Author: Wim GE De Vos

ISSUE 20 · 23 OCTOBER 2026

A hundred printed pages that cost us nobody, and three lines that already changed who we hire.

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There is a book on my desk. A hundred pages, printed properly, with a herd of camels on page four and a man wearing a helmet made of lightbulbs on page eighty one.

It is our Culture Code. Everybody in the company has a physical copy. They were handed it in a conversation, not sent it in an email.

It is the second one we have printed. It is really the fifth or sixth one we have written.

People like it. They quote it back to me.

And for a long time I could not point at a single decision it changed.

That is the test I now run, and it is the one I want to hand you.

Pick up whatever you have written down about how your company behaves. The values on the wall. The laminated card in the kitchen.

Now name one decision it changed. One person you did not hire. One thing you stopped doing. One conversation that went differently because of it.

If you cannot name one, you do not have a standard. You have a brochure.

Why I kept writing them

I have been writing versions of this document for most of twenty years, and I never once sat down to write one because things were going well.

Every version started with a trigger. A conflict I did not want to have twice. A firing that took too long.

I see culture the way I see code. You write it, you ship it, you watch it break, you fix it, you ship it again. It is never finished. And the goal is not to be the only one allowed to change it. The goal is a team maintaining it together, in the open.

So if every version came out of something real, why did the finished book still not bite?

I think I know now. The book was written to describe us. It answers the question: who are we.

That is a good question. It is not a filter.

A different question

Earlier this year the four of us sat down twice and asked a different one. Not who are we. Who did not work out here, and what did they all have in common?

We went back over the people who had left, the ones we had let go, and the ones we should have let go much earlier.

We kept only what all four of us agreed on without hesitating.

High energy.
Respectful, always.
Want to be here.

In my notebook they are longer. High energy, self-combusting. Want to be here, enjoying the ride. The short version is what we say out loud.

Three lines, against a hundred pages.

The hundred pages tell people who we are. The three lines tell us who we cannot keep.

The part that is uncomfortable

Page eighty three of the book I already had says, in bold: we do not tolerate consistent violations.

It was in the 2024 edition too. Printed. Handed out. Read.

So the sentence was never missing. I had written the standard down twice and it had still never cost me anything, because writing something down and holding somebody to it are two completely different jobs, and only one of them is comfortable.

I expected the three lines to cost us goodwill. When you say out loud that low energy is not something we can carry, you are telling somebody that they, specifically, do not fit here.

Nobody argued. What came back was relief.

Some of that may be politeness to the man who signs. But they had been working next to the problem longer than I had. They were not waiting for me to be kind about it. They were waiting for me to be clear.

The filter is not finished

Here is what I did not see when we wrote them down.

Only one of the three can be checked at the door.

Energy you can see in an interview, and we have already turned people down on it. The other two you cannot. Whether somebody stays respectful when it is inconvenient, and whether they actually want to be here rather than somewhere that will have them, only shows once they are inside and the novelty has worn off.

So what we built is not a hiring filter. It is a keeping filter with one door check bolted on the front.

Those are two different instruments, and I had assumed they were one.

The two things I never handed over

Which brings me to the hole underneath it.

For ten years I did two things in this company better than anybody else. I sold, and I hired.

Those are the two processes I never wrote down and never handed over.

Everything else got documented. Those two stayed in my head, because handing over the thing you are best at feels like the last job on the list.

It is the first one.

Here is what a company without a hiring process looks like. A territory screaming for help. One candidate. Nobody stress testing him. An offer. Candidate one of one, and we told ourselves we were moving fast.

A seat nobody has defined cannot be filled badly, because there is nothing to fill it badly against. That is last week's lesson, back at my door wearing a different hat.

What bending a seat costs

Larry O'Reilly asked me after last week's issue whether I had ever shaped a seat around a person instead of the other way round. Yes. More than once.

Here is what it costs, and it took me years to see. The cost is not paid by you. It is paid by the person you bent it for.

You take somebody excellent. You build a job around their strengths because you want to keep them. Then you watch them struggle in a seat that was never real, in front of people who can see it.

They carry that. You carry the regret, which is much lighter.

The one I got right

It did not feel like a firing.

He was good. Honest, careful, hard working. But we run this company in fifth gear all day long. That is a choice we made. It is not a standard he failed.

I had put him somewhere that was never going to fit, and then let it run far too long while we both pretended it would settle.

By the time we had the conversation, we had already found a place that ran at his pace. He had to apply for it himself. But it was there.

