[0:00] Debra Bowers: You put a great salesperson in a broken process, they will figure out a way to sell. They'll break your process.
[0:07] Rich Smith: Yeah. They will, because it needs to be broken.
[0:10] [laughter]
[0:11] Debra Bowers: They will break it. They will go around it. They will come in with deals. People will say, "How did you do that?" And they'll say, "Oh, I didn't do that — this seems to work better for me. This is how I did it." But the problem with that is you're not creating a repeatable process. That is a one-off process that depends on one individual. And if you're relying on that for your pipeline, that's super, super risky.
[0:54] Rich Smith: Welcome to Revenue Science, the show where we translate marketing and sales complexity into boardroom clarity for CEOs, founders, and leaders who are building predictable growth systems. I'm Rich Smith — CMO, founder, executive adviser, and lucky enough to be your host. Thank you for listening today, and please join our goal of helping more leaders successfully grow their companies by liking and subscribing to this podcast.
[1:18] Rich Smith: Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives our economy. And when founders succeed, they improve the lives of their family, their employees, their community, and — lastly, but most importantly — their customers. Today I'm joined by Debra Bowers, co-founder of The Growth Vanguard, CEO of Hexagon Media, and host of the Deals with Heels podcast. Debra has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of sales, marketing, leadership, and human behavior.
[1:42] Rich Smith: Through The Growth Vanguard, she helps organizations uncover the hidden breakdowns that stall growth — from leadership misalignment and weak demand generation to customer experience gaps and sales friction. Through Hexagon Media, she helps companies translate those insights into demand-building marketing systems. What makes this conversation especially interesting is that Debra and I share a belief that growth is rarely a marketing or sales problem in isolation — more often, it's a human behavior problem. Today we'll explore buyer psychology, trust, demand creation, leadership alignment, and why sustainable growth starts long before a prospect is ready to buy. Debra, welcome to Revenue Science.
[2:31] Debra Bowers: Thank you for having me, Rich. I'm really excited for our conversation.
[2:35] Rich Smith: Yeah, I am as well. I thought maybe we could start by getting a little background on you — the 60-second overview — and if you want to talk about The Growth Vanguard and Hexagon Media, that'd be great too.
[2:54] Debra Bowers: The 60-second version: I started in marketing and sales right out of college in 1990. I've been doing this a long time, and I really help businesses slow down and find clarity in their growth cycle — diagnose where in the cycle growth is breaking, and put together a sustainable plan for moving forward with priorities. So: these are the essential things you need to fix right now. And for my own business purposes, sometimes what needs to be fixed right now isn't what you'd expect — often there's something else that has to happen before you can even implement the other portion.
[3:44] Debra Bowers: That's essentially what I do, and it does span growth broadly — that's where my specialty lies, and it started in sales and marketing. My partner is more of a customer experience and team-building expert, so they go together really well, because if things are going to break somewhere, it's in the connections between all of those things.
[4:08] Rich Smith: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and it dovetails closely with a lot of the work that I do. Did you see patterns across sales, marketing, and leadership that led you to launch The Growth Vanguard?
[4:26] Debra Bowers: Absolutely, because the majority of my work — I spent a couple of decades in corporate marketing, where I learned a tremendous amount about how systems work in different types of organizations. But often when I started my agency, Hexagon Media, which is marketing-focused, I'd come in and I might be the third or fourth agency they've talked to or worked with.
[5:02] Debra Bowers: So they've plateaued in growth, they need to move forward, and they've hired multiple agencies to solve that problem. And when I look at the work those agencies did, it's pretty good — depending on the type of agency, are they targeting the right place, are they using buying-behavior messaging rather than branding messaging, because people identify when it's about them, not about the company. There are things that can go wrong in sales and marketing that affect that, but I kept seeing this pattern: okay, this actually looks pretty good.
[5:50] Debra Bowers: As I dove deeper I'd find other problems affecting growth — or I'd implement a marketing and sales plan, and from the metrics we use to diagnose whether the advertising or content is doing its job, it looked like everything should be working, and yet sometimes it wasn't. So you look further: if the ads are driving traffic where they're supposed to go, but you're not converting that into a lead, or not closing the lead — is it falling apart in the funnel on the website, or is something operationally disconnected?
