Jason Barnard is a serial entrepreneur, award-winning innovator and world authority on Digital Brand Intelligence™. He’s CEO of Kalicube.
As founders, we all have our superpower. Mine is the product. I know entrepreneurs whose superpower is sales or deals. Personally, I can spend 15 hours straight digging into our database, and at the end of it, I sometimes literally cry with joy because in that moment, it feels like I’m looking directly into the brain of Google or ChatGPT. When I’m in that zone, I’m eight years ahead of the competition. It’s exhilarating. It’s home.
And a few years ago, it was also the most dangerous place I could be. In 2023, Kalicube pivoted to serve a new, higher-value audience: CEOs and founders. But acquisition stalled. My team was worried about their jobs. Despite having a strong product, we were losing money month after month.
My first reaction was to retreat deeper into the product: refining, rebuilding and reworking the engine while quietly avoiding the uncomfortable work of outreach and sales. I told myself I didn’t have time. But the real reason? I wasn’t comfortable leading a sales push to my peers.
Your business is only as strong as its weakest link.
Picture your company as a three-legged stool: product, team and client acquisition.
Our product was an 8 out of 10. The team was an 8 and doing incredible work. Acquisition? A sloppy 2 out of 10. The uncomfortable truth I didn’t initially face up to was this: With a stool whose legs are 8, 8 and 2, you might as well sit on the floor.
Polishing the product always feels good and always feeds my ego. But at this juncture, I realized that spending time in product would not help the business. I was lucky because my mentor at the time told me that your company doesn’t grow at the speed of your strengths … it moves (or stalls) at the speed of your constraints. And the only work that will move the needle is the work that strengthens the weakest leg.
Founders should learn to play the bigger game of business.
I realized I’d been giving myself a pass: letting myself ignore what I pragmatically needed to do for the business, and doing what made me feel comfortable day to day.
Discomfort, it turns out, is a compass. It points straight at the work that matters most. For me, that meant something embarrassingly simple and deeply uncomfortable at the time: spending one hour a day doing the kind of outreach I hadn’t touched since my days in the music business—cold calls, warm intros and follow-ups.
I’d been thinking of it as “sales.” But I realized that B2B business isn’t really sales at all. It’s about mutually profitable relationships, just like in the music business. I wasn’t selling. I was building good relationships with like-minded people. Partnerships that are enjoyable for both parties and drive revenue for both businesses.
Your constraint might be different, but the discipline is the same.
Maybe for you, the weak leg isn’t acquisition. Maybe it’s hiring. Maybe it’s finance. Maybe it’s delivery. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is this: Your job as CEO is to identify your zone of genius because that’s your bias. That’s your safe haven. It’s not something to avoid, but it is something to watch carefully. Your role is to put personal preference aside and strengthen the weakest leg of the stool before the stool falls over.
So here’s a quick exercise: Score your own three-legged stool: Product or service. Team and ops. Client acquisition. Be honest. What’s the weak link? That’s where your next breakthrough lives, not in doubling down on the part you like most.
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