📉   Be the Boss They Need
🚨   The Looming SaaSpocalypse
đź“š Â Â Have We Lost the Plot?
📉 Be the Boss They Need
When a business is growing and profits are healthy, leadership tends to be freer. It’s easier to give employees autonomy and agency to learn, try, and even make mistakes. You can empower people to “get it done,” without a lot of oversight.
When growth slows and profits become thinner, leadership changes. It can become more prescriptive and top-down.
Coming from a loose leadership culture to a more prescriptive one can feel quite jarring. Not everyone will like it, especially people who perceive the changes as a loss of autonomy. Or worse, they may feel like being held accountable is micro-management. It’s not!
In good times, there’s a momentum behind the business that carries the team forward. As a business slows, leadership must become more disciplined.
A company needs effective systems for accountability and performance to thrive. Declining profitability is a signal: Your systems and business model are not keeping pace with the realities of your marketplace.
More disciplined leadership is the first step to tightening systems that enhance performance and profitability. If margins are shrinking and growth is slowing, be the leader your company needs you to be, even if that’s the “boss.”
🚨 The Looming SaaSpocalypse
AI is not the reason tech companies are laying off so many employees, but it makes for one hell of a distraction.
Stock traders have dubbed it the “SaaSpocalypse.” Fears of a growing AI boom wiped out roughly $285 billion from software stocks in a single trading day.
According to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tech giants shed over 55,000 employees in 2025, and the trend only appears to be accelerating in 2026.
Salesforce cut another 1,000 employees in early February. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate positions. Block (formerly Square) cut almost 40% of its headcount to 6,000 employees. Wisetech cut 2,000 of its 7,000 employees.
They all blame AI for these drastic layoffs. I call BS. AI layoffs are outpacing AI productivity gains. These companies are using AI as an excuse to cut costs and restructure.
We’re being led to believe AI is going to take our jobs or disrupt our business models, but it’s not happening that fast. Tech companies are feeling the same pressures we are. Their businesses are slowing, margins are tighter, and they need to do more with less.
đź“ŠÂ One Stat to Watch
1 Hour
AI is saving workers 1 hour per day, while doomscrolling is costing them 2 hours per day.
📚 Have We Lost the Plot?
Your business exists to help your customers solve problems. You can glam it up all you want, but every company is in the problem-solving business.
As salespeople, we talk about “pains” and “needs.” This is our language for finding problems that we can solve.
The challenge is as companies change or adapt to uncertainty they risk losing the plot.
“Losing the plot” means you’re focusing on your own needs. Not your customers.
It’s a beautiful rallying cry: “Guys, are we losing the plot?”
When you’ve lost the plot, you are not considering a challenge or issue from your customers’ lens. This forces a reframe. Are you doing something for the sake of the business, someone’s political aspirations internally, or because of a bias?Â
When dealing with uncertainty, you have to continually stay focused on what is most important: your customers’ needs.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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