[6:37] Debra Bowers: A great example: I was brought in to consult for a client who wanted to grow. They were ready, and had lots of opportunity — different segments they could move into. I was excited to work on it. But as I dug into the whole organization, I found they couldn't fulfill any more business. They had major problems with systems in their plant, a backlog of work getting stuck aside because it didn't meet their standard, little issues with each piece. So they had this side backlog going — a fulfillment and operational efficiency issue that was capping their growth capacity. They didn't have room, and they didn't actually need to upgrade equipment — they needed to be more efficient with what they already had.
[7:58] Debra Bowers: Seeing that pattern appear across multiple companies is really what led me to start The Growth Vanguard, partnering with an old friend from college whose background is in team and customer experience — he's from hospitality, an expert in customer experience — which let us formulate a full growth cycle that encompasses the whole company, not just the sales department. So yes, that pattern exists, and it was frustrating at first — you're doing your job well, the little part they hired you for is working, but the metric that really matters is: are they getting a lift in business? And if not, why not?
[8:51] Rich Smith: That's a great example, and I want to double-click on something you said — I often see one program at an organization doing well, but there are these other things still hanging around, sometimes just because they've always been there, or a "HIPPO" (highest-paid person in the room) thought it was a great idea. So you end up with things you need to think about subtracting, not just adding — how do you get better by doing less instead of more? We're all wired to think "I need to add something," when really you need to stop doing the things dragging you backward.
[9:54] Rich Smith: So — this is a bit of an unfair question, I'll be honest about that — but if I forced you to choose: does growth break down more often because of strategy, execution, or leadership alignment?
[10:15] Debra Bowers: Boy, it really varies. I think the big thing is strategy — but along with that, if your leaders and team don't understand the strategy... I was just talking with a business about this, because they've invested so much money in consultants, market research, ideas, and data, but haven't implemented any of it. I see this in individual coaching too — they've spent $50,000 on coaches and they're stuck on implementation.
[11:06] Debra Bowers: It's not that the plan is bad — the coaches and consultants gave them great work. But the leaders of the organization have to align, believe, jump in, and implement it, and they often get stuck right there. I think the breakdown most often occurs in strategy, though, because most businesses haven't specifically identified who their targets are. Marketing has become very segmented and specialized — which isn't bad — but also separated.
[11:56] Debra Bowers: We've broken marketing into pieces unintentionally, and lost the overall growth strategy. You see fewer marketing people on boards, fewer in the C-suite — the person actually trained to own that overall strategy has been pushed out, and it's been left to other specialties in top-level management. Now marketing gets reduced to tactics and individual expertise, and the overall purpose gets lost. It's not intentional — it's growing pains as the industry expanded, with more content creators and branding agencies.
[12:56] Debra Bowers: But now we're stuck with all these different experts who must work together in a common growth strategy that's more than SEO, pricing, tactics, and email. We tend to look at all of those things separately, without an overall strategy for them to align to.
[13:23] Rich Smith: It's remarkable how often I see that exact story repeat. A lot of times when I talk to a CEO or founder for the first time, they'll ask: should we be doing more SEO? Paid search? Facebook? LinkedIn? Trade shows? And my honest answer is "maybe" — tell me your strategy, tell me who you're targeting, at what point in the buyer cycle are you trying to capture their attention — then we can talk tactics. It's the difference between big-M Marketing — growth strategy — and little-m marketing — the tactics. You need both.
[14:18] Rich Smith: You said something else important I want to emphasize: you can have a great strategy, but if you don't translate it into great execution, it's worthless. Honestly, I see the opposite more — execution with little or no strategic thought. Both are equally a problem. You talk a lot about the difference between attention and trust — why do so many companies confuse visibility with demand?
[14:59] Debra Bowers: I think because they're trained that visibility is the most important thing — just get your name out there. Hardly anyone talks about or really understands demand. Branding agencies all say, "well, we're doing that — getting your stuff out there about how great you are." Don't get me wrong, they're good at that piece. But I saw a LinkedIn post that said "branding isn't marketing," and I had to giggle, because branding is crucial, but it's a small sliver of demand building — it's not your full marketing plan.
