The client who let me have it

Somewhere along the way, someone handed you a definition of winning.

You probably didn't notice it happening. A parent. A first boss. A leaderboard on the wall. A number someone else set that you agreed to carry.

And you've been running on it ever since.

Here's what I want to hand you today: you can keep it, or you can choose your own.

That's the whole decision.

Change is not something that happens to you

We talk about change like weather. The market changed. My biggest client changed. The referrals dried up.

Some of that is true. Conditions shift and you don't get a vote.

But the change that moves your business isn't the one that arrives. It's the one you choose — usually quietly, usually without an announcement, usually on an ordinary Tuesday when you decide you're not doing it the old way anymore.

Change is a decision. Not an event.

I spent years competing against yesterday's me

My sales career started in an environment that was flat out win-lose. Monthly rankings. Monthly and quarterly goals.

I decided early I wasn't going to play against the board. I competed against yesterday's version of me instead. Every day was a chance to do better and be better than I had been the day before.

That was healthier than the alternative. It kept me out of the comparison spiral, usually. And it worked — for a while.

But here's what took me longer to see:

I had changed who I was competing against. I hadn't changed what winning meant.

The definition was still handed to me. A win still required somebody's loss. I'd just made the somebody me.

The meeting I've never forgotten

I was 100% commission then. No base. No cushion. Every month started at zero.

His name is Mike. He owned several retail locations — the kind of operator who knows his own numbers cold, because he built the whole thing himself.

I sat down with him and I was underprepared. I didn't know his business deeply enough. The solution I brought wasn't on point.

And the reason was simple, even if I couldn't have named it that day: I wasn't focused on Mike, or his stores, or how to grow sales for him.

I was focused on my goals, the company I worked for and how great it was.

He let me have it.

Every word of it was deserved. I have never forgotten that meeting, and I have never forgotten him.

Somehow, sitting in it, I had the wherewithal to ask him for another chance — to let me come back and do it right.

He gave it to me.

I have not walked into a meeting unprepared since. Not one, in a career that's now spanned decades.

But the durable thing that changed that day wasn't my prep.

It was the question I was answering.

I moved the win

From that meeting forward, the question stopped being did I hit my number.

It became: did this client end up further along than they would have without me in the room?

That one move rearranged everything downstream of it. I prepared differently, because now I really had to understand their business. I asked different questions, because I needed the real problem, not the convenient one. I stopped performing and started building.

And the numbers went up. Not in spite of the reframe — because of it.

That decision is the seed of what I now call Win Your Way. I used it to build sales teams. I use it now to grow this business and help client scale theirs. And it's the first thing I take founders through, because nothing else holds without it.

Why this matters most in sales

Sales is where the borrowed definitions pile up highest.

Always be closing. Hunters and farmers. It's a numbers game. You have to want it more. If you're not hearing no, you're not asking enough.

None of those are yours. You inherited them, and then you judged yourself against them — and when they didn't fit, you concluded you weren't a salesperson.

You didn't fail the definition. The definition was never yours.

This is exactly where traditional sales training goes wrong. It drops you straight into How — the scripts, the sequences, the objection handling — and skips What and Who entirely.

What does winning mean to me now, in this phase? Who would I have to be to produce it, to live it?

As founders, few or nobody asks you. So you build a plan, especially a revenue plan, based on what you think you’re supposed to want, probably built for a version of you that doesn't exist or you can't sustain doing it the way you’re doing it, and you decide the problem is you.

A result you've never produced requires a version of you that doesn't exist yet.

That's the work. Not the plan.

The question I want to hand you

We're at the end of August. Four months left in 2026.

So define it:

What does a win for the rest of this year look like — on your terms?

No one's watching. There is no right answer, just what’s right for you.

Three things worth doing as you sit with it:

• Notice the first answer that shows up, then interrogate it. A revenue number arrives fast for most founders. Ask whose number it is and where you got it. Sometimes it's genuinely yours. Often it's a benchmark you absorbed from a peer, a podcast, or a version of you from three years ago.
• Ask what you'd want if no one ever found out. No LinkedIn post. No year-end recap. Strip out the audience and see what's left standing. That's usually the real one.
• Make it something you could recognize on sight. "Grow the business" isn't a win, it's a direction. "Two clients in the sector I actually want to serve, and I stopped chasing the other kind" — that you'd know the moment it happened.

Then ask the harder question underneath it:

Who would I have to be to hold that outcome without strain?

Not who would grind hard enough to reach it once. Who holds it. Those are different people, and only one of them gets to keep it.

No system sticks until the identity catches up. I say it every week for a reason.

Here's mine, since I'm asking for yours

I make B2B sales fun for founders. I'm in the revenue growth business, so of course I have revenue expectations for the year.

But my wins for 2026 feel different than they used to.

Building this community. Time with my family and my extended family, who are scattered all over the country. Being outside, in nature, as much as I possibly can be. And getting to the end of a day and letting it be enough — which is its own kind of discipline for a recovering high performer.

My calendar is color-coded, and one of those colors is fun. I watch it. If a week goes by without a couple of things on there purely because I want to do them, I know I'm out of whack before anything else tells me.

That's not the win I would have written five years ago. That's the point.

The mantra I keep coming back to

You don't need a better plan. You need to become the person the plan belongs to.

What does winning the rest of 2026 look like, defined by you?