Somewhere in a trade magazine from twenty-some years ago, there's an article where I'm quoted coining a phrase, and the phrase has outlived the clipping, because I still can't find the clipping and I've never stopped seeing the disease.
Fat wallet disease.
Here's the case history, and every sales manager reading this is going to recognize the patient before I finish the second paragraph. You've got a closer — a real one, talented, hungry — and he puts together a monster month. Best month of his life. The commission check has a comma in a new place. And then you watch the strangest thing happen to a talented man: he disappears. Not physically — he still comes to the meetings. But the edge is gone. The 8 o'clock sits get soft. The follow-ups don't happen. He coasts, for exactly as long as that check holds out, and then — broke again — the hunger comes back, the edge comes back, and he puts together another monster month. And coasts again.
His performance is a saw blade. Up, down, up, down — and if you lay his production chart over his bank balance, they're the same chart, inverted. The man doesn't have a talent problem. He doesn't have a training problem. He has a thermostat problem: he's wired to a comfort number, and every time his wallet crosses it, the furnace shuts off.
I ran sales floors for four decades and I'm telling you fat wallet disease costs this industry more than every recession it's survived, because recessions end. The saw blade doesn't. It's built into the way most salesmen — most people — relate to money, and no commission plan on earth cures it, because the commission plan is the cause. You cannot fix a thermostat by making the fuel richer.
Now let me tell you about the ones who don't get it, because they're the interesting cases, and understanding them is worth real money to anybody who hires closers.
Watch great athletes. Not the good ones — the great ones, the ones who play for fifteen, twenty years at the top. Every one of them was financially set for life before their third season. If money were the motor, they'd all coast by year four — and some do, and those are the careers you can't quite remember. But the great ones show up to camp in year sixteen like they're fighting for a roster spot. Why? Because most athletes do it for the winning, not the money. The money came along. The scoreboard was the point. You cannot pay a man enough to quit winning, because winning is a well with no bottom, and a wallet fills.
The salesmen who never catch fat wallet disease are built the same way — and here's where I have to stop and be straight with you, because this is the part of the sermon where preachers usually start lying.
Don't get me wrong. It's all about the money, or I'd be a Walmart greeter. I didn't knock on strangers' doors in Charlotte for the love of aluminum siding. Anybody in this business who tells you money doesn't matter is either rich already or selling you something — usually both. The money is why we do this instead of something easier.
But somewhere along the way, somebody explained something to me that rewired how I understood my own job, and I've been carrying it ever since:
My commissions were gone far before their products stopped delivering value.
Sit with that one, because it took me years to fully absorb it. The commission on a siding job I sold in 1986 was spent by 1987 — gone, converted into rent and a car phone bill and groceries. The siding? Near as I know it's still on the house. Forty years later. Still shedding water, still saving paint jobs, still doing every single thing I promised a homeowner it would do while I stood in her kitchen with empty hands. Her side of the deal has been paying out for four decades. My side was gone in months.
Once you see that asymmetry, you can't unsee it, and it changes what you're chasing at the table. The salesman chasing the commission is chasing the small half of the transaction — the half that evaporates. When the wallet's full, there's nothing left to chase, and he coasts. That's the disease mechanism, right there. But the salesman chasing the customer's win — the thirty years of value on the other side of the deal — is chasing a well that never empties. There's always another kitchen table where somebody's about to make a ten-year mistake with a low bid, another roof leaking onto somebody's Christmas decorations. That chase doesn't have a thermostat, because it isn't wired to his bank balance at all. The money follows it anyway. It just stops being the motor.
The great ones play for the winning. In our business, the winning is the customer getting what she was promised, decades after the check that paid for the promise was spent. Same wiring as the athlete. Different arena.
So why does a chapter about salesmen's paychecks sit this early in a book about your books? Because fat wallet disease scales, and the scaled version is the disease this whole book treats.
Companies get it too. Because here's a fact I've never seen printed in a business book, so I'll print it: money is made uncomfortably. Typically, the more uncomfortable you are, the better the opportunity — the cold knock, the hard question at the sales meeting, the price you hold when your gut wants to cave. Every dollar I ever made arrived through a door I didn't feel like walking through. Which means comfort isn't the reward for good business. Comfort is the warning light.