[15:57] Debra Bowers: Marketing can't be only branding, because that's the equivalent of standing on your front porch screaming your name and what you do — it doesn't build the trust buyers need from their perspective. If you think of demand as increasing the number of people who want what you have, period — that's the general definition — and then getting them to want it *from you* as the provider of choice. When you focus only on branding, you skip the first part: building people who want what you have. And when you skip that, you're relying on your competitors to build the demand, then trying to steal it away with your branding, because they built the demand and are now "the expert" — not because they said so, but because real demand-building is deeper than visibility.
[17:23] Debra Bowers: Visibility alone doesn't do it — you have to live it. It has to be true in your customer experience, true for your team. Does your team feel engaged and enthusiastic? Because sales is just a transfer of enthusiasm — that's all it is. If I'm fired up, proud to be here — but your team has to feel that too. So for me, marketing is bigger than visibility: it's how you communicate to your people, how they understand their direct involvement in the company's purpose. Visibility is just the amplification of all that.
[18:40] Debra Bowers: Demand building can happen naturally — I'm doing such a great job with customer experience that customers are happy and talking about it (and they talk when they're unhappy too — they're telling people, referring, mentioning it in day-to-day conversation). Team members build it too — when they're empowered to solve customer problems without asking permission, that customer walks away thinking employees went the extra mile, which counteracts almost any bad thing that happened. So demand building doesn't have to be built only with media.
[19:43] Rich Smith: Yeah, exactly right. And your housekeeping example — a hotel is a service business.
[19:57] Debra Bowers: Yeah, they're the customer experience experts.
[20:00] Rich Smith: There's a big difference between someone who thinks their job is changing sheets and vacuuming rooms, and someone who thinks their job is customer service.
[20:13] Debra Bowers: Yes, exactly — creating the room environment people want to be in.
[20:20] Rich Smith: And when that person thinks of themselves as being in the business of serving guests rather than sweeping floors, when they get a special request, they naturally handle and field it better. What are they doing there? They're creating the brand. I tell people: if you want to understand your brand, send someone to talk to your receptionist who doesn't know who they are — your receptionist *is* your brand. They're the first interaction many people have with your organization — potential customers, current customers, the UPS guy, the FedEx guy — and they all talk to people too, so it all matters.
[21:16] Rich Smith: I loved your phrase earlier — "branding is not marketing." I'd put it this way: branding *is* marketing, but marketing is not branding.
[21:31] Debra Bowers: Yes, exactly.
[21:32] Rich Smith: Branding is one piece, and it has to be a holistic thing within an organization. I'm a little biased — I think everybody's job is marketing in one way or another.
[21:52] Debra Bowers: I don't think that's much of a stretch at all. I have a concept called the Enterprise Growth Cycle — it's an infinity symbol rather than a circle, with sales and revenue at the friction point in the middle. One side is all the demand-building that happens, and everyone in the organization involved in doing it; the other side is fulfillment, which also builds demand. What's wild is your team is on both sides — they feed one another. So the whole growth cycle *is* marketing, and every team member on it is in marketing in some way, even though they'll tell you flatly, "I'm not in sales."
[22:46] Debra Bowers: And yet they're critical to building demand. Without demand, the salesperson has to build demand *in* the sales call — that feels like pressure. "I've got 13 things to tell them to build trust, since they don't know anything about us." That's overwhelming. Even without high-pressure tactics — which most avoid, since they're so hated — that pressure still lands on the sales team, and they're trying to solve it in the short window they have.
[23:40] Rich Smith: Right, and that leads to what I call the myth of the rockstar salesperson — the idea that hiring one or several rockstar salespeople will solve everything. But what you're really describing is not having a demand system.
[24:06] Debra Bowers: There are rockstar salespeople out there, 100% — I've worked with them. You put a great salesperson in a broken process, they will figure out a way to sell. They'll break your process.
[24:23] Rich Smith: Yeah, they will, because it needs to be broken.
[24:25] [laughter]
[24:25] Debra Bowers: They will break it, go around it, come in with deals. People will say, "How did you do that?" and they'll say, "Oh, this just seems to work better for me — this is how I did it."
[24:38] Rich Smith: And the problem is, it can be great for a short period, but you're not creating a repeatable process — it's a one-off that depends on one individual. If you're relying on that for your pipeline, that's super risky.
