Makis Marmaridis

"We have four of those right now." That's what a GM told me yesterday on a call when I shared the 7 signs with him. A revenue stall doesn't feel like a crisis. It feels like a slow week. The problem isn't performance. It's visibility.

There are 7 signs you're in a revenue stall — before the numbers confirm it. The stall mimics health. That's what makes it dangerous. Find out your score in under 3 minutes for free here - score.imtg.com.au

The next interface isn’t a dashboard or an app. It’s a sentence. We’re moving from managing systems to briefing them. That gap — between intention and execution — is the business problem of the next decade.

Most franchise networks measure performance. Almost none measure the execution infrastructure underneath it. That's why the same dealers keep stalling and the fix never sticks.

High activity. Flat revenue. The business isn’t broken. It’s optimised for the wrong outcome. Sign #3 of a Revenue Stall: you built an engine for delivery — not for growth.

Sixty people lost their AI on Friday. The post-mortem will call it a governance failure. It wasn't. Governance is the language we use after architecture has already failed. Governance can't save you from architecture you already shipped.

Told this to two clients today and they both laughed: “Deploying AI agents without execution infrastructure is like 40 caffeinated interns typing on laptops at maximum speed.” Fast. Loud. Busy. Going absolutely nowhere. Happy Friday 🙂

Running a Revenue Stall Score diagnostic this month for any mid-market operator who wants to see where their data substrate is leaking. 2 minutes, no sales call. score.imtg.com.au

Every franchise network has a bottom 40% dragging the average down. They're not bad operators. They just don't have the execution layer installed. That's a network decision, not a dealer decision.

Your AI pilot is going to fail. Not because of the AI. Because your business was never written down. If your ops manager resigned tomorrow, no agent can replace what only lived in their head. Write it down first. Automate second.

Founders need to document what the current business is already doing. 60% of ops work is repeated decisions following unwritten rules. 25% is firefighting caused by the 60% being undocumented. 15% is actual judgement. If you're hiring without docs, you preserve oral tradition.

3 questions before any AI conversation: Can a new hire run your sales follow-up on day 3 without asking? Do lead stages mean the same thing to every salesperson? Is your complaint response path documented? AI agents are multipliers. They multiply order or chaos.

The most dangerous business runs on the founder's memory. No handoff. No system. No continuity. It works until it doesn't. Execution Infrastructure is the control layer between your tools and your judgment. Most founders skip it until something breaks.

Most revenue stalls aren't strategic. They're trust signal failures nobody noticed. Broken DMARC. Dead listing. SSL mismatch. Partners run quiet checks. Buyers Google before they reply. The audit is happening whether you know it or not.

A Revenue Stall is good news. Leads exist. Network exists. Product-market fit exists. What's missing: execution infrastructure at the edge. Highest-ROI fix in the building — converting customers you're already paying to attract. Audit the handoff.

3 questions that reveal a Revenue Stall: 1. Who owns the 48hrs after a lead enters your network? 2. Can you see response time at every location now? 3. What happens when a location doesn't follow up? "Depends / not exactly / nothing" = stall. → score.imtg.com.au

"We've got Salesforce." Great. What's running at your 150 dealer locations? A spreadsheet. An inbox. A good memory. CRM is a record system. You need an execution system — one that ensures the follow-up happened, not just logs that a lead was sent.

Lead response time at most dealer locations: days, not minutes. 5 min → high conversion 60 min → halved 24 hrs → single digits This is the lead decay curve. Most franchise networks never measure it. They track volume. They track close rate. Never the decay.

"Put it in the system prompt" = "Put it in the operations manual" Same delusion. Instructions ≠ execution. AI is stochastic. So are franchise networks. 200 locations = 200 interpretations. Guardrails aren't documents. They're systems.

Franchise networks spend six figures on training. Follow-up rates look the same six months later. Training is an event. Execution infrastructure is a system. Stop installing software without the operating system.