The Story I Always End Up Telling

Whatever a talk is supposed to be about, sooner or later I end up back in Grand Rapids, standing in a room full of cubicles I was about to empty out.

Six rooms full of people

My lead business didn't start as software. It started as call centers. Six of them, physical buildings in Grand Rapids, Michigan, full of people on phones. That was the business. Leases, headsets, parking lots, payroll. When people picture "lead generation" they picture something abstract. Mine had a break room.

And it worked. For years it worked. Which is exactly what made what came next so hard.

The decision

Around 2017 I closed them. All of them.

Not because the business was dying. The shape of it was wrong for where things were going. The value we created was never really the phones. It was knowing where demand was, matching it to the right buyer, and being able to prove the whole chain. You don't need six buildings to do that. The buildings had become the thing I was protecting instead of the thing that made money.

I'd love to tell you I saw it clearly and moved fast. I didn't. I sat on that decision way longer than I should have, because those rooms had my whole history in them, and some of those people had been with me from the start. Closing a failing business is sad. Closing a working one takes something else out of you.

What came out the other side

The company that walked out of those buildings became a lead exchange. First personal-loan leads, then more verticals, and today it runs on partnerships instead of parking lots. More than two dozen of them. Smaller footprint, stronger business. Along the way I ended up building the software to run it, because after twenty years of doing this I had opinions the off-the-shelf tools couldn't satisfy.

Why I keep telling it

Because every room has somebody in it who's protecting their version of the buildings. The store, the process, the org chart, the identity. The question I hand them is the one I had to answer: is this thing the business, or is it just what the business used to look like?

That question is worth more than any pep talk I could give. If you want it asked in your room, get in touch. The rest of my story is at joedelfgauw.com.