[25:02] Debra Bowers: It is. We used to say, "what if you get hit by a beer truck?" — I don't know why it was a beer truck, we were young. What's going to happen to the organization? When you have a rockstar salesperson doing everything and you're afraid to lose them, you make poor decisions. And there's no reason for them to stay — they're going to go eventually. You have to accept that your most valuable employee is eventually going to leave.
[25:38] Rich Smith: And if you haven't built a growth-system mindset, you'll be in a world of hurt when that happens. I talk and write a lot about reducing friction in buying decisions, and I think trust plays a big role. What's your take?
[26:05] Debra Bowers: Let's face it — people buy because they trust. I trust this is going to work, I trust the person selling it, I believe them. Building trust is a huge part of demand building — that's what it's about. You build it through confidence that the thing will do what it says, and that it "has your back," that it'll work for you.
[26:40] Debra Bowers: You can't build it with media alone, and you can't build it just with branding — and a salesperson can build it, but not in one sales call. Depending on personality and buying type, you can't build it all the way in one call for some people. Different things cause someone to lean in, listen, and believe you. But use the wrong messaging or sales tactics with someone you haven't built trust with, and they lean back — they disbelieve even more. It's counterproductive. Without trust, your company isn't selling, because they don't believe you.
[27:49] Rich Smith: Right — and I think one of the biggest reasons buyers choose not to buy, B2B or B2C, is uncertainty. They're not sure they'll get the value the cost implies, and trust is a big piece of removing that uncertainty. My job as a salesperson isn't to convince you to buy from me — it's to help us figure out whether working together is actually good for both of us.
[28:39] Rich Smith: A lot of people think, "if I'm the seller, it's always good, because I'm selling it" — but I can give plenty of examples where someone sold something that wasn't good for the buyer. You had the client for three months, but it wasn't effective, and you should've passed and let them find someone more in their wheelhouse.
[29:16] Debra Bowers: That gets down to what we used to call "commission breath." You could tell when someone just really needed a sale, bending over backwards, lowering their price, losing control of what makes them special, just to get that one sale. It never turns out well. When people get in that mode, they take a client they can't really help, because they need the client. Your side matters too — is that client really for me? If not, there's going to be miscommunication and misalignment. So what you said is important — it has to work both ways.
[30:06] Rich Smith: How should leaders think about demand-building before prospects even enter a buying cycle?
[30:18] Debra Bowers: It's really important, and we get too focused on process — how the customer moves through the organization, can they order, fulfillment steps — getting specialized in making sure each piece runs correctly. We forget that demand building happens naturally, through what you do, how you treat customers, how you and your team talk about customers and the business, how fulfillment works, how you treat people after the sale.
[31:07] Debra Bowers: In my infinity-symbol model, the customer never leaves the growth cycle — they need to stay in it, because you'll have another product to sell them, you can keep marketing to them, and get referrals. Keep them in it, and you maintain that confidence and trust, and the longer they stay, the more referrals and enthusiasm you get. Then you reinforce that with your marketing plan, media, and branding — that's when you're really growing. If all you do is media and branding, you've disconnected from everything else, sustainable growth becomes hard, and you end up reactionary.
[32:11] Debra Bowers: In real life that looks like: I only grow when I have a marketing campaign running. Sales are down, so let's call an agency and run a campaign. That works for a while, then you hire a different agency with a different tactic, and that works for a little while — but it's not sustainable. You need to think about every aspect of how you do what you do, what effect it has on customers, have those conversations, put a plan in place, and train your people — so demand is built before your salesperson even steps into the room, and before you've done any marketing.
[33:15] Debra Bowers: My first marketing job was for a cable television company, later sold to Cox Communications. Back then we did direct response, very standard. When competition came in — there'd been almost none before — operations people had great ideas for commercials and things to say to be competitive.
[34:03] Debra Bowers: I remember saying, even in my 20s: "we can say whatever we want, but it needs to be true." The cable industry in the '90s went through federal rate regulation — a lot of what people wanted to say in marketing wasn't really true. Even as a young marketing person, it stood out to me: we can talk about all these things, but what happens when it's not true? I didn't have the nuanced answer I have today, but I could see it even then.
[34:39] Rich Smith: That kind of authenticity — you might get away with it externally for a little while.
[34:52] Debra Bowers: For a little while, but it blows back eventually.
[34:52] Rich Smith: And the other aspect people don't think through: what does it say to the people inside your organization?
