What Every Founder Ought to Know About RevOps

When I started on this journey almost 15 months ago, I just wanted to build a business that could sustain me.

I had done the math. And despite all the “hype” about being an entrepreneur, the reality hit me square in the face: based on the product I was selling, and the limitations of me as a solopreneur, freedom was not guaranteed.

At first, I thought the problem was effort. (And to be fair, I had stretched myself too thin — taking a VP role with a bootstrapped media company while trying to build on the side.)

But it wasn’t just effort.

It wasn’t the product either. (This was a well-recognized white-label platform with depth and features people respected.)

It wasn’t even leads. (I had secured a retainer client and delivered a full system that showcased all my capabilities.)

The truth was harder to admit: I didn’t know what I was doing.

Despite two decades of delivering strategic IT marketing solutions for Fortune 500s — and years of running marketing automation for entrepreneurs — I had no idea how the game of business actually worked.

I thought building a product and selling it was the game.
But I learned the hard way: building a product or service is just the entry fee.
The real game begins when you try to build a business around it.

“Entrepreneurship: the only sport where you’re dropped into a stadium with no rulebook, no position, and no gear.”
~ Juhl Tayler Lenard

Four years in, I was disillusioned. The business failure statistics told me my days were numbered. And yet… I couldn’t quit. I had to find out how to make this thing work.

That’s when I started seeing what I had missed.

• The point where I received a lead was not the end, it was the beginning.

• Every lead was not a good lead.

• Selling anything to anyone just to get paid was a trap that would never scale.

I was missing the bigger picture: the system of business itself.

Without understanding that system, I was doomed to stay on the hamster wheel — chasing the next tool, the next vendor promise, the next coaching program — all while making little real progress toward my financial goals.

And underneath it all, I realized I had made some basic assumptions that were flat-out wrong.

Assumption #1: “A CRM will help me close more deals?”

Wrong.

I thought the tool would do the heavy lifting. I signed up for CRM after CRM, spent hours setting them up, sent a few newsletters, stored my contacts… and then wondered why nothing changed.

The hard truth? A CRM is a tool. Without a system, an offer, and a sales process, it’s just a fancy Rolodex. If anything, I would have been better off cold calling than pouring time into platforms I wasn’t ready to use. I had drunk the CRM Kool-Aid.

Back to the lab again.

Assumption #2: “I just need more leads.”

Wrong.

What I really needed were qualified leads. And not the kind you buy in bulk from lead gen services. To even use those services effectively, you need two things I didn’t yet have: a clearly defined Ideal Customer and a rock-solid Offer.

I didn’t know what those were — not really. I just knew I didn’t have them.

And the more I chased leads without fixing that, the more frustrated I became.

Assumption #3: “If I just had more tools, things would feel less overwhelming.”

Wrong.

When you’re in the thick of it, every new tool feels like relief. The promise of order. The hope that this one will finally make the chaos go away.

I chased that promise: automation platforms, dashboards, funnels, plug-ins, upgrades. Each one gave me a hit of hope… until I realized I was just adding more complexity to an already fragile foundation.

Tools weren’t solving the problem. They were multiplying it.

The Realization

What I came to see is this:

• The pain wasn’t about the CRM. It was about my lack of control over a repeatable process.

• The pain wasn’t about the leads. It was about my lack of clarity on who I was meant to serve and how.

• The pain wasn’t about the tools. It was about my lack of capacity to carry growth without burning out.

Those were the raw gaps. Control. Clarity. Capacity.

And no tool in the world could hand me those things.

Bringing It Back to RevOps

When I finally got fed up with chasing tools and patching holes, I sat down and started building what I wish I’d had from the beginning: a system that actually worked together.

That system became Streamline & Scale™ — my framework for creating control, clarity, and capacity so a business could grow without burning its founder out.

And only later did I realize: what I had built for myself as a scrappy founder is exactly what big corporations call Revenue Operations.

Corporate teams had whole departments dedicated to it. Founders like us? We were left to figure it out on our own, usually by buying the next tool or signing up for the next program.

That’s when it clicked for me: Streamline & Scale™ was RevOps for Builders. A founder-sized way to stop duct-taping tools together and finally play the real game of business with rules, positions, and the right gear.

What’s Next

✦ That’s the journey that led me here — from chasing tools and leads to realizing the real game is building a business that can actually hold growth.

If this resonates, you’ve got two simple ways forward:

• Watch the Founder’s RevOps Debrief → a 35-minute briefing on why RevOps is the foundation most founders are missing.

• Download the Scale-Ready Systems Checklist → an interactive tool that helps you spot gaps and pick 3 action items you can start on this week.