The founder had just lost her third account manager in six months. Each one had been hired to support her top-performing salesperson — a man who’d been with her since the start, hit every target, and brought in nearly forty percent of revenue.
“They keep saying they can’t work with him,” she told me. “But he’s the reason we have a business.”
That sentence is the trap. It’s also the most expensive belief a small business owner can hold.
The cost you don’t see
When one person hits the numbers by working around the system instead of through it, the business pays a price that doesn’t show up in the sales report. You see it in the turnover. The account manager who quits because she’s tired of cleaning up promises she didn’t make. The customer complaints that get smoothed over because the deal is too big to lose. The processes that quietly stop being followed — because he doesn’t need to follow them.
Deming saw this forty years ago. In his System of Profound Knowledge, he argued that individual performance is almost entirely a function of the system the person works in. Rank your salespeople from best to worst and you’ve measured the system, not the people. The star isn’t a star — they’re someone who’s figured out how to extract value from a poorly designed system faster than anyone else.
Why founders protect them
I spent three years interviewing nineteen Australian founders for my PhD. Different industries, different stages, but the same pattern: at some point in the business, one person becomes load-bearing. The founder knows it. The team knows it. Everyone bends.
The bend looks like this. Bigger commissions, in case they leave. Fewer rules, because they push back. A different standard, because the founder doesn’t want to risk the conversation. The system reshapes itself around one person.
Chris Argyris called this a Model I response. Faced with a threat to control, you protect the relationship that feels safest. You don’t have the hard conversation. You don’t redesign the role. You hope it sorts itself out.
It doesn’t.
What it looks like to catch it early
One of the founders I interviewed — he ran a food and telecommunications business — told me about an evening that stayed with him. His team had rewarded one person for a specific achievement. Walking out at the end of the day, he realised the person sitting next to them had done equally important work, and hadn’t been recognised. He went home, but he didn’t sleep on it.
“Three of us just said, let’s just fire an email,” he told me. “I’m worried that you’ll go home and feel that someone else got rewarded and you weren’t. Can we take some action? Send a formal letter tomorrow, but let’s send an email tonight. So he can go home without the wrong impression and sleep overnight.”
This is what it looks like to see the system, not just the individual. He didn’t wait for the overlooked person to quit. He didn’t accommodate the rewarded person’s status. He spotted the second-order effect — what one reward did to the person next to them — and acted before it set.
That’s the muscle most founders don’t build until the third account manager quits.
Three questions
If you’re not sure whether you have this problem, three questions worth sitting with:
How much of your star’s performance is them, and how much is the territory, the timing, or the warm leads they inherited?
What would happen to your team’s culture if their behaviour became the standard?
What are you not doing — what conversation, what redesign, what redistribution — because you’re afraid of losing them?
Most founders can answer the third question if they’re honest. And most of the time, the answer is the work.
What money is for
Here’s the part that surprised me in the research. When I asked nineteen founders what motivated their teams to do their best work, money was rarely the answer. The pattern was the opposite: people wanted to be part of something they were proud of, to work with people they respected, to feel that the standards were the same for everyone.
Joy at work, in Deming’s sense, comes from being part of a system that works. Star performers who extract value from others don’t experience that joy. They experience anxiety — the kind that comes from knowing your position depends on outperforming everyone around you. They’re not happy either.
A business that runs on one person isn’t a business. It’s a hostage situation that pays commissions.
The work is to build a system where good people can do good work — and where the metric isn’t who closes the most deals, but whether the whole thing holds together when one person leaves.