[35:09] Debra Bowers: Because they will 100% know. Oh yeah — we'd say something and they'd give the little scoff, because they completely understand. And does that make them more or less bought into the company's purpose? More or less proud of where they work?
[35:37] Rich Smith: It snowballs — that lack of authenticity snowballs, and not just with external campaigns but internal ones too.
[35:44] Debra Bowers: Right — "we're going to change the culture," bring in a culture agency, do a bunch of things. What usually happens is everybody internally goes along with it because they know it's important to leaders, but if you caught them at the water cooler, they'd be making derogatory comments about it.
[36:16] Debra Bowers: I think that comes down to inclusivity — when decisions are made at a high level and the people who implement and live them day-to-day haven't been included in the conversation, they've had zero input. A lot of times leaders don't want to bring people in, even at a supervisory level, because they don't want to hear the complaints and resistance. But what they need to hear is how the changes land day-to-day, and what can make the transition easier — so it's true, not just a label and fancy packaging on culture without it actually existing.
[37:07] Debra Bowers: There's a huge disconnect right now, especially because top-level CEOs face so much pressure to build shareholder wealth, which is different from "the economy," which is different from demand — the people actually buying your stuff. Boards and C-suite leaders make revenue-based decisions, and then when it filters down to top- and mid-level leadership, they don't believe in it, because they can see the issues day-to-day. This is especially pronounced when a company's been bought by private equity — now they're not just shareholder-wealth-driven, they're dividend-driven too, so less gets reinvested.
[38:17] Debra Bowers: That's a tough position to be in as a leader when you're not included in the decision. Recent studies from Harvard and McKinsey — I'm being generous saying 25% of leaders believe the decisions their company makes are good; 75% think the decisions aren't inclusive and don't account for potential problems and teamwork issues.
[38:46] Debra Bowers: I'm not saying every opinion has to be reflected in the final policy — it might not be — but the fact that people got to talk about it, and if it's a big enough issue there's some mitigation, means they feel heard, and it helps to explain back why decisions were made the way they were. Sometimes you have to make hard financial decisions that don't align with your own personal ethics, and you have to communicate that back down.
[39:34] Rich Smith: So part of what you're describing is a result of that lack of inclusivity in decision-making, and it ends up affecting day-to-day customer relations.
[39:47] Debra Bowers: Yeah — inclusivity creates buy-in, and buy-in creates ownership. When someone's been asked to participate in creating a plan or strategy, even if their specific ideas don't end up in the final product, the fact that they were involved means they can't really complain about it — that would be inconsistent, and we have a cognitive desire as humans to be consistent with our prior decisions. We never want to be seen as a hypocrite or a flip-flopper. Getting someone's involvement gives them buy-in, buy-in gives them ownership, and that's what unlocks alignment within an organization.
[40:52] Rich Smith: Something you said earlier about demand generation being spread across the whole organization is really important to highlight, because most people I talk to think demand generation just means acquisition of new customers. The reality — and if you've run a business through a successful growth and exit, you start to understand this — is that growth and enterprise value come mostly from existing customers, not new ones. If your churn rate is too high — it's expensive to acquire a customer, much less expensive to keep one, and much less expensive to get the next dollar of revenue from an existing customer than a new one. Do you think people are hyper-focused on "new"?
[42:01] Debra Bowers: Yes. They're so focused on new, new, new, and everything else is like, "oh yeah, we should get reviews" — some tactical afterthought — without understanding how everything works together to build demand.
[42:24] Rich Smith: It's amazing — in your example, sales are down, let's hire an agency and run a campaign — but what was that campaign meant to do? Probably acquire more customers. Instead of looking inward: how do we not lose the customers we're losing, or go further — how do we get the customers we already have to buy more from us?
[42:53] Debra Bowers: Yes — being able to say, "okay, this little part over here is broken," and identify it when it happens. Often the people in customer service know when there's an issue, and they likely bring it up, but it's not a priority. HR knows — or if you're just a founder with leaders in charge, they know if there's a personnel or team-sentiment issue. It doesn't become a priority until it lands in sales' lap. Now sales are down, and they start focusing there without realizing what's been happening for the last eight months elsewhere. It's a sales problem, and they focus on solving it there, which becomes very reactionary — I'm reacting, driving sales, changing sales management, looking for the rockstar sales guy. That becomes hyper-focused, and most companies spend a lot of time trying to solve it there without realizing it broke somewhere else and just landed here — that's the first time it got prioritized, because it hit revenue.
