What do you do when you lose your biggest client, your entire industry vertical vanishes, and a pandemic shuts down the world—all in the same year?
Most leaders cut costs, lay off staff, and pray for survival.
Shayna Cohen rebranded, hired aggressively, and fired 20% of her clients.
Four years later, Team SCG went from $5 million to $30 million in revenue. Not despite the crisis of 2020, but because of how they responded to it. Shayna's counterintuitive leadership transformed a family business into one of the industry's fastest-growing distributorships.
Her secret? Choosing evolution over comfort, vision over fear, and the courage to become the leader her company needed instead of staying in the role she loved.
We dive into:
2019 was supposed to be the launchpad. Team SCG closed just under $8 million—their best year ever. Shayna and her brother finally hit their rhythm. Momentum felt unstoppable.
Then everything collapsed at once.
First came the RFP loss. A client they'd served for 30 years walked away. Not a small account—one of their largest. The kind of loss that reverberates through a family business, leaving everyone questioning what went wrong. Their first experience losing an RFP, and the ego blow landed hard.
Then COVID-19 shut down the world. Team SCG had built significant business in the travel industry. Overnight, that vertical became irrelevant. No events. No conferences. No travel programs. Gone.
Revenue dropped from nearly $8 million to $5 million. The math was brutal.
But here's what makes Shayna's story remarkable: Team SCG avoided layoffs entirely. While competitors shed staff and hunkered down, they kept their team intact and found opportunities "out of the woodworks." They survived. Barely. But survival created something more valuable than revenue—it created clarity about who they needed to become.
With phones quieter than they'd ever been and traditional business models shattered, Shayna faced a choice most leaders never get: complete reinvention with nothing to lose.
"We were in a place that we had never been in before," she explains. "It was born from boredom, transparently speaking."
They had time. They had talented people with capacity. What they didn't have was a clear path forward using the old playbook.
So they threw it out.
Team SCG launched their first-ever rebrand in the middle of a crisis. Not cosmetic changes—a fundamental rethinking of how they went to market. The rebrand wasn't about logos or color schemes. It was about identity. Who would Team SCG be when normalcy returned?
That question drove every decision that followed. And those decisions took them from $5 million to $30 million in four years.
When business came roaring back, Team SCG faced a problem most companies dream about: too much opportunity, not enough capacity.
The conventional move? Hire frantically, stretch your team thin, and service everyone who wants to work with you.
Shayna made a different choice. She let go of 20% of their client base. It was about creating space for the right relationships. Clients who appreciated Team SCG's approach. Clients who aligned with where the company was headed.
The decision required guts most leaders never find. Shayna admits the sleepless nights, the second-guessing, the fear of consequences if she was wrong. But her intuition screamed one message: press the gas pedal harder, not softer.
She was right. Firing clients to grow isn't just counterintuitive—it's terrifying. But it works when you're clear about who you serve best.
Every company claims to be easy to work with. Team SCG turned it into an operational religion.
The mantra: "We are easy to do business with."
Simple words. Profound impact.
But Shayna didn't just hang it on the wall. She made it the filter for every decision, every process, every client interaction. The team started seeing opportunities to make clients' lives easier, even when it made their own lives harder.
This isn't rocket science. But it requires discipline. It means choosing client convenience over internal ease every single time. It scales across an entire organization because everyone can grasp it. And it creates loyalty that competitors can't break with lower prices alone.
The light bulb turns on when people realize that making the client's life easier is always the right answer—even when it's inconvenient.
The epiphany came on an ordinary day. Shayna looked up from her desk and saw five or six people lined up outside her office door. Each waiting their turn. Each holding a problem only she could solve.
"This is not good," she remembers thinking. "It's not good that I'm the only person who can answer this."
The bottleneck was obvious. The solution was painful.
Shayna loved being the sales leader. Following her father's footsteps. Building client relationships. Diving into specific projects. That work brought her genuine joy.
But the CEO role demanded sacrifice. She had to give up something she loved for something the business desperately needed.
Team SCG grew from 20 people when Shayna joined to 55 today. That kind of growth breaks companies that don't evolve their leadership structure. She promoted Brian into the sales leadership chair she vacated. She created team leaders so people could depend on each other instead of forming lines outside her door.
She elevated Savannah and Justin, who already understood the business and drove significant results.
