lines, identify the ones that actually sell.

• Margin — work out which of those actually make money.

• Buying — build relationships with key suppliers to secure better deals and protect margin.

• People — get the right people doing the right things, in the right way, at the right time, with a key-account approach built on understanding what customers genuinely need.

• Ownership — give everyone clear, aligned goals that drive the business, rather than busy fools making call after call with no contact or connection.

Around that sits the operational discipline the team had been missing: sales-stage tracking with conversion measured by salesperson, sales management coaching and a steady performance-management rhythm, margin monitoring, a clear view of what to push, pause or stop, and a key-account strategy for the MATs — turning a string of individual school sales into deeper, trust-wide relationships and larger average deals.

I ran key account management work to identify which team members actually have the skills to sell that way, because not all of them do.

And I built a growth calculation to show the directors when the numbers justify bringing in another manager.

But the first move is a reset: be honest about who should stay, who needs developing, and who should go.

This is live — the latest chapter in a long relationship, not a quick fix.

The plan is set, and the reset is underway.

What’s already changed is the clarity: the directors can see that the next stretch of growth won’t come from working the sales floor harder, but from running the business with a discipline they’ve never had to apply before — visibility instead of instinct, accounts instead of transactions, and the right people in the right roles instead of whoever was to hand.

"Activity feels like progress. Profitable, managed account growth is progress. Knowing the difference is what takes a business from good to genuinely scalable."

Plenty of businesses get a long way on owner drive and product hustle — this one grew many times over that way. But there comes a point where that engine runs out of road.

The next phase isn’t about selling harder; it’s about selling smarter and managing properly: knowing which products and which customers actually make money, building accounts rather than chasing orders, and putting in the management discipline that lets a business grow without the owners holding every thread.

Activity feels like progress. Profitable, managed account growth is in progress. Knowing the difference is what takes a business from good to genuinely scalable.