🙅🏻 Founder not buying what you’re selling? Here’s why

TL;DR

🙅🏻 Founder not buying what you’re selling? Here’s why

🎬 How to move your founder to action: 2 steps 

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Sapienˣ 💛

Founder not buying what you’re selling? Here’s why

I coach a lot of HR leaders. Talented ones. Committed, overworked and often frustrated.

And this is a question I keep hearing:

“How do I influence my founder to do [insert HR solution here]?”

And that, right there, is the problem.

Too often, HR leaders are trying to sell a solution. Founders, investors and the C-suite don’t buy solutions. They buy outcomes. They buy risk mitigation. They buy pain relief.

Let’s compare it to how your company sells its product.

Customers don’t buy features. They buy pain relief. 

❌ Solution-first: “We offer a next-gen, AI-powered threat detection system with automated incident response.”

✅ Pain-first: “One phishing email. That’s all it takes to lose customer trust, face regulatory fines and land on the front page. Right now, your team wouldn’t even know it happened. We fix that.”

See the difference? One sounds clever. The other makes you feel something. It drives urgency. It moves decision-makers to act.

Sell pain, not solution

To influence, HR leaders must do the same. You’re not there to pitch solutions. You’re there to solve business problems (pains) through the people lens.

And I want to be clear:

🚫 Not having a career framework is NOT a problem.
✅ High-potential employees not fully maximising their performance and productivity due to lack of expectations? That’s the problem.

🚫 Not having a leadership programme is NOT a problem.
✅ Having senior leaders who can’t scale themselves and are eroding investor confidence? That’s the problem.

🚫 Not having an OKR framework is NOT a problem.
✅ Wasting 2 quarters building the wrong thing and costing the business time and resources? That’s the problem.

A lack of a solution isn’t what hurts. The business pain of that absence is.

That’s the shift. That’s the lens. That’s how you influence your founder, your exec peers and your board. You don’t “sell HR solutions.” You connect what you do to what the business cares about—urgently.

If you’re leading the HR function, you are no longer just an executor proposing solutions. You’re a business leader identifying the right problem to solve—framing it in business terms, highlighting the commercial risk of inaction and positioning your people strategy as the lever to drive growth.

So if you’re wondering why your founder or C-suite aren’t biting, check what you’re pitching.

So stop selling the solution.

Start naming the pain.

That’s how you influence your founder. That’s how you earn your seat.

How to move your founder to action: 2 steps

Following on from the article above: so, you’ve identified a clear pain point in the business. Good start—but not enough.

Below, I will share 2 steps to help you tailor your approach and move the business to take action.

Step 1: Identify whether the pain is worth solving 

Now, you need to walk in your founder’s or executive team’s shoes. Just because you see it as important doesn’t mean it is—not to them, not right now.

To get real about the business impact, assess the pain through their lens by asking:

These 2 questions will help you determine its true priority and next step. So, if the pain is:

⬆️ Frequency + ⬇️ Severity 

Act now: This is bleeding out your business—constantly damaging performance with serious consequences. Don’t patch it—fix it at the root. Get leadership aligned and prioritise it immediately.

⬇️ Frequency + ⬆️ Severity 

Prepare, don’t panic: Rare, but when it lands, it hits hard (e.g. legal risk, security breach). Build contingency plans–you don’t solve daily but you must be ready.

⬆️ Frequency + ⬇️ Severity 

Automate or optimise: Drip, drip, drip—this slowly drowns your team’s time and energy. Not fatal, but costly. Fix the system, not just the symptoms.

⬇️ Frequency + ⬇️ Severity 

Ignore or monitor lightly: This is noise. Log it, keep an eye on trends, but don’t burn resources here unless the pattern changes.

⚠️ Tips:  If you can’t clearly articulate the severity of the business impact, you’ll struggle to get traction. Be as objective as you can.

Step 2: How to make your founder care enough to act

Now that you’ve assessed whether the pain is a priority to solve or safe to ignore—and if it is truly a priority–your job still isn’t done.

If you want real action, you need to understand where your founder or exec team stand. Ask yourself:

Once you know where they sit on this matrix, tailor your influence strategy accordingly.

The goal is to move them towards the top-right quadrant—high awareness, high urgency—where they see the pain clearly and feel the pressure to act.

Quadrant 4 (⬇️ awareness, ⬆️ urgency): In this quadrant, you’re dealing with a blind spot—which isn’t a bad place to be, because they feel the pain. They know something’s burning but don’t realise where the fire is. To move them to Quadrant 1, your job is to connect the dots. Say, “You’re worried about delivery timelines? Here’s how our leadership gaps are fuelling the problem.” Use data to show the correlation, but avoid framing it as an HR issue. Position it as the root cause of their business stress.

Quadrant 3 (⬇️ awareness, ⬇️ urgency): If they’re here, you’re ice cold. They don’t see the issue, and frankly, they don’t care—yet. This isn’t the moment to go in hard. Take time to educate. Share trends, peer examples or cautionary tales from other start-ups. Use indirect storytelling to plant the seed. Your goal is to build awareness—first moving them into Quadrant 2, and ultimately towards Quadrant 1 where action becomes possible.

Quadrant 2 (⬆️ awareness, ⬇️ urgency): When they’re here, the pain is acknowledged but deprioritised. They see it, but it’s not keeping them up at night. Your move is to make it cost something. Quantify the opportunity cost, highlight the risk of delay and show how inaction today will bottleneck to business growth tomorrow. Use time pressure to your advantage—“If we don’t fix this in Q2, we will push back entering the enterprise market until  Q4.” The aim is to shift them into Quadrant 1, where urgency meets awareness—and action follows.

Quadrant 1 (⬆️ awareness, ⬆️ urgency): If they’re here, it’s go time. They’re ready—they just need clarity on how to act. Don’t waste time rehashing the problem. Lead with a clear solution path. Lay out what you can do this week, this month, this quarter. Show them how HR isn’t just flagging the issue—it’s the strategic unlock they need.

Influence that moves the needle

Spotting pain in the business isn’t the hard part—getting others to care, act and prioritise it is where your leadership is tested.

This framework gives you the edge. It helps you diagnose problems with commercial clarity, translate them into business impact and influence decision-makers without falling into the trap of "HR said so."

If you want to be seen as a strategic leader—not just the person flagging problems—this is how you do it. Use the right lens, speak the right language and show them what’s at stake if they ignore the fire.

Scaling your start-up?

Let’s make sure your leadership, people and org are ready. Here are 3 ways I can help:

🔗 LinkedIn | 🌎 JooBee’s blog | 🤝 Work with me