When "Ambitious" Goals Are Actually the Problem
Lessons from: 1-800-GOT-JUNK
Here's something I see constantly with the startups I work with: founders who are so focused on growth that they set goals designed to stretch themselves and their teams. Then can't figure out why everyone's burned out.
The logic seems sound. Set aggressive targets, push people to rise to the occasion, and celebrate when you hit them. But there's a failure mode here that doesn't get talked about enough: when your goals are consistently out of reach, people stop trying. Not because they're lazy, but because they've learned that effort doesn't correlate with success. Why kill yourself for something that's going to fail anyway?
Brian Scudamore learned this the hard way at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. After hitting $100 million in revenue in 2006, he and his COO decided to force franchisees to add more trucks on an aggressive timeline. Not negotiate, force, through retroactive changes to franchise agreements. The backlash was immediate and so severe that the COO was fired.
The turnaround came from an unexpected direction. New COO Eric Church walked in and did something that probably felt like failure: he lowered the goals. Made them almost guaranteed wins.
His reasoning was simple. People needed to feel like they could actually succeed at something. The constant losing had wrecked morale and driven away good people. You can't rebuild from that by demanding more. You rebuild by letting people win again.
It worked. They turned a profit in the first year after restructuring.
I think about this story often when I'm working with founders who are frustrated that their teams aren't "stepping up." Sometimes the problem isn't your people. It's that you've created a situation where success feels impossible, so why would anyone invest their full effort?
The fix isn't to permanently lower your ambitions. It's to recognize that goals serve a purpose beyond the number itself; they shape how your team feels about the work. If your goals are consistently teaching people that they'll fail no matter what, you're training them to disengage.
So here's my question for you: When was the last time your team actually hit a target and felt good about it? If you can't remember, that might be the problem you need to solve first.