Now think about what a comfortable month does to an owner. The account's flush, the crews are booked out six weeks, the sales meeting is all high-fives. Does anybody, in that month, pull the jobs apart to see which lines actually printed money and which just moved it around? They do not. Comfort shuts the furnace off. The questions in this book are hungry-month questions, and almost every owner who's ever called me called in a hungry month. The fat months — the months when the data was just as available and the fixes would have been just as cheap — nobody calls. The full wallet doesn't just kill a salesman's edge. It kills the owner's curiosity, and the owner's curiosity is the only audit most companies will ever get.
And that's how a company ends up believing its own belief ledger for a decade. The good months keep coming — the average is fine, remember, the P&L melts everything into a survivable fog — so the appetite to look inside never arrives. The company performs exactly like the sawtooth closer: it works its business hard in the lean stretches and coasts on its beliefs in the fat ones. Volume covers sins. Comfort defers questions. And whatever's quietly bleeding underneath gets renamed "just how this business is" — priced in, tolerated, unexamined, for years.
And lest you think this is a story from the nineties, let me tell you how recently I watched it happen — from the inside, because I was the one who caused it.
Not long ago I went to work selling for a bath-remodel franchise. The year before I got there, they'd done barely $400,000 in volume — total, for the year. Two jobs on the board when I walked in. In my first six weeks I wrote over $300,000. My second month, $420,000 — more than their entire previous year, in one month. I'm not telling you that to flex; it's all verifiable, and it sets up the point: that company went from a three-or-four-job-a-month pace to a twenty-job-a-month pace almost overnight. Money like they had never seen was suddenly coming through the door.
And the door started falling off the hinges. Within a month I could see the difference in my own lead quality. Calls weren't getting returned. Balls got dropped left and right — not from laziness, from arithmetic: they had no systems built for that volume, because they'd never needed them, and the fat wallet made sure nobody felt the urgency to build them now. Why would they? Look at the deposits. The disease had them in a month. It doesn't need a decade; it just needs the money to arrive faster than the questions.
There was a second lesson buried in that pile, and it cost real pain to dig out: too much of the new volume ran through a big-box store program, and under those programs you don't get paid until the job is entirely finished. Not mostly finished. Entirely. A missing screw on a mirror can hold up an entire check for a week — I've seen it go two. Nobody had done that math before the surge, because the surge was the first time it mattered. Sudden volume doesn't just break your follow-up. It changes your cash flow, and if you're not prepared for it, the best sales run in company history will have you sweating payroll while the board's never looked better.
Now notice the part of that story that should have your full attention, because it's the two halves of this chapter shaking hands. The salesperson writing those checks didn't catch fat wallet disease. Didn't slow down in month two, didn't coast on the biggest run of commissions that building had ever produced. That salesperson never does — because the motor was never wired to the wallet in the first place. It's all about helping the customer; the sale is how the helping gets done, and there's always another customer. The immunity I described earlier in this chapter isn't theory. I've road-tested it for forty years, most recently on that very floor.
But the company caught it inside of thirty days. Same money, same building, opposite wiring. The organization was wired to the deposits, the deposits crossed a comfort number nobody knew they had, and the furnace shut off exactly when the workload tripled. That's the transmission mechanism, cleaner than I could ever draw it up: fat wallet disease doesn't care whether the wallet belongs to a closer or a corporation. It only cares what the motor's wired to.
So mark the lesson with both hands: growth arrived, comfort and chaos arrived holding hands, and the systems conversation — the boring, uncomfortable, who-returns-the-calls conversation — got postponed by the very deposits that made it urgent. Success is a change event, same as a downturn, and it demands the same discipline: everybody rowing in the same direction, or out of the boat.
The cure, for a company, is the same as the cure for the closer: get the motor off the wallet. Wire it to something with no bottom. For the salesman, that's the customer's win. For the owner, it's knowing — the actual, job-level, receipts-on-the-table truth of what your company does well and what it does expensively. Because knowing, like winning, has no comfort number. There's always another gap to close, another line to move up a band, another crew-day to get back. An owner who's tasted the watch with the back off doesn't coast in fat months, for the same reason a great athlete doesn't coast in year sixteen. The scoreboard stopped being the bank balance a long time ago.
That's the disease at the individual scale and the company scale. Next, I want to show you what it looks like at institutional scale — what happens when an entire several-hundred-million-dollar company catches fat wallet disease, gets its scoreboard exactly backwards, and optimizes the vanity number all the way into the ground. I know the story from the inside, because I was standing in the building.
It's the story of the best sales training I ever got, from a company that died of the disease it trained me to spot.
From The 48 Questions No Marketer Ever Had the Guts to Ask You. Read Chapter One free →