Clarity Opens So Many Doors

This is a little tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sitting in a Starbucks as I write this. Had a meeting here this morning, and I'm parked near the entrance. Someone with their head down, scrolling their phone, walked face-first into the glass window.

Ever hear a bird hit a window at your house? Yeah, this was that. Except with a faceprint. And spilled coffee.

The irony? An employee was literally holding the door open right next to them, washing the glass.

It happened twice before I left.

I'm not sure what this says about clarity, distraction, or modern life in general. But it felt like a fitting start to a week where I've been thinking about what people miss when they're not paying attention.

My “a-ha” moments this week

I mentioned last week that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the repositioning and relaunch of my consulting business.

It’s been a bit of a “goo stage” for me. Uncomfortable, but necessary.

I've done a lot of reflecting, a lot of thinking out loud, and a lot of arguing with a couple of different LLMs about my business positioning. (They're very patient. Also very wrong sometimes.)

When I look back at my favorite engagements over the past decade, a couple of prominent themes pop up:

1. Most companies cannot clearly articulate what their top reps do well, which makes it extremely difficult to replicate them. I think it's a huge reason why sales hires fail so often, and companies have difficulties growing above and beyond their market rates.

2. There are usually larger, more systemic barriers that get in the way that are very difficult to see. My working title for these factors is "The Dirty Half-Dozen."

There are a couple of common denominators here. They require a lot of introspective work, involve answering tough questions, and most companies are afraid to really dig into the answers they get.

That's why an outside set of eyes is so valuable.

When the clouds part ways

Here's the thing about doing the hard thinking work—once you get clear, everything else gets easier.

Once I could articulate my positioning—I help companies decode the success patterns they can't explain—suddenly I knew exactly what to write about, who I was writing it for, and how a typical engagement should flow.

• What to write about (the patterns hiding in plain sight)

• Who to write for (leaders who know something's off but can't name it)

• What an engagement actually looks like (diagnostic first, transformation second)

• How to make this replicable instead of reinventing the wheel every time

Before replication leads to scale, it gives you room to get better at the work itself. To refine the process. To bring in people who are better at pieces of it than you are.

Part of me reads this and thinks, "Well, duh."

Of course, clarity makes everything easier. Everyone knows that.

But here's what I'm noticing: knowing that clarity helps and actually doing the uncomfortable work to get there are two very different things. Most people (myself included, honestly) will avoid that "goo stage" as long as possible. It's easier to stay busy than to sit with the hard questions until the answers emerge.

The companies I work with face the same tension. They know something's off, but doing the introspective, often forensic work to really know themselves? It's awkward, especially when you feel like there are people all around you judging you for what you’re doing (or what it looks like you’re not doing).

Frankly, they'd rather bring a trainer in and hope something sticks.

I'm doing something different this time around—rebuilding more publicly than I ever have before. Showing more of the thinking, not just the polished final product.

If this kind of diagnostic thinking resonates with you—if you've got that nagging sense that your team's problems run deeper than skills gaps—take a look at what I'm building over at jeffbajorek.com.

And if you're dealing with sales performance issues that training alone hasn't fixed, let's talk. Grab some time on my calendar, and we'll figure out if there's something systemic worth digging into.

As always, thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next week.

Cheers,

JB