Somewhere between early traction and meaningful scale, most companies discover that the selling motion that got them off the ground no longer works. Early sales are won on founder energy, personal relationships, and product novelty. Growth-stage sales must be won on process.
Investor and entrepreneur Greg Warnock has spent more than forty years on both sides of that transition, first as a founder building companies in technology, consumer products, biotechnology, and marketing, and later as co-founder and managing director of Mercato Partners, a growth capital firm that works with expansion-stage companies to strengthen their go-to-market strategies.
One lesson recurs across his career, easy to say and difficult to live by. At the growth stage, the product is no longer the only thing being built. The company is also building the machine that sells the product. If that machine cannot run without the founder inside it, the business has a ceiling.
Why Founder-Led Selling Stops Scaling
In the earliest phase of a company, founder-led selling is often the only viable approach. It is a strength, not a flaw. The founder understands the product better than anyone, can adjust the pitch in real time, and carries a credibility with early customers that no hired representative can match.
The problem appears when the company tries to grow through that same motion. A founder’s calendar does not scale. Personal networks get exhausted. Deals that close on enthusiasm start stalling when the buyer is two or three steps removed from the founder’s circle.
Warnock has seen this pattern from an unusually wide set of vantage points. Before moving into venture and growth capital, he founded and operated companies across several industries, frequently serving as a technologist-founder who built products, assembled teams, and guided businesses from concept to commercial traction.
He was also a principal in more than 20 mergers and acquisitions, which meant repeatedly evaluating whether a company’s revenue was the output of a durable system or the output of a few talented individuals. Acquirers pay for systems and discount heroics.
The first task at the growth stage is therefore an honest diagnosis. Which parts of the current sales motion are repeatable, teachable, and measurable, and which parts only work because a specific person is doing them? Everything that follows depends on that answer.
The Network-led Model Greg Warnock Applies at Mercato Partners
At Mercato Partners, the answer to that diagnostic question is not delivered as advice from a distance. The firm is built around a disciplined governance approach, a network-led model, and a connector-driven value-creation framework.
In practice, that means a curated external network of proven operators, independent directors, and CXO-level co-investors, matched to a specific company’s needs and scoped to a defined objective. Each engagement is measured against proven metrics tied to enterprise value creation rather than carried as fixed internal overhead.
The specific application matters because go-to-market design is full of decisions that look identical on a slide but play out very differently in the field, including how to segment accounts, when to split prospecting from closing, how to compensate a team so that behavior matches strategy, when a second product line helps the sales motion, and when it fragments it. Network connections recognize these forks because they have taken the wrong branch before.
Warnock’s public commentary reflects that orientation. Growth problems are usually execution problems wearing a strategy costume.
Mercato’s portfolio spans applied AI, defensible software and workflow systems, healthcare technology, and intelligent infrastructure. Across those different sectors, the go-to-market questions rhyme.
Who is the repeatable buyer? What is the repeatable message? What does it cost, in time and money, to acquire that buyer, and does the math still work when a hired team is doing it instead of a founder?
Prove the Unit Economics Before Adding Fuel
Nowhere is that math more unforgiving than in the food and beverage industry. Warnock is also the co-founder of Savory Fund, a buyout and growth platform in the food and beverage sector that helps emerging restaurant concepts expand.
Restaurants are a useful stress test for go-to-market thinking because every location is a small, self-contained proof of the model. The work there centers on improving unit economics, scaling multi-unit operations, optimizing supply-chain and site-selection strategies, and preserving culture during rapid expansion.
One critical principle carries over from restaurants to software. Repeatability gets proven at the unit level before it gets funded at the system level. A restaurant group does not fix a broken store concept by opening ten more stores, and a software company does not fix a broken sales motion by hiring ten more representatives. In both cases, expansion capital applied to an unproven unit simply produces losses at a larger scale.
Warnock’s background reinforces this discipline from the academic side as well. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and Venture Finance from the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, along with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and his investing pairs that analytical foundation with operating experience.
For a growth-stage leadership team, the practical application is a short checklist. Know the fully loaded cost of acquiring a customer through the repeatable channel, not the founder’s channel. Know how long that customer takes to pay back the cost. Know that a newly hired seller, following the playbook, can hit a defined level of productivity within a defined ramp period.
Until those numbers hold, adding headcount is speculation.
Networks Open Markets Faster Than Cold Outreach
A repeatable engine still needs doors to knock on, and this is where Mercato’s Connector Network value-creation model comes in. New markets, whether a new geography, a new industry vertical, or a new buyer persona, are expensive to enter cold. Introductions from credible intermediaries compress that cost dramatically.
Part of the value a growth investor can add is opening pathways into new markets with speed and confidence, so the sales team spends its time in qualified conversations rather than manufacturing them from scratch.
Warnock’s track record of backing growth-stage companies across sectors illustrates why relationship capital compounds. Earlier in his career, he co-founded vSpring Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on information technology and life sciences companies in the Mountain West, and the networks built there carried forward into Mercato.
For operating teams, the lesson does not require a venture fund. It requires treating the company’s collective network as a managed asset that is mapped, maintained, and deliberately pointed at the next market the engine needs to enter.
Governance Turns Wins Into a System
The least glamorous ingredient of a repeatable go-to-market engine is governance, meaning the cadence of review, the definitions everyone shares, and the discipline of writing down what worked and why. Disciplined governance is a core element of how Mercato works with its companies. The framework for growth-stage go-to-market discipline is straightforward. Define the stages of the pipeline so that two people cannot describe the same deal differently. Review conversions between stages on a fixed rhythm.
When a deal is won or lost, capture the reason in a way the next hire can learn from. A playbook that lives in one person’s head is really a dependency with a nicer name.
Warnock’s long-running commitment to teaching this kind of discipline shows up outside his funds as well. In 2008, he founded Junto Partners, an entrepreneurship education initiative that trains and mentors emerging founders, and his talks on mentoring founders through scale return. Because the payback for governance is so high, Warnock returns often to the gap between having customers and having a system for winning them.
Repeatability Is the Real Product of the Growth Stage
A growth-stage company is really shipping both a product and an engine. The product wins individual customers. The engine wins markets, survives leadership transitions, and holds its value in an acquisition or a public offering.
Building it means diagnosing what repeats, putting operators around the problem, proving the economics one unit at a time, using networks to lower the cost of new markets, and installing the governance that turns individual wins into institutional knowledge.
Nothing on that list is exotic. It is all just work, done in order, without skipping steps. That is what building better looks like at the growth stage, and it is the pattern that runs through Greg Warnock’s four decades of founding, buying, and backing companies.
About the author: Greg Warnock, Ph.D., is an entrepreneur, investor, and mentor with more than forty years of experience building, scaling, and guiding companies. He is the co-founder and managing director of Mercato Partners, a growth capital firm serving expansion-stage companies, and the co-founder of Savory Fund, a buyout and growth platform in the food and beverage sector. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and Venture Finance from the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business and is the founder of Junto Partners, an entrepreneurship education initiative.
This article is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, nor does it constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. Any offer of interests in a Mercato Partners fund is made only to eligible investors by means of definitive offering documents. Past performance is not indicative of future results.