[44:39] Rich Smith: Really well said. I'm going to put you on the spot — can you share an example where solving a non-sales, non-marketing problem unlocked revenue growth?
[44:56] Debra Bowers: Sure — I have an older client I've had for quite some time. They were feeling stagnant in growth and would come in to run a campaign; they weren't interested in an annual campaign, they wanted it to happen "naturally." We put in campaigns, and I wasn't involved in their day-to-day customer experience, but I could see the results diminishing over time.
[45:44] Debra Bowers: This was a trades company — as we ran campaigns, even in their busy season, they'd get less. We hear this a lot: "I used to be able to just boost a Facebook post and get all this business." They felt like competitors were stealing their business. But it wasn't that they were uncompetitive on price, or that their marketing or tactics were poor — we were doing all the right things. They had a disconnect in their office, and their frontline people had burned out and weren't friendly. They didn't understand how they related to the sales process.
[46:51] Debra Bowers: This was an HVAC company, and the place they were really losing was on new installs — which, of course, come mostly from your maintenance and repair guys. So we sat down to do sales training, to help everybody see why they weren't converting those over. Their number-one repair guy — sitting at the back, sunglasses on — raises his hand and says, "we aren't like other HVAC companies, we aren't required to sell anything in this group," because the new-install guys weren't in the room, since they didn't need the training.
[47:48] Debra Bowers: He genuinely believed he had no role in new installs — and he's the top repair guy, setting the standard for everyone else. It was eye-opening for him to learn that repair and maintenance is the number-one generator of new installs for this business — and for HVAC companies nationwide. Best practice: "it's broken, you can pay this much to repair it" — but he was just doing the repairs and not referring people over. He didn't understand how critical that one thing was, and even the owner assumed he was already doing it.
[48:50] Debra Bowers: Once that clicked, and he had an easy way to say, "you should talk to our new-install department, because you're going to keep paying for repairs" — that small transition, once implemented, and man, we didn't even have to run a campaign — it changed everything about their growth. In that same room, the frontline phone and dispatch people got it too — they'd been completely disconnected from it, every single one of them. It was wild that such a critical piece of a service company's business was essentially non-existent in the team's minds — the owner knew it, the service manager knew it, the new-install guys knew it, but nobody else did.
[50:30] Debra Bowers: Solving it was a mindset shift and a couple of small scripting tools — a natural way of presenting repair recommendations — and it turned everything around. They started getting all the new-install business they'd projected for revenue growth.
[50:58] Rich Smith: It's amazing how something that small can just be assumed to be in place. Many CEOs assume growth problems are pipeline problems — how do you diagnose what the real issue is?
[51:33] Debra Bowers: I like to have a lot of data. The first clue is when I look at their sales and marketing plan — if it's good (and I'm not the only good marketing person, there are things you can always improve, that's just the nature of business), but if there are no major breaks I can see, that part's easy to fix.
[52:19] Debra Bowers: But if the marketing and tactics aren't broken — these tactics should work, and if they're not, that's the first clue something else is wrong. Are you getting lots of attention and engagement on your content and advertising? If the KPIs look like the marketing is performing and you're still not seeing growth, that's a big signal something else is broken.
[53:05] Debra Bowers: At the HVAC company, they thought it was a marketing issue — "we need more visibility for new installs." When I asked how much they were getting referred from their repair department, they said, "probably a little less than it should be, but it needs to be fixed with more marketing." So the first signal for me: decent marketing strategy, good tactical execution, real expertise there — but growth is completely flat. Something's broken elsewhere.
[53:59] Debra Bowers: If you're a founder or CEO and it feels like you're doing everything right — SEO, email campaigns, all of it — and it's still not working, there's something misaligned somewhere. Those are the first signs for me.
[54:30] Rich Smith: What behaviors actually lead to greater leadership alignment?
[54:44] Debra Bowers: It comes down to clarity. As the founder or CEO, you have the mission and what you want to accomplish — getting really clear on the expectations and the empowerment of your people, and then it has to move consistently from leader to team, leader to team, leader to team.
