Sometimes you have to hire even when the framework says you shouldn’t. Your CFO insists. Your board pushes for it as a condition of capital. Here’s the rule that determines whether the hire works. By Shawn Ennis · Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks · July 29, 2026 Over the past eight weeks I’ve made a…
Before you make a salaried hire, exhaust three other mechanisms first. They cost less, carry less risk, and let you scale revenue without scaling headcount. I’m running all three at my current company right now. By Shawn Ennis · Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks · July 20, 2026 Stage 3 is when you bring in…
Most founders place themselves in Stage 3 when they’re actually in Stage 1. The gap is what’s hurting them. Here is the four-stage model — and why Stage 2 is the new default that almost nobody is operating in yet. By Shawn Ennis · Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks · July 9, 2026 Every successful…
The founders who survive the solo-led phase aren’t working more hours. They’re working the same hours with dramatically better structure. Here is the time allocation that makes founder-led GTM sustainable past $1M in revenue. By Shawn Ennis · Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks · June 29, 2026 The instinct when you are overwhelmed is to…
In my 25 years of building and selling companies, I have found that job-board candidates take 10 times longer to qualify than network candidates. The math isn’t even close. Here’s why — and what to do instead. By Shawn Ennis · Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks · June 17, 2026 Let me say this plainly,…
The hardest mistakes I have made in 25 years of building companies were in hiring. Hiring too early. Hiring from job boards. Hiring people I “clicked with” but who couldn’t actually do the job. Here are the four patterns I see most often — and the real cost of each. By Shawn Ennis · Founder…
Everyone in B2B sales knows the feeling. A perfect deal appears from your network — the timing is flawless, the pain is exactly what you solve, the budget is approved. It feels like luck. It is not. In sales, we call these deals Bluebirds. They feel magical because they arrive without the grinding, multi-month pursuit…
A compounding pipeline requires ten essential activities running continuously. Most founders are doing three. The gap between three and ten is why your revenue is lumpy. I discovered this the hard way. For years, I did the traction tasks I was naturally good at — meeting prep, direct outreach, and occasionally posting on LinkedIn —…
Two pieces of feedback every founder and sales leader hears eventually. They sound like different problems. They are the same problem. The first one arrives in a board meeting, an investor check-in, or a candid conversation with your co-founder at the end of a brutal quarter. The words are always some variation of the same…
Most founders collapse three distinct functions into one undifferentiated activity called “GTM.” That confusion is why their pipeline never compounds. I spent years doing this. I called it “sales and marketing.” It was one line item on my to-do list, one block of time on my calendar, one thing I felt guilty about not doing…