Advice from the G.O.A.T. Why wouldn’t you seek that?
By Nathan Elsberry, CEO, Revenue Office Innovations
In The Art of Coaching, Nick Saban (the greatest college football coach ever) shares a moment that shocks him: NFL teams rarely call him for advice on players he has coached or is aware of, that they plan to draft.
“All they had to do was call,” he says. “I would’ve told them the good stuff, and I would’ve told them any issues.”
The lesson? When there is available access to true experts in an area you are seeking talent, you don’t need to guess. You just have to ask the experts.
At ROI, we are those experts. The stakes associated with key hires for growth are too high to rely on gut checks, resumes, or reference calls that don’t tell the full story. Yet I constantly see firms that do just that and suffer for it.
Let me show you what I mean.
The CRO Who Looked the Part
I know a firm that recently hired a CRO and added them to their board. On paper, this person looked great. Work history at well-known firms. Confident communicator. Knew all the buzzwords and key focus areas. Seemed like a plug-and-play leader.
What they didn’t know: this person had been fired from all three of those well-known firms, in a four-year time period, for poor performance.
The issue wasn’t that this person lacked intelligence. They had a strong surface layer of conversational awareness. But beneath that? No real depth. No pattern recognition. No track record of execution in this kind of environment. Just a resume that couldn’t be validated because most firms won’t legally comment on prior employees.
How was the firm that hired this person, or their investors, supposed to know?
They didn’t ask the right questions. They didn’t get advice from people who’ve built these teams, managed through downturns, and seen what works.
They didn’t call ROI; We would’ve told them and saved them, not only from hiring this person, but also from the unqualified people that this person hired to build his team of underachievers
The Verticalization That Never Landed
Another firm I know reorganized around industry verticals before they had the right clients, experience, or service offerings to back it up.
Don’t get me wrong. At ROI, we believe specialization and differentiation are critical. But specialization and differentiation have to follow substance.
They skipped the foundational steps: building relevant case studies from past work, creating repeatable services and solutions, and identifying industry-specific language. Verticalization felt like strategy, but it was mimicry. It burned time, budget, and trust with their team.
They didn’t need industry verticalization. They needed an incremental approach to differentiation with focus areas and progressive specialization.
ROI could have prevented this.
The First-Time Exec Problem
There’s nothing wrong with hiring first-time executives. We work with many, and we were all first-timers at some point. But too often, first-timers are dropped into roles they’re not equipped for without the support structure or mentorship they need to succeed.
I know over a dozen companies that have done this in the last 18 months. And the result is nearly always the same: slow ramp, internal confusion, unmet or incorrect expectations, and a new round of turnover within 12 to 18 months.
Headhunters are not qualified to vet for job-specific readiness because they haven’t done those jobs. Recruiters rarely know what skill sets your internal structure demands. And most internal interviewers don’t know how to assess the true depth of execution, especially when they are filling roles that have never existed at a company.
ROI does. We help companies from interviewing to onboarding, as well as building and executing the support and accountability systems those hires need to succeed.
In summary, ROI is not claiming to be the G.O.A.T, Nick Saban. But in the custom software development world, we are pretty dang close!
