Ninety days into a new role, he did what good leaders do.
He sat down with everyone. Leadership team, direct reports, one-on-ones. Asked what was working. Asked what wasn't working. And one thing kept coming up: we're not doing enough with HubSpot.
The executive leader who owned the system had retired. The institutional knowledge walked out with them. Nobody panicked when it happened. Nobody flagged it. The system just quietly eroded, through turnover and competing priorities and accumulated workarounds, until someone new arrived and started asking the obvious questions.
He called us. Not because there was a crisis. Because he was paying attention.
A few weeks later, I was on a different call with the head of franchise development at a fast-growing fitness brand. She had just gotten access to her company's HubSpot account for the first time and described what she found: leads hitting the system with no visibility into what happened next, spreadsheets filling the gaps, a Google Form collecting franchise investor information, reps using a sophisticated platform as little more than a contact list.
Her words: "I got under the hood and I was like, what is going on?"
Same story. Different company. Different industry.
The breaks didn't announce themselves in either case. They happened slowly, invisibly, until someone new walked in and asked why things were the way they were.
In five years, Brady Carlsen and his co-founder built The Back Nine Golf into a franchise with over 160 locations and 300 more in the pipeline. Brady joined us recently on the RevOps Champions podcast, and one thing he said keeps coming back to me. When your business is growing fast, things are going to break. The smart move is expecting it.
He said that at every growth stage, something cracks. Not dramatically. Not all at once. The process that worked at 30 units doesn't hold at 100. The support structure that was fine for 50 franchisees becomes a bottleneck at 150. His advice wasn't to prevent the breaking. It was to expect it. Build with backup plans. Create the feedback loops that tell you when something is starting to slip.
"It's a never-ending continuous improvement," he said. "Franchisees will give you feedback and you have to figure out: this isn't working the way it did at 50 units. What's going to support them better now?"
That's a different mindset than most operators carry. Most are trying to build something permanent. The ones who scale well are building something designed to be replaced.
The same is true for revenue operations.
If your revenue system depends on specific people knowing how it works, it isn't really a system. It's institutional knowledge wearing a system's clothes. And institutional knowledge retires. It gets promoted. It moves on.
Brady put it plainly when talking about franchisee onboarding: if you can hand someone your operations manual and they can go through it and understand exactly what to do, you've built something real.
Most companies think they've done that. Then someone new arrives, looks beneath the surface, and finds out they were wrong.
The companies we work with that grow the most aren't the ones who built it right the first time. They're the ones who treat their system as a practice. Something that gets tended to, updated, and improved continuously. Not completed and closed.
A lot of the conversations we're having at Denamico right now start the same way both of those calls started: someone new walks in, digs in, and realizes the system stopped working a while ago. The rest of the company just didn't know it yet.
The good news is that once you see it, you can fix it. And the companies that do, the ones that commit to treating their revenue system as something living rather than something finished, are the ones that keep growing with confidence.
If that sounds like where you want to be, I'd love to meet.
There's a link below to grab some time.
Cheers to always being a work in progress,
Kristin
Kristin Dennewill
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