If you work in sales, I need you to hear something nobody is going to say to you in your next one-on-one. Sales is one of the greatest launchpads on earth. It is not a great career. And if you've been treating it like the destination instead of the runway, that distinction is costing you.
The trap most reps fall into
Here's the pattern I see constantly. Rep gets good. Starts hitting quota. Earns some wins. Gets a little recognition. Then they start optimizing for the wrong thing.
Senior rep. Team lead. Manager. Director. VP of sales someday. That's the path, right? That's what winning looks like in this world. So they spend years, sometimes a decade, getting really good at climbing. And then one day they look up and see where the ladder actually goes.
The people at the top? They're not happy. They're not free. They're not at peace. They're stressed out, capped out, and still grinding someone else's quota, just with a bigger title and a higher base that comes with its own problems. I watched this at my own company. The VPs, the directors, the top performers who had been there forever. They weren't what I thought winning looked like. That's when I realized: this isn't a ladder I want to climb. It's a launchpad I need to jump off of.
What sales actually is
Let me ask you something. What do you actually do all day?
You pick up the phone when most people won't. You handle rejection ten, fifteen, twenty times before lunch and you keep going. You run discovery calls and figure out what someone actually needs underneath what they're saying. You handle objections in real time without a script. You follow up persistently without becoming annoying. You close deals under pressure with a quarter-end deadline breathing down your neck.
Those aren't sales skills. Those are founder skills.
The only difference between you and someone running a successful business is that they took those exact same skills and pointed them at something they own. Sales is the gym. It's the dojo. You're supposed to get strong here, and then use that strength somewhere that actually belongs to you. The problem is nobody ever told you that. They just kept handing you a new quota.
The moment it clicked
I spent 18 months closing a $3.5 million deal with Nike. Flights to Portland. Client dinners. Endless follow-up. Every ounce of skill I had poured into that one deal.
Commission check: three thousand dollars.
Not because I did anything wrong. Because that's how the math works when you're doing founder-level work at employee-level pay.
Two weeks after I started my agency with Derek, I had my first client. A screen printer out of Detroit. Two calls, never met in person, closed at $2,750 a month. Same skills. Same outreach. Same ability to build trust and close.
The difference? That $2,750 was mine. Not a percentage of a deal someone else booked as revenue. Mine. That's when I understood what sales had actually been doing for me all those years. It wasn't my career. It was my training.
Eric didn't have anything special. Neither do you.
I want to tell you about one of our students, because this one hits different if you've ever thought "I don't have anything special to offer."
Guy named Eric. Came from the landscaping world. Not from some high-powered sales career. Landscaping. When he started his lead generation agency, he didn't sit around trying to figure out what niche to pick. He just turned around and sold to the industry he already knew.
Think about what that looked like on his first calls. He knew what a season looks like for a landscaping company. He knew what a crew costs, what a job margins out at, what owners lose sleep over. When an owner started talking, Eric didn't sound like a marketer. He sounded like one of them. The trust that takes most beginners months to build? He had it in ninety seconds.
First 30 Days
3 clients
at $3,000 to $4,000 a month each
Six Months In
8 clients
at $25K in monthly recurring revenue
He didn't learn new skills. He weaponized knowledge he already had and thought was nothing special. Every sales rep watching this has Eric's exact advantage and doesn't see it. You've spent years selling into some industry. Security software, medical devices, pest control, SaaS, logistics, construction, whatever it is. You know how that world buys. You know what it fears. You know what it needs. That's not resume filler. That's the foundation of a business.
Why the LGA model works for sales reps specifically
You're not learning a new industry. You're not developing skills you don't have. You're taking what you already know, the prospecting, the outreach, the closing, the industry knowledge, and pointing it at local and service-based businesses who desperately need leads and will pay a monthly retainer for someone who can deliver them.
Three to five clients at two to four thousand a month.
That's ten to twenty thousand in monthly recurring revenue. Income that doesn't reset in January. Income that compounds instead of expires.
That's not some overnight transformation. Derek and I started in November 2016 and I didn't quit until June 1st, 2017. About six months of building it on the side while still employed. By the time I walked out, I wasn't jumping off a cliff. I was stepping onto something I'd already built.
The mission isn't the quota
If you're a sales rep who's been treating the launchpad like the destination, this is me telling you the mission isn't the quota. The mission is to build something that's yours.
You already have the skills. You already have the industry knowledge. You already have the grit. The only question is when you're going to stop using all of it to build someone else's business.
– Dave
See the exact model Derek and I used.
From sales reps to seven-figure agency. The free training walks through how it works and how to start on the side without quitting your job.
Watch Free Training