Same Growth Problem. Opposite Ends of the Hallway.
Why Gary Rust and Brian Talbot started Trifecta, and what building it taught them about traction, drag, and a system for growth.
We've all sat in the meetings. Gary has. Brian has. And, you surely have, too.
The owner has a good marketing lead, a sales lead who can close, a CRM that costs real money, and a plan everyone nodded at in January. Revenue is flat anyway. Not collapsing. Just flat, in a way nobody in the room can fully explain.
So everyone explains their piece. Marketing points to lead volume. Sales points to lead quality. Whoever keeps the books points to the margin. Every answer is reasonable. Every answer is true from where that person sits.
And the business stays stuck.
Gary Rust and Brian Talbot started Trifecta because they had both spent their careers in that growth problem meeting, from opposite sides of the table. They got tired of watching good companies explain their stall instead of fixing it.
Two Hallways, One Growth Problem
Gary came up through sales. Fourteen years in pharmaceutical sales, then running the whole number for a commercial furniture dealer in Austin and Houston, where he held the forecast between 95% and 105% of actual for eight straight years against a fifty million dollar book. When Gary looks at a stalled company, he looks at pipeline coverage, forecast discipline, and whether the sales team runs on structure or on pressure.
Brian came up through marketing. For thirty years his job has been making the market, the message and the demand plan hold together long enough to show up in revenue. One system he’s proud of took a company stuck at $100 million to $164 million over four years, at five times profit against budget, and it kept running after he left. When he looks at a stalled company, he looks at who the business is really for, whether the message survives a sales call, and what happens to a lead after marketing hands it off.
For years Gary and Brian kept arriving at the same problem from opposite ends of the same hallway. Gary would find a forecast nobody trusted. Brian would find a message nobody on the sales team actually used. Different symptoms. Same break.
It took them longer than they'd like to admit to say the obvious thing out loud. The constraint wasn't in marketing, and it wasn't in sales. It was in the space between them. And nobody owned that space.
The constraint rarely lives inside a function. It lives in the handoff, where nobody is looking.
What They Kept Seeing
When they started talking seriously in the spring of 2026, before there was a name, a logo or a single slide, the conversations kept circling the same patterns.
Gary talked about a company he'd worked with that spent half a million dollars on a new brand and website. Beautiful work. It produced assets that started depreciating the day they launched, because nothing connected them to a sales conversation. There was no growth engine behind the brochure and no way to prove the spend was working. Within a few months the leadership team was second-guessing every decision it had made.
Brian had his own versions. Campaigns built for a buyer the sales team had quietly stopped chasing. Messaging polished for a homepage that fell apart the first time a prospect asked, "compared to what?" Lead handoffs that weren't handoffs at all. Leads went over the wall and never came back.
The two kept landing in the same place. Marketing without sales teeth is expensive decoration. Sales without a clear market and message is a team working harder every quarter against the wrong buyers. The two functions aren't neighbors. They're the left arm and the right arm of the same body, and most growing companies are asking them to work without a spine.
They also agreed early on who the real competitor was. It isn't another consulting firm. It's inaction. Most owners already know something is off. They've tried a hire, a tool, an agency. What they haven't had is someone who can locate the constraint precisely enough that fixing it stops feeling like another gamble.
Then They Stalled Themselves
Here's the part of the origin story they'd rather skip, which is exactly why it belongs here.
Five months in, Trifecta stalled. Not for lack of ideas. They had research, a framework, a platform in development, and a spreadsheet with fifty-four activities ready to execute. Brian built most of it, handed it over, and waited for momentum.
It didn't come.
To Brian, that spreadsheet was five months of diligence made visible to move the company forward. To Gary, it was a plan he hadn't helped build with a to-do list of assignments. Same five months. Two completely different experiences of them. They were aligned on the problem, and the plan still wasn't reaching the work.
(Oh, the irony. Two growth operators, falling into the same misalignment trap they help their clients overcome.)
So they did what they told clients to do. They stopped defending the plan and started asking where it was losing its grip. They rebuilt the next steps together, in the same room, and kept going. And in the middle of that, Gary said the thing that became the center of everything they sell:
"We were planning based on trying to figure out how to deliver on a non-existent customer."
They hadn't just described the problem. They had lived it, inside a two-person company. If alignment can stall between two people who agree on almost everything, imagine what happens across a sales team, a marketing team, an operations lead, and an owner who is still closing half the deals personally.
Traction And Drag
Gary had been working on a concept he originally called friction. He tested the word on people he trusted, and it kept landing badly. Friction sounds like a fight. As he put it:
"A CEO's not gonna want friction, no matter if it's good or bad. He's gonna want traction."