[55:21] Debra Bowers: What I see a lot is the CEO has clarity and disseminates it, but it doesn't get passed down clearly because a leader in the middle didn't fully get it, didn't want to ask questions, and didn't understand how it applied to their team — so they wrote it off. So one, have the clarity; two, communicate it company-wide so everyone buys in, and then it passes down in a way everyone buys in.
[56:00] Debra Bowers: Leaders have to get clarity and speak up if they don't have it — people don't like to ask questions. I can get "annoying" with questions myself: explain how this works, how it'll play out in my department, what will we see if my department is wildly successful with this? Those expectations matter. Even for an individual employee: if you're wildly successful at this, what will you have given me, what will it look like? Now they know what to look for and how to gauge success meaningfully.
[57:08] Rich Smith: That's really helpful. You have your own podcast, and you've talked to lots of people — after 100-plus conversations, what have you learned about successful leadership?
[57:27] Debra Bowers: I've learned so much from my guests — I think that's a sign of a good episode: did I learn something? Because if I learned something, the audience will too. One common theme is clarity — it gets thrown around as a coaching buzzword, but it's really important that leaders understand what they're supposed to do and what's expected of them.
[58:05] Debra Bowers: The other piece is being overly concerned with the nuts and bolts, the little pieces — like in marketing, focusing on tactics over overall strategy and how it all fits together. And for a lot of founders, especially at their first big growth plateau, what got them there won't get them to the next level — because they've had so much on their shoulders, doing HR stuff themselves and so on, which is fine at the beginning, but at some point you can't do everything you need to as a leader if you're too tangled in day-to-day operations.
[59:09] Debra Bowers: It's natural in how we grow a business — hard to let go of things — but you hit a point where you can't grow further unless your time is freed up, because when you're wrapped up in the weeds, you can't see everything else.
[59:39] Rich Smith: I see that a lot too — I call it "the founder's business trap." You hit a growth plateau, and very often the founder is doing too much, taking on too many roles, without having layered in talented people beneath them. As a founder, in order to scale your business, you have to think about how to scale yourself at the same time.
[1:00:18] Rich Smith: It's important, because if you're not scaling yourself — getting closer and closer to doing only the things you're exceptional at — at the beginning you have to do everything, that's just practical reality.
[1:00:41] Debra Bowers: Right — after day one, the organization needs you scaling yourself up to scale the organization up. It's a trap, because they don't know which part to give away, and once they do, it creates this emptiness in what they used to do and think about. If they don't have a plan for what fills that space, they sit around thinking, "why did I hire that person? I'm not doing anything now." It's kind of like completion grief — I reached this point and now I've created an emptiness and don't know what to do with it.
[1:01:37] Debra Bowers: A good operational coach can help you figure out what to get rid of, and then what to replace it with. That's not my specialty, but it's crucial — I see it a lot: a founder who can't get off their phone, answering customer-service and field questions, who doesn't even have 30 uninterrupted minutes for a strategy conversation. They've become so integral to day-to-day operations that they don't have time to think about what to do moving forward, and no one else can do that thinking for them.
[1:02:31] Rich Smith: Right — they've basically tied their revenue growth to the amount of time they personally have.
[1:02:37] Debra Bowers: Exactly — that's why it stops working. You can't grow beyond that.
[1:02:45] Rich Smith: This has been an amazing conversation, Debra — I want to start bringing it to a close, unfortunately, because I've had such a good time it feels like it's already been an hour.
[1:02:59] Debra Bowers: Yeah, it's been great.
[1:03:08] Rich Smith: Along the lines of what we were just discussing — if a CEO had 90 days to improve growth performance, what three actions would you recommend they do first?
[1:03:16] Debra Bowers: First, take a long, hard look at the organization and where the potential breaks for growth are — where's room for improvement. They likely already know where things aren't at their best. I've worked with people who have mounds of market research they never use. Look at what you have, and identify weak links — not as blame, but as room for improvement — and then think about how what they do affects the growth cycle. Step into what could potentially be wrong, instead of assuming, and get help if you don't have the data — market research isn't just what prospective customers think of you, it's also what your team thinks, what your existing customers think, and what's out there in the market about you.
[1:04:43] Debra Bowers: That's step one: get clear on where you are company-wide and department-wide. If you don't know, you need more data. Step two: now that you've identified that, look at how it affects customer experience and team experience — is there a break there? At the same time, look at your marketing and sales strategy, because there's always something to improve there too. I've seen B2B clients spending $25,000 to $100,000 on Facebook — I don't even need analysis to tell you that's a bad idea, but they just don't know.
