Tom Sawyer got his fence painted by making the job look like a privilege. Many owners of technology companies do the opposite: they keep the brush. A note on the owner as the bottleneck – and on borrowing a business developer.
Aunt Polly gives Tom Sawyer a Saturday sentence: “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high”, to be whitewashed (Project Gutenberg).
You know what happens next. Tom does not complain. He paints slowly, carefully, as if it were the finest job in the world. The other boys stop, watch – and start to beg for the brush. By the afternoon the fence has three coats, and Tom is a rich man: twelve marbles, a tin soldier, a kitten with only one eye, and a key that wouldn’t unlock anything.
Twain draws a law from it: to make a man covet a thing, “it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
I meet the reverse of Tom Sawyer almost every week.
The owner of a technology company. Advanced technology, a team that delivers, customers who stay. And a fence that never gets finished: business development.
The owner paints it alone. In the evenings, between two releases, at the end of a client meeting. Nobody else may hold the brush – partly because nobody else knows the product so well, partly because selling has always been the founder’s privilege. Every customer came through them. Every price was their decision.
That is Tom Sawyer in reverse. The job has become so precious that nobody else may do it – so it gets done only in the evenings that are left.
Here is what I see in these companies.
First: the (brilliant) owner is the bottleneck.
This is not criticism. The owner is the bottleneck precisely because they are good: they close the deals, they know the technology inside out, the market trusts them. But a company in which every new revenue line passes through one calendar grows only as fast as that calendar allows.
The holidays show it best. When the owner is away, the pipeline is away too.
Second: the next market may speak a different language.
The first customers usually come from the owner’s own network. The next ones – a new country, a regulated sector, a large partner – rarely do. Defence innovation, health data, content management systems: each has its own vocabulary, its own rhythm and its own logic of trust. (Regular readers remember the briar wood.)
Learning that language alone, in the evenings, is the slowest and most expensive way to learn it.
Third: a full-time sales hire is often too early and too late at the same time.
Too early, because the offer, the price and the target are not yet sharp enough to hand over. Too late, because the window in the market is open now.
A junior salesperson needs a playbook that does not exist yet. A senior sales director wants a team, a budget and a long contract. Between the two there is a gap – and many owner-led / short-decision-chain companies live exactly in that gap.
So what does Tom Sawyer the right way round look like?
Not giving the fence away. The owner remains the owner: of the vision, of the key relationships, of the final word on price.
What they borrow is the brush. Someone who has painted such fences before. Who works with the owner, not instead of them. And who leaves behind what keeps working after they have gone: a sharper offer, a pipeline that does not live in one head, a few doors that now open from the other side.
In English there is a word for this model: fractional. A senior business development lead for a few days a week, on the company’s side of the table, but without a permanent chair. The word has spread fast – more than 110,000 people on LinkedIn now describe themselves as fractional leaders (Harvard Business Review). The label matters less than the idea: experience you borrow for as long as you need it.
Twain’s law works in business, too – only the other way round. A job that only the owner may do becomes precious. And it stays unfinished.
A question to you:
If you own a technology company: which part of business development do you still do yourself – because you are the best at it, or because nobody else has ever been allowed to try?
If your fence is long and your evenings are short, write to me.
Gábor
I help owner-led / short-decision-chain tech companies turn advanced technology into revenue. If that’s you, write me: priegl.gabor@gmail.com
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