I Took Revenue to Zero on Purpose

When I joined OpticWise as CEO around 2016, the company had revenue. It had contracts. It had customers. I sold off every existing contract and took revenue to zero.

On purpose.

This is not the kind of story that impresses a venture capitalist. This is the kind of story that makes sense if you have ever looked at a business and known, in your gut, that the foundation was wrong. Not broken. Not failing. Just built on the wrong kind of customer and the wrong kind of relationship.

OpticWise's co-founder Drew Hall built the technology. He is exceptional at it. When I came in to drive the business side, what I saw was a company with real capability and a revenue base that would not support where the company needed to go. The contracts were fine. The customers were fine. But the business model needed to be rebuilt around recurring commercial real estate clients, not around the mix that existed.

So I zeroed it out. Not gradually, not with a two-year migration plan. I sold off the contracts, thanked the customers, and started over. For the first two years I was totally in it, by choice, not because I had to be. I was building the pipeline, building the relationships, and building the recurring revenue model that would eventually make the company profitable and sustainable.

The conviction to do this came from a principle I teach in the Business leg: when you know the foundation is wrong, no amount of optimization on top of it will fix the problem. You can grow faster, hire better, market smarter, and the building still leans because the base is crooked. The courageous call is to accept the short-term pain of rebuilding the base, because the alternative is a long, slow grind on a structure that will never hold.

I have seen this pattern in other businesses too. An earlier company of mine went from $12 million to $2.5 million during the 2008 crash. Eighty percent of revenue gone. I cut everything except customer-facing features, went from a couple dozen people to five, and ran so much more efficiently that the smaller company earned more net dollars than the bigger one had. The lesson was identical: sometimes less is more, and the lean version of the thing is actually the better version.

The men I coach who run businesses often have a version of this call sitting in front of them. A product line that is not working. A customer segment that is draining the team. A partnership that made sense five years ago and does not anymore. He knows the right call. He is not making it because the revenue attached to the wrong thing feels safer than the uncertainty of rebuilding.

I zeroed out revenue and rebuilt. The company is profitable, the customers are right, and the model works. The short-term pain was real. The long-term gain was everything.

What part of your business do you already know needs to be rebuilt from the foundation?

~b