[1:05:39] Debra Bowers: See where those breaks exist, and think about how curing them could impact growth overall. If you don't understand those dynamics, get expertise — add someone to your leadership team, or bring in a consultant — rather than making assumptions. Making decisions based on things you're not sure about is a bad decision in business and in everyday life.
[1:06:19] Debra Bowers: Then, implementation — often we identify all the issues and never do anything about it, we just sit on it. Be willing to take the steps, put an implementation plan in place, and get your leadership's buy-in so they actually implement it. I do implementation coaching sometimes, because people have the plan but can't step into it, stand in it, and lead through it — they need a little help. Typically a founder can do it, but those are really the steps: identify what's broken, think through how it's affecting growth, understand that growth doesn't begin and end in the sales department — demand is built elsewhere — see how the pieces fit together, put a plan in place, implement it, and stick with it consistently, because change is never easy.
[1:07:44] Debra Bowers: My ex-husband used to say, "the hardest thing about change is just doing it — once you start, you're on that road, you're changing." Basic, but sometimes it really is that simple.
[1:08:08] Rich Smith: Sometimes you just have to take the first step.
[1:08:11] Debra Bowers: And make that step smaller and smaller. I found that being stuck is sometimes fight-or-flight — I didn't learn that the easy way, I learned it the hard way, because I was in "functional freeze" for almost a decade. Outwardly functioning and doing everything right, but there were specific important things I was unable to move forward on. I wasn't procrastinating or being lazy — though I was hard on myself for exactly that — I was actually stuck, and it was dropping me into fight-or-flight, where your subconscious is in control and you can't even feel it happening. You just know you can't choose to do the thing, even in a small way.
[1:09:12] Debra Bowers: If you're feeling that way, a grounding exercise pops you right out of it. I learned "5-4-3-2-1" from a grief counselor after my mother died — you can Google it, it grounds you to the here and now. It's remarkable — if I feel really stuck on something, I do that and then suddenly I can just do it, like flipping a switch. So often, being stuck in the implementation phase isn't because you're incapable, don't want to, or are lazy — it's because you're dropping out, losing conscious control. Taking the smallest possible step pops you back out of it, because your conscious mind has to take control to do that one little step.
[1:10:03] Rich Smith: "5-4-3-2-1" is a great technique — we'll put a link in the show notes. I've used it too, and a lot of what it's really describing is activation energy: any time you start something new or change something, you have to apply extra energy, but it doesn't have to be much — a small spark can start a fire. Hey Debra, how can people best get in touch with you if they want to connect or learn more about your work?
[1:10:43] Debra Bowers: The best place to actually reach and communicate with me — I post a lot and have articles there — is LinkedIn. I'm on all the social platforms since I'm in marketing, but if you want a response and to know I saw your message, LinkedIn is the best place. You can also find a lot at thegrowthvanguard.com. I have a couple of free resources for people who want to go deeper: one is for sales, called "The Human Sales Playbook" — it's short, but walks through exercises for connecting with someone with confidence and trust. The other is "Five Signs Your Growth Is Breaking," which covers ways to identify if your growth is breaking somewhere other than sales.
[1:11:35] Rich Smith: We'll put links to all of that in the show notes so our audience can check them out. I want to thank you again for being on Revenue Science today — I think we've had a great conversation, and I really enjoyed it. Like you said, when I feel like I'm learning something, I think the audience will too. Thank you for being here.
[1:11:58] Debra Bowers: I really appreciate you letting me come on — please check out my podcast too, it's available on all platforms. It's called Deals with Heels — an entrepreneurial, business, and leadership podcast delivered through a female lens.
[1:12:18] Rich Smith: Fantastic — we'll link to that as well. Thanks again, I really appreciate you being here, and have a great rest of your day.
[1:12:26] Debra Bowers: Thank you for having me — loved this conversation.
[1:12:31] Rich Smith: Thank you for your time and attention on Revenue Science today. I hope you've gained valuable insights to put into practice in your own life and work. Please join our goal of helping more leaders successfully grow their companies by liking and subscribing to this podcast. To connect with me, go to richsmith.com.
