THS # 146 - A partner at a $120M firm told me: They taught us search. Nobody taught us sales.

A partner at a $120M firm told me last week: “They taught us search. Nobody taught us sales.”

Sit with that for a second. A nine-figure firm. Partner level. And the thing that grows the business, the thing every dollar of revenue actually depends on, was the one thing nobody ever sat him down and taught.

This is not uncommon as I have heard this story play out over and over again over the past 3 years.

Think about how you learned to recruit. Someone showed you how to write a Boolean string. How to read a resume. How to qualify a candidate, prep them for an interview, manage the offer, close the placement. You got trained on the craft. You got coached on delivery. You probably had a manager who reviewed your submittals and told you where it could be improved upon.

Now think about how you learned to sell. For most recruiters, the honest answer is: you didn’t. You watched someone who was good at it and tried to copy the vibe. You got told to “make more calls” and “build relationships.” You picked up a few lines that worked and repeated them until they stopped working. When BD went well you couldn’t fully explain why, and when it went badly you couldn’t fix it, because there was nothing underneath it to fix. There was no system. Just instinct and effort.

A $120M firm still feels it for a simple reason. When you’re small, the founder is the rainmaker. The business development lives in one person’s head, and as long as that person keeps swinging, the lights stay on. Then the firm grows. You hire delivery people, because delivery is the thing you know how to train. You build a recruiting machine. But the selling stays trapped in the founder’s head, undocumented and unteachable, because nobody ever broke it down into something you could hand to someone else.

So the firm hits a ceiling that has nothing to do with talent or market. It’s a ceiling made of one simple fact: the most important skill in the business was never turned into a process. Revenue depends on a handful of people who “just get it,” and you can’t hire your way past that, because the thing they get was never written down.

I want to name the reframe, because most firm owners get this backwards.

Search is hard to learn and feels teachable. Sales feels hard to teach and gets treated like a personality trait. You either have it or you don’t. He’s a natural. She’s just good with people.

That’s the lie that keeps the gap open. Selling is not a personality. It’s a set of repeatable behaviors that can be named, sequenced, practiced, and corrected, exactly like sourcing. Who you target and why. What triggers a reason to reach out. What you actually say in the first message. How you follow up without feeling like a pest. How you run the call so the prospect talks more than you do. None of that is charisma. All of it is process.

The recruiters who look like “naturals” aren’t doing magic. They’re running a system they’ve never written down. The good news in that sentence is the whole point: if it’s a system, it can be taught. If it can be taught, it can be hired for, scaled, and pulled out of the founder’s head before the founder burns out or sells.

So if you’re sitting in that gap right now, knowing your delivery is sharp and your BD is held together with instinct and adrenaline, start here this week. You don’t need to overhaul anything.

• Write down what you actually do when BD is working. The good week you had last month did not happen by accident. Reverse-engineer it. Who did you contact, what made you pick them, what did you say. If you can’t reconstruct it, that’s your answer about why it isn’t repeatable.

• Pick one niche and go an inch wide, a mile deep. “Naturals” almost always sell into a lane they understand inside and out. Most owners are spread mile wide, inch deep, which is why every conversation feels like starting over. Narrow it.

• Build one repeatable outreach sequence and run it the same way for thirty days. Not spray and pray. The same message structure, to the same kind of buyer, tracked so you can see what’s landing. A mediocre system you run consistently beats brilliant outreach you do twice and abandon.

• Treat your own BD like you treat a search. You’d never let a recruiter wing a high-stakes role with no process and no notes. Stop letting yourself wing the thing the whole firm is built on.

The partner who told me that line wasn’t complaining. He was just telling me what I have heard 100s of times already.

They taught you search. Nobody taught you sales. That’s not on you. What you do with it now is.