IThe CEO’s Blind Spot: Why You’re Losing Staff and Clients While You’re Busy Growing
You’re marketing to strangers. Are you selling to the people already inside your business?
The founder of Thumbtack watched his company grow from forty employees to four hundred in a single year. That kind of growth should feel like winning. Instead, he started noticing something strange every time he walked through the office.
He’d pass the water cooler and realize he only recognized one out of every five people standing there. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t know them. They didn’t know him either.
That’s not a story about needing more one-on-ones or an open-door policy. It’s bigger than that. His staff didn’t know where the company was headed. They didn’t know the mission, the values, or the priorities that were supposed to guide their decisions. So they made none of their own. They showed up, did what looked like a good job, and waited to either get fired or not.
The people he’d hired specifically to help him scale the business couldn’t actually do that job, because nobody had told them what the job was building toward.
So he started something simple. Every single morning, he recorded a short audio message, a “quick cast,” and sent it to his entire staff as a group text. Two minutes. Every day. Just to keep four hundred people connected to what he already knew in his own head.
That one habit is the whole episode.
Every CEO Has This Blind Spot
Whether you built the company from nothing or you were promoted into the chair, you learn the same lesson fast: your job is to grow the business. So you focus outward. You forge partnerships. You work with sales and marketing. Maybe you’re even acquiring other businesses.
And all of that outward focus pulls your attention away from what’s happening inside your own operation.
You still make decisions, sure. You sit in meetings. Your CFO or your accountant hands you numbers. But almost every one of those decisions is in service of one goal: promoting the company outward, to people who don’t work there yet and haven’t bought anything yet.
Here’s the blind spot. As much time and energy as you spend marketing to strangers, you need to spend marketing to your own staff. As much time as you spend selling to people who’ve never given you a dollar, you need to spend selling to the clients who already have. As much effort as you put into communications and media for an audience you’ve never met, you need to put into communications and media for the people already inside your walls.
When you don’t, the company hits a ceiling. Not because you stop growing, you’re still marketing, still attracting new people, maybe still striking new partnerships, but because you’re losing staff and clients at close to the same rate you’re bringing them in. You end up on a hamster wheel: new people just barely replacing the ones walking out the back door.
Retention is just sales over time. If you stop selling your own people on the future, they leave. Not always loudly. Sometimes they just quietly become someone who’s punching a clock.
The Fix: The One-in-Five Rule
For every five pieces of content, activity, or effort you put toward people outside your business, you owe one piece of equal effort to the people already inside it. Your staff. Your current clients. Twenty percent. Not an afterthought, a rule.
This applies across three areas.
Internal media. If you’re producing content for strangers, blog posts, social media, webinars, ads, you also need to be producing content for the people who already work for you and already buy from you. That’s what the Thumbtack quick cast was. Two minutes a day, sent straight to staff, not for marketing, not for outsiders to see, just to keep everyone oriented around what the company is doing and why.
Internal marketing. This is how you keep the clients you already have engaged and looking forward to what’s next. Preview what’s coming. Give your current clients a glimpse of the future so they stay excited about staying, instead of only ever seeing marketing aimed at people who haven’t joined yet.
Internal sales. Your staff need to be sold on continuing to work for you, the same way a prospect needs to be sold on becoming a client. That’s not manipulation, it’s clarity. A regular meeting where the entire purpose is “here’s how this job builds your career, and here’s why this company is worth staying at” does more for retention than any perk.
This reframes partnerships, too. Most business owners think of partnerships as cross-referrals or paying for leads. But the highest-leverage partnerships are the ones that deliver measurable value to your staff without adding a dollar to your payroll. Partner with a business your team already frequents, an oil change shop, a clothing store, a restaurant, and negotiate real staff benefits. Your team gets something tangible. Your partner gets access to a built-in customer base. You get a business that grows without your labour costs growing alongside it.
We Learned This the Hard Way
Catalyst Fitness, 2014 to 2020. My gym grew fast in those years. Full-time staff, booming membership. Then government-mandated COVID lockdowns hit, and for two years everything was chaos, client churn, staff churn, nobody sure what the rules were from one week to the next. We sat back and reacted to whatever got thrown at us. What we should have been doing, and didn’t, was producing regular internal media for both staff and clients. That failure is on me.
Coming out of it, we treated it as a chance to start over. First, we published our mission, publicly, but we shared it with staff first, on purpose. Then we started monthly staff breakfast meetings. Not a rules briefing. The entire goal of every single one of those meetings was to sell the team on continuing to build their career at Catalyst.
And we started a weekly quick cast built around the questions our clients were actually asking, a preview of the week’s programming. Outsiders wouldn’t have understood it and it wasn’t meant for them. It was built entirely to sell our current clients on the week ahead, to keep them engaged, to keep them excited to show up.
Two-Brain Business, growing from five mentors to sixty. When our mentor team was small, I had regular contact with every one of them. As we scaled toward sixty, that direct contact disappeared, and at first we tried to compensate by evaluating harder: correcting advice, flagging why a client had quit, pointing out where guidance drifted from what we taught.
That didn’t work. What worked was getting in front of the problem instead of correcting it after the fact. Starting in 2018, every new mentor went through formal certification, and recertified annually, so they knew the material cold. But the bigger driver was something less formal: regular office hours, especially early on, where mentors could talk through client problems, learn from each other, and stay genuinely excited about the work.
Between 2018 and 2021, our mentor churn was close to zero. The only people who left were people we chose not to renew.
Your Task This Week
Here’s an audit that takes about an hour.
Step one: Pull up your last ten pieces of external activity, ad campaigns, social posts, webinars, or partnerships. Count how many were built specifically to benefit people already inside your business, your current clients or your staff. If that number is less than two, you’ve found your blind spot.
Step two: Plan one action in each category this week.
- Internal media: One piece of content, a quick cast, an internal update, a client-only preview, built only for people already inside your business.
- Internal sales: One team meeting whose entire purpose is selling your staff on staying and growing with you. If you’ve never run a vision, mission, and values meeting, start there.
- Internal marketing: One partnership opportunity that benefits your current clients or staff directly, not a cross-referral, not a fee, an actual benefit your people will notice.
Step three: Put a specific date on each one. The One-in-Five Rule only works if it’s a rule, not an intention.
Retention is sales over time. Stop treating your current staff and clients as a solved problem, and start selling them on tomorrow the same way you sell strangers on today.
Chris Cooper is the host of BusinessIsGood, a podcast for Canadian small business owners. New episodes at businessisgood.com.
SEO Title: The CEO’s Blind Spot: Why You’re Losing Staff and Clients While You Grow Meta Description: Every CEO markets to strangers while the people already inside the business quietly disengage. Here’s the One-in-Five Rule for fixing it, with real examples from Thumbtack, Catalyst Fitness, and Two-Brain Business. Tags: staff retention, client retention, internal communications, leadership, employee engagement, small business operations, business growth, Canadian business, company culture, internal marketing, mentorship, entrepreneur Category: Leadership & Retention
Chris Cooper is the founder of BusinessIsGood and the former founder of Two-Brain Business, the global gym mentorship company. He’s the author of six books on entrepreneurship and lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
