Hiring Is the Win. The Ramp Is the Work.

Every distributor owner I work with eventually gets to the same good moment. The business is growing. There is more pipeline than the founder and two loyal people can cover. It is time to hire.  Congrats – this company and processes you have built are working.

Then the new person starts, and a few months in, they are still not producing. Not because they are bad at the job. Because nobody ever actually taught them the job.  Perhaps you’re too busy doing your job to stop and train them.

This is the part of scaling that nobody warns you about. Finding the right sales or account management person is hard enough. But even a strong hire can stall out if there is no structure waiting on the other side of the offer letter. No onboarding. No playbook. No one whose job it is to get them to full productivity before the patience runs out.

Two separate jobs. Most companies only staff one of them, and then conclude the hire was the mistake.

Why the ramp gets skipped

It is not negligence. It is math.

By the time an owner has run a search, sorted through resumes, done the interviews, negotiated the offer, and gotten someone to sign, they are exhausted and they are behind. The hire itself consumed the bandwidth that was supposed to go toward onboarding the hire. So the new person gets a laptop, a login, a list of accounts, and some version of “shadow me for a couple weeks.”

Then the owner goes back to running the business, and the new hire is left to reverse engineer an entire industry on their own. Promo is not an intuitive business from the outside. Margins, decoration, sourcing, supplier relationships, the rhythm of how a program actually gets built and reordered. None of it is obvious. A smart, motivated person can absolutely learn it, but not by osmosis, and not fast enough to justify the payroll if nobody is teaching them.

That is how a good hire quietly becomes a failed one, and how a growing company ends up running the same search twice.

What I am doing about it

I have partnered with Maggie Ortmeyer at Sportified Recruit to close that gap.

Sportified Recruit is a recruiting firm that places former collegiate and professional athletes into their next professional chapter. Maggie and her husband Jed founded the business around a simple thesis: there is an elite, deeply competitive talent pool coming out of sports every year, and most companies have no idea how to reach it. Jed played pro hockey for eleven years and served as Director of Player Development for the New York Rangers. Maggie worked as an Account Executive in the promotional products space before moving into sports marketing, and she runs the day to day of Sportified Recruit now.

Here is how the partnership works. Sportified Recruit sources and places the candidate. My sales training takes it from there and gets that new hire up to speed in this industry specifically. Any client who hires through Sportified Recruit can add NMC’s sales training as part of onboarding. One relationship, both halves of the problem.

Why athletes

Because they are the most coachable people you will ever work with. Obviously.  Athletes bring grit, determination, and team building skills that translate directly into sales. More importantly, they have spent their entire lives inside a feedback loop.  Somebody tells them what they did wrong, they fix it, they run it again.  They do not get defensive about coaching. They expect it.

That makes them unusually good candidates for a structured ramp, which is exactly what makes this partnership work.  Sportified Recruit brings me people who are wired to be developed, and I develop them. The hiring organization gets to ROI faster than they would have with a candidate who has to be convinced that coaching is not criticism.

If you are hiring

If you are a distributor or supplier leader who is looking at a sales or account management opening right now, or who tried a hire in the last year that did not stick, this is worth a conversation. You do not have to build an internal recruiting function to reach good talent.  And you do not have to hope your new hire figures out promo on their own. There is a version of hiring where the person you bring in is set up to succeed from day one, and it is not as complicated as it looks from the inside of a busy quarter.

Reach out and I will walk you through how it works. If Sportified Recruit is the right fit for your search, I will make the introduction.  Contact me at nm@nicolemcnamee.com or book 15 minutes for a quick conversation.