About Chad Lakin

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I work with founders who can sell, but don’t want revenue permanently tied to their calendar.

Over the last 15+ years, I’ve been directly responsible for closing deals, building sales teams, and navigating the exact moment when founder-led sales starts to break under growth.

Experience at a glance:

  • $15M+ in B2B revenue personally closed

  • Scaled a founder-led company to $20M ARR

  • Built and transferred sales systems across US and international markets

  • Sold into complex, multi-stakeholder buying environments, including Fortune 500 teams

I’ve been the early sales hire. I’ve run best-practice playbooks that looked great on paper and failed in real conversations. I’ve watched smart reps struggle, not because they were bad at sales, but because no one could explain why deals were actually being won.

As a founding sales leader, I helped scale a business from founder-led selling to a $20M ARR operation, including taking the company from Australia into the U.S. That meant building pipeline from scratch, adapting a founder’s sales approach to a new buyer environment, and proving it could work without the founder in every room.

Along the way, a pattern became impossible to ignore.

Founders weren’t winning deals because they followed a script. They were winning because they made better decisions, when to push, when to pause, when to walk away - based on experience earned deal by deal.

That judgment worked. But it didn’t transfer.

Scripts didn’t carry conviction. Decks didn’t carry context. Generic methodologies didn’t carry Founder Magic.

What did work was extracting a founder’s instincts, language, and decision-making, pressure-testing them against real buyers, and turning them into a system other humans could actually use.

That work became CloseLab.

CloseLab isn’t built on theory. It’s built from watching exactly what breaks when founders try to scale beyond themselves, and defining what has to be true for sales to keep working when they do.

I don’t believe founders need to be removed from sales completely.

I believe their Founder Magic needs to be made transferable.

That belief is what CloseLab is built on.