So they split the idea in two.
Traction is how much of a leadership decision survives the trip from the first planning meeting to the final customer deal. Good friction in the leadership room (real debate, a decision someone has to defend) creates it. Then the decision has to travel. It has to be clear. It has to be translated into offers, targets and priorities. It has to survive the handoff between marketing and sales. And it has to show up in what the frontline actually does on Tuesday morning. They call that path the traction cascade, and a decision can lose its grip at every step.
Drag is everything that works against the traction you built. Rework. Stalled work. Decisions made twice because the first one didn't stick. Work nobody owns. Drag isn't laziness. It's what capable people produce when the system around them is unclear.
Then they put it into a formula, because they both trust numbers more than adjectives:
Growth = [(Pipeline x Conversion x Team Capacity) x Traction] / Drag
The first half is the engine most companies already measure: how much pipeline you create, how much of it converts, and how much work your team can actually carry.
The second half is the part almost nobody measures. Traction multiplies the engine. Drag divides it.
Because the terms multiply, the weakest one sets the ceiling. In their scoring model, a company that rates itself a solid four out of five at every step of the cascade still loses about a third of every decision before it reaches the customer. That isn't a failing company. That's a company that thinks it's fine.
Traction multiplies the engine. Drag divides it. Most companies are only measuring the engine.
It's also why "more leads" is so often the most expensive answer in the room. You can buy growth by pouring more pipeline into a system that leaks, or you can earn it by fixing where the system leaks. The second is almost always cheaper, and it keeps paying after you stop spending.
Alignment Is Not A Meeting
Here's what traction and drag teaches about alignment.
Most owners treat alignment as an attitude. Get everyone in a room, agree it matters, leave feeling better. Then Monday arrives with the same three definitions of a qualified lead, the same forecast nobody trusts, and the same handoff with no return path.
Alignment is a structure. One definition of the pipeline. One named person who breaks the tie. Service levels that run in both directions between marketing and sales. A weekly rhythm where decisions get reviewed, not just results. When marketing and sales agree on what the number means, the argument stops and the work starts.
That structure is what they mean by an operating system for growth. Not software. Not a binder. The shared definitions, owners, cadence and decision rights that let a decision keep its grip all the way to the customer. Alignment creates the traction. The operating system keeps it from leaking back out as drag.
Alignment is not a meeting. It's a definition with a name attached to it.
Why SMBs? And Why Two Of Us?
They built Trifecta for owner-led companies, roughly $5 million to $100 million in revenue, where growth has stalled or slowed and nobody can quite say why.
These companies are exactly where the gap hurts most. They're too big to run on the owner's instincts alone and too small to carry a full executive bench. When growth stalls, the usual moves are to hire a senior leader or bring in outside help. Both add expertise. Neither installs the connection between marketing, sales and the numbers.
Each new expert improves the function they were hired to fix, and the space between functions stays empty.
That's why Trifecta is two people and not one. Gary says it well: "We know how each other thinks, but we're not thinking in silos." He hears a stall in the field as a sales problem. Brian sees it upstream as a market or message problem. Usually it's the same break, and you only find it by looking from both ends at once. Same evidence.
Same room. One answer.
What they sell is not advice. It's an installation. They name the constraint, blueprint the fix, and install it with your team until they own it. Diagnose, Direct, Deliver. One engagement. Three phases. The diagnosis produces a Growth OS Blueprint, so you see exactly what gets built before you commit to it. Then they build it with your people, inside the tools you already own, using a custom operating system platform they designed so every engagement starts from a proven structure instead of a blank page.
And they measure success by how well your team runs it without us.
Nothing gets built before it is named.
If it stops working when the outsider leaves, it was never installed.
Why Now
They're both old enough to have lived through a few disruptions, the dot-com bust among them. Every one of them punished companies whose strategy never reached the frontline. AI is about to make that gap more expensive, not less. Faster tools pointed at a misaligned organization just produce misalignment at scale.
Gary said something that stuck with Brian. Regardless of whether Trifecta ever made a dollar, this was something they needed to be telling people. He meant it. Owners deserve a better explanation for their stall than "the market" or "the team," and they deserve a fix that doesn't walk out the door when the invoice stops.
Your plan was probably never the problem. The translation was.
If that sounds like your business, the first conversation is with both of them.
Three questions and fifteen minutes.
Trifecta is a growth practice for owner-led companies between $5M and $100M whose growth has stalled. Two senior operators, one from revenue and one from marketing, in every engagement. We name the constraint, blueprint the fix, and install it with your team until they own it. Then we leave.
Install the system. Create the growth.
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