Oversubscribed and Understaffed: EA vs. Sales Hire, One Plan's Done & Matt's Most Intense Week Ever

Michael opens the week trying to come up for air — CoolantClear is selling faster than it can be assembled, proposals are backing up, marketing has gone quiet, and he can't figure out which fire to stomp first. Matt opens on the opposite end of the same problem: 13 sales meetings in one week, Andrew in his first days booking more, Trish running the inbox, and a Thursday that converged accounting, legal review, CFO reporting, and the largest pitch in Develop history into a single day. Both are oversubscribed. The difference is which part of the business is doing it to them.The sales and marketing conversation is one of the most practical the show has had. Matt makes the case for EA before salesperson — and shares how Trish protected him from his own chronic optimism before Andrew could even start. Michael walks through his pricing experiment on CoolantClear, his 200-hour proposal generator that's 90% done and still breaking, and the EA versus sales hire debate he's been circling for weeks. They go deep on LinkedIn organic versus ads, zero-difficulty keywords, email drip campaigns, case study attribution, and the right order to line up marketing dominoes when you can't measure which one will fall furthest.Engineering covers a new pallet tending system Michael can't discuss yet — provisional filed, first customer implementation underway — incremental gripper redesigns cutting assembly cost without touching specs, and a mountain of parts arriving at Develop for the largest machine in company history. The CI section closes with One Plan officially outgrown: Develop has 3X'd its machine throughput and is aiming for 2-3X more in 2028, two team members are tasked with figuring out what replaces it, and Michael makes the pitch for building something in-house in 20 hours.