Then came the hire that changed the game: Isabelle.
Operations, logistics, supply chain—these weren't Shayna's strengths. She admits she was "fake it till you make it" for as long as humanly possible. But you can only fake operational excellence for so long before the system collapses under its own weight.
Finding someone competent enough to independently run an entire wing of your business that you're not confident in? That's transformational.
"People tell me that, but I just didn't believe it," Shayna says. "I've never seen it before. I didn't know there could be such a difference maker."
Isabelle now handles roughly 50% of Team SCG's daily operations. The leadership team finally has someone they can depend on for the operational infrastructure that supports everything else.
When you find that person, you realize how much energy you were burning trying to manage complexity you didn't fully understand. The relief isn't just operational—it's psychological.
Ask Shayna what drives her, and the answer might surprise you: fear.
Not crippling fear. Not paralyzing anxiety. But a healthy fear of stagnation, of being left behind while competitors evolve.
"If you don't feel like you're evolving, someone else is gonna evolve and come for your business," she explains. "A lot of it's fear of being left behind."
When something feels stale, it triggers her instinct to focus on how the company needs to change. Where are we vulnerable? What capabilities must we build? Who do we need to become?
It's been quite a ride over the last five years. From $5 million to $30 million. From 20 people to 55. From surviving 2020 to thriving in 2025.
Fear transformed into fuel. Crisis became catalyst.
Looking back at the compressed education of those four years, Shayna offers two pieces of advice that every growing leader should hear.
Slow down on trying to do everything at once.
When she first took leadership, eagerness made her want to fix every problem simultaneously. Every issue needed immediate attention. Every opportunity demanded immediate action.
The result? Burnout. Not just for her, but for everyone around her.
"I would tell myself to slow down a little bit and focus on prioritize what's gonna make the biggest impact," she reflects. "Everything I think was the right move, but it was too quick."
Finish something completely before jumping to the next fire. Sequential execution beats simultaneous chaos.
Double down on trusting your vision.
Shayna spent countless nights questioning whether she'd made the right decisions. Many people would've said the risks weren't worth the potential consequences if they understood the full scope of what Team SCG had to do.
"A lot of brain power and anguish was wasted in questioning what I knew from an intuition perspective, which was to press the gas and press it hard," she says.
Looking at where Team SCG sits now, those instincts were correct. The aggressive investment paid off. The bold moves worked.
Trust your gut. Question tactics, not vision.
Team SCG's transformation offers a masterclass in counterintuitive leadership during crisis.
Sometimes the right move when everyone says "cut costs" is strategic investment. Sometimes firing 20% of your clients creates space for explosive growth. Sometimes becoming the leader your business needs means leaving behind the role you love.
The promotional products industry splits into two groups: those who embrace evolution and those who resist it. Shayna chose evolution. Aggressively. Relentlessly. Even when it scared her.
Her mantra of "we are easy to do business with" isn't revolutionary language. But making it operational reality across 55 people, embedding it into every decision, using it as the cultural filter—that's where magic happens.
For distributors in that $5-10 million range eyeing the next level, or those at $20-50 million wondering how to break through, Shayna's journey offers clear lessons:
Focus on where you're most constrained. Build leaders others can depend on. Give up something you love for something the business needs. Let fear of stagnation drive evolution, not paralysis.
The branches are always about to break. The question is whether you'll build the infrastructure to support the next phase before they do.
Shayna did. Team SCG is thriving because of it.
Sometimes the fastest path to $30 million starts with losing 40% of your revenue. The difference is what you do next.
[00:02:42] Lost largest client after 30 years—first RFP
[00:03:14] $8M to $5M—travel collapse + pandemic hit
[00:03:42] How they avoided layoffs in 2020
[00:04:28] The boredom-driven rebrand decision
[00:08:30] Firing 20% of clients to create growth space
[00:09:45] $5M to $30M in four years
[00:12:15] "Easy to do business with"—the mantra
[00:27:39] The three-question email principle
[00:28:42] Slow down: stop building Rome in a day
[00:29:33] Double down: trust your vision
[00:31:03] The office line epiphany
[00:31:20] Giving up sales leadership for CEO
[00:32:05] Building the C-suite from scratch
[00:33:08] The operations hire that changed everything
[00:34:01] Fear as fuel for evolution