The Curve Grows Back

There is always a slowest tap.

Pull it, and the title just moves one handle over. The beer that was second slowest yesterday wakes up this morning as the problem, and nothing about it changed. Same keg, same pour, same handle, now wearing a dunce cap it never tried on.

Every revenue report eventually makes you the same offer. A fifth of the names are paying for most of the lights. Keep those, let the rest drift, and enjoy how much lighter the boat feels. (Spreadsheets always sound so calm. That’s how they get you.)

The trouble is that the shape lives in the list, and the list comes with you. Cut the bottom 80 percent and the survivors are an 80/20 of their own the moment the cut is made, a fifth of them paying for most of what’s left and the rest suddenly looking a lot like drag. Cut again and you’re down to four percent of where you started, still lopsided, the curve growing back like a hedge that takes every haircut as a suggestion.

Follow the plan all the way down and you end up with one customer.

That isn’t a business. It’s a job with a worse boss. One logo sets your prices, bends your roadmap, and knows to the dollar how much you need it.

I’ve been on the wrong end of the trim. At a company I worked for, two vendors courted us for months. Then the executive who owned the budget went on leave, the conversations went quiet, and somewhere a rep read the quiet as a no. Both marked us closed lost, right before a new VP walked in with budget and appetite. Neither came back. On their list we were the 80… we were about to be somebody’s 20.

The bottom of a list is a seat. Somebody is always sitting in it. Some are on the way up, some are on the way out, and the ranking can’t tell you which, because a ranking only knows where everyone stood on the day you printed it.

So cut for behavior, never for rank. The customer who treats your team like a vending machine has earned the door at any size, and showing that one out actually changes the room. Show the small one out and you’ve only handed the small title to whoever’s next in line.

Then give the bottom of the list a job. Part of it is your future 20, still growing into its budget. Part of it tells you what the market is doing, since your biggest accounts mostly tell you about themselves. Part of it is ballast, and a lighter boat is also an easier one to tip. If the 80 feels like drag, it’s usually being served on a model built for the 20: the same meetings, the same handholding, the same price of attention. That’s a packaging problem wearing a customer’s face.

The same math runs through a team, where it gets expensive. Rank a great crew and somebody is still last. Cut them, and the new last one spends every shift waiting to be next, and the guests can feel it from across the bar.

80/20 is always 80/20. You never get to delete the shape, only furnish it. There will always be a slowest tap, a smallest account, somebody at the end of the bench… and everyone else is watching how you treat whoever’s sitting there.

Stay Positive & Pour One Out For The Slow One