Oversubscribed and Understaffed: EA vs. Sales Hire, One Plan's Done & Matt's Most Intense Week Ever

<p>Michael opens the week trying to come up for air — CoolantClear is selling faster than it can be assembled, proposals are backing up, marketing has gone quiet, and he can&#39;t figure out which fire to stomp first. Matt opens on the opposite end of the same problem: 13 sales meetings in one week, Andrew in his first days booking more, Trish running the inbox, and a Thursday that converged accounting, legal review, CFO reporting, and the largest pitch in Develop history into a single day. Both are oversubscribed. The difference is which part of the business is doing it to them.</p><p>The sales and marketing conversation is one of the most practical the show has had. Matt makes the case for EA before salesperson — and shares how Trish protected him from his own chronic optimism before Andrew could even start. Michael walks through his pricing experiment on CoolantClear, his 200-hour proposal generator that&#39;s 90% done and still breaking, and the EA versus sales hire debate he&#39;s been circling for weeks. They go deep on LinkedIn organic versus ads, zero-difficulty keywords, email drip campaigns, case study attribution, and the right order to line up marketing dominoes when you can&#39;t measure which one will fall furthest.</p><p>Engineering covers a new pallet tending system Michael can&#39;t discuss yet — provisional filed, first customer implementation underway — incremental gripper redesigns cutting assembly cost without touching specs, and a mountain of parts arriving at Develop for the largest machine in company history. The CI section closes with One Plan officially outgrown: Develop has 3X&#39;d its machine throughput and is aiming for 2-3X more in 2028, two team members are tasked with figuring out what replaces it, and Michael makes the pitch for building something in-house in 20 hours.</p>