He was relieved. So was I. He is better off now than he was with us, and the credit for that is his. What I finally did was stop pretending the fit would fix itself.

What still does not work

The time.

The decision is not the hard part any more. We get there. Then it sits. Weeks. Sometimes months, while we take it round the table one more time to be sure.

I used to think the pain of this job was making the call. It is not. It is the gap between making it and doing it, because by then everybody in the room can feel the call has been made. Including the person it is about.

That gap is unkind. We are closing it. We are not there.

So, practically

Do not write your standards forwards, from who you hope to be. Write them backwards, from who did not work out.

Go through the people who left, the ones you let go, and the ones you should have let go sooner. Find what they had in common. That list will be shorter and uglier than the one on your wall.

Keep only the lines everybody in the room agrees on without hesitating. A standard that needs a debate every time will not survive its first hard Tuesday.

Then sort them. Which ones can you check at the door, and which ones only show up in the room. They are not the same instrument and you need both. I did not see that until I sat down to write this.

Say them out loud, to everybody, long before you use them on anybody. Ours were spoken in rooms for months before they were written anywhere.

And then run the test. A year from now, name one decision that changed because of them.

If you cannot, you did not write a standard. You printed a brochure.

I know. I printed a very good one.

w. 🌊

Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time.
This issue first appeared on LinkedIn.
Every issue lives here.

ISSUE 19 · 16 OCTOBER 2026

A LEGO boat in six numbered bags, and the two things that decide whether a company closes its problems or only names them.

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My mother is at my dining table, building a boat.

It is a LEGO sailing boat, sent to me by a reader of this newsletter. It arrives in six numbered bags. You open bag one. You do not open bag two.

The instructions are a book. Step thirty one. Step thirty two. Each step shows the piece and where it goes.

Two people who have never built it before can sit down and build it, because somebody did the hard part first. They wrote it down and they organised the work.

I built a company for the first fifteen years without enough of that.

I have handed it over three times. 2021, 2024, 2025. The first two did not work. The third is working.

The interesting part is not the third. It is that the first two failed for the same reason, and the reason was mine.

Naming a problem is not fixing it.

That sounds obvious. It is not, because a company that only names problems looks exactly like a company that is working on them.

Here is how it happens. You think you have handed over the rudder. But the new team has not understood yet what the job actually is. Or they have no clarity on what the work really is. Or they are not ready to make the calls, so they have not accepted the decisions.

Any one of those three and nothing closes.

Problems get described. Then described again, in a better meeting, with a better deck, by people who are not wrong about any of it.

A stalled company is not one that cannot see its problems. It is one that can only name them.

For a long time I thought what was missing was courage.

It was not.

I did not keep the final say because I wanted it. I kept it because I could not get anyone to take it. I was not hanging on. I let go, and nobody caught it.

The reason is embarrassing when you write it down.

You cannot ask a team that is learning, and carrying a large responsibility for the first time, to also define their own roles and their own context.

I asked them to do the job and invent the job at the same time.

Nobody can do both. I could not have.

In 2024 there was a seat at the head of our leadership team that nobody had defined. I did not appoint anyone to it. I left it to the team.

An empty space with no edges does not get filled by the best fit. It gets filled by whoever reaches.

Ambition fills a vacuum. Fit cannot, because fit needs edges to measure against.

So the fix was not more delegation. It was less guessing.

We defined the seats first, together, as a piece of work in its own right, before anybody was asked to sit in one. Then we set the goals together. Then we brought in a coach from outside, because we had known for years what was not working and had still done nothing about it.

And one thing I had skipped entirely. Gino Wickman has a simple test for whether somebody belongs in a seat. Get it, want it, capacity to do it. I never ran it. You cannot test a person against a seat that does not exist.

That is the mess. Here is what replaced it, and the team owns most of it.

Two things decide whether a company closes problems or only names them.

The first is the collective brain. Not how clever the people are. Whether what they know gets shared, used and added to.

A brain only compounds when people share. If everybody learns and nobody tells anybody, you end up with a room full of clever people and a company exactly as clever as it was last year.

I used to think of it as a machine for new ideas. It is not. Its real job is remembering. Knowing which parts of the past mattered is harder than inventing something new, and usually worth more.

In 2025 the team went back and revived things that had worked years earlier and been forgotten. One of them I was not in the room for. They refused to meet a competitor on price and defended the value on its merits instead. It became one of the largest projects in the company's history, at full margin.

Nobody asked me.

