A funny thing happened last week. An appliance retailer’s COO booked a demo with us — not from an ad, not from a referral, not from anything we did. He found one of these posts while going through a former employee’s inbox.
Sit with that image for a second. Somewhere in a departed salesperson’s email was a link to a blog about weak links and gazelles. And the COO, doing the quiet forensic work every operator does when someone leaves, stopped and read it.
Here’s the question that should keep you up at night: in addition to my blog, what else was in that inbox?
It was the customer who said she’d come back. The designer who only ever texted this one associate. The open quote. A whole book of business, alive and humming, right up until the day two weeks’ notice turned it into archaeology.
There’s a proverb, usually credited to the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ: when an old man dies, a library burns down. He was talking about oral cultures — societies where the history, the medicine, the genealogy all lived in the memory of the elders. Lose him before he passed it on, and you didn’t lose a person. You lost a library. It burned, and no one could read the ash.
Every organization has an oral tradition. Things not written down. Institutional intuition. The gut feel in free form. It’s a library. And it walks out the door wearing your best employee’s coat.
The uncomfortable part is that people leaving isn’t the problem. People always leave. Good ones get poached, great ones get promoted, everyone eventually moves on. That’s not a flaw you can fix. What you can fix is whether the only copy of the knowledge leaves with them.
A business that runs on individual memory stays exactly as smart as whoever currently works there. It never compounds. Every departure is a small fire. Every new hire starts by relearning what the last one already knew. The knowledge never accumulates, it just keeps burning down and getting rebuilt.
The retailers that compound are the ones that turned oral tradition into documented records. Not because they don’t trust their people, because they refuse to let a resignation letter double as a book-burning. When the knowledge lives in a system the business owns instead of an inbox the employee owns, the person can leave and the library stays. The next rep inherits the be-backs instead of rediscovering them. The COO doesn’t have to play archaeologist.
Your best people will leave someday. All of them. The only question worth asking is whether the library burns when they go. Or does it light the way for the next person.
The COO who found us was reading by that light. And now he’s going to be a customer.
P.S. Trakwell exists so the library never burns. We count what walks in and capture what walks out — the traffic, the conversions, and the be-backs that would otherwise live and die in one person’s inbox. When a great salesperson moves on, their pipeline shouldn’t move on with them.
