There is a version of the founder story in which the founder arrives fully formed, with a vision and a deck, and the market simply agrees. I have never met that founder. The ones I respect all did an apprenticeship somewhere unglamorous, and mine was in sales.
I took jobs in debt resolution, in home warranty and in life insurance, not because they were prestigious but because they put me across the table from real people making real decisions with real money. A person negotiating their way out of debt is not interested in your pitch. They are interested in whether you understand their situation better than they do, and whether you will still be there after the signature. Home warranty taught me how to sell a promise about the future to someone who has been burned by promises before. Life insurance taught me how to have the hardest conversation a person can have about their own family and leave them grateful for it.
Every business, whatever it makes, is ultimately in the business of earning trust, and sales is where you learn what trust actually costs. It costs preparation, because the customer can tell within a minute whether you did your homework. It costs restraint, because the fastest way to lose a buyer is to answer a question they did not ask. And it costs follow-through, because the sale is not the signature. The sale is the second order.
Those three habits are the operating system of every company I now run. When Smart Gov Supply quotes a school district, the quote is built the way I learned to build a proposal for a family: complete, accurate, with the hard numbers up front and nothing hidden in the footnotes. When a federal buyer asks whether we can deliver, the answer is the answer I would have given a policyholder. Yes, and here is exactly how, or no, and here is who can.
I would give the same advice to anyone who wants to build something. Before you lead people, sell to them. Before you design a product, spend a year explaining one to strangers who did not ask. You will learn the shape of a real objection, the sound of a real yes, and the difference between the two, which is the only thing a leader actually needs to know.