The second is the collective conscience. Not what is in the handbook. What a group defends when it is tested.

We had one real test.

There was a person who should have been let go long before they were. The arguments were sound. People said them out loud, clearly, more than once.

The clean version of what happened next would be a lie. Talking about it openly did not produce a calm decision. It made the person worse. And being worse is what finally forced the issue.

The decision was never taken. It became unavoidable.

That is what a conscience does. It does not vote. It raises the cost of doing nothing until doing nothing stops being available.

So here is the practical part, and it is the only instruction in this essay.

Before you hand anything over, do the hard part first. Write down what the job actually is. Organise the work. Define the seat before you put a person in it, and define it with the people who will sit in it.

Then the brain has something to remember, and the conscience has something to defend.

Here is the argument against all of it. Maybe none of this was the seats or the goals or the coach. Maybe the team in 2025 was simply four years more experienced than the team in 2021, and everything I changed was something I happened to be doing while they grew up.

I cannot rule that out. What would prove me wrong is a handover where the seats are clean, the fit is tested, and the decisions still come back to me.

Il faut laisser le temps au temps. You have to give time its time.

My mother will finish her boat this week. Six bags, a book of steps, and somebody who did the hard part first so that two people who had never built one could.

I am still writing mine.

w. 🌊

Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time.
This issue first appeared on LinkedIn.
Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 18 · 9 October 2026

I expected a report card. What came back was an inventory.

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In 2021 I handed my company to the leadership team and left for a year.

I expected a report card. What came back was an inventory.

Not a sabbatical. I was still the owner, still in the building some of the time. But the running of it was theirs, and I wanted to see what I had actually built.

What came back sorted into three piles.

The first was everything that simply ran. Prepared, understood, nobody needing me.

It was the smallest pile. That still stings.

The second was the fires. The things that went wrong loudly, where somebody came to me and said this is broken and we are going to die.

That was the pile I had braced for, and it turned out to be the safest of the three. Every item in it had already been seen and understood by the person raising it. A problem a team can describe is a problem that team will solve, usually faster than I would have.

The noise was a sign of health.

The third pile was silent.

These were fundamental things that were not in place at all, and nobody in the room knew they were missing. No alarm went off, because an absence does not set off an alarm.

Here is what was on it. This is the useful part and the embarrassing part.

How to hold a meeting.

How to decide without waiting for consensus.

How to set a long-term goal and work backwards from it, instead of running at whatever was burning that morning.

How to hire. How to fire. How to grow somebody who is already good.

How to reward people for the right thing, which I wrote about last month and which was one line on a longer list.

Not one of those is advanced. There is no MBA anywhere in that list.

And not one of them was something the team had failed to learn. Every one was something I had never installed.

Underneath all of it sat the thing I had never said out loud.

I had never explained what the job is.

Running a company is not getting through today.

Think of an accordion.

You pull it open and you find room. Opportunity, movement, new people, new ideas. You also get chaos and stress and pain, because open is where things break.

So you close it again. Order, process, stability, everything back in its place. Close it too far and the music stops.

There is no correct setting. There never was. The job is the pulling and the closing, over and over, and knowing which one this year needs.

Nobody had ever told them that. So they did the only job they had been handed. They took care of the day. The orders, the fires, the customer on the phone. They were good at it, and they spent that year looking at their feet instead of at where we were going, because nobody had told them to lift their eyes.

The other thing I never built was the part where everybody pulls the same way.

I thought that was a matter of telling people. Here is the plan, here is where we are going. I said it clearly, more than once, and I assumed clear was the same as shared.

It is not. People carry a goal they helped build. They carry out a goal they were handed, and that one does not survive the first hard week.

Three Fridays ago I named three habits that got me here. Hiring for the job in front of me. Training people only for the job they held. Deciding everything myself.

Reading them back, two of those are too tidy. I did hire for the next role, often. I did hand over real responsibility, and plenty of it worked.

The third one was true, and it is the only one that matters.

I was in the room too often. I decided too fast.

Now the part that will annoy some of you, and it should.

That worked. For years.

A founder in the middle of everything is the fastest way a small company will ever decide anything. No meeting, no slides. You see it, you call it, it moves. In the early years that is not a flaw, it is the reason you are still here while better-funded people were consulting each other.

I would do it again. I think you have to.

Hero-led or system-led is the question everybody asks, and everybody answers system, because nobody wants to be the hero. Founder on a horse, cape, the whole picture.

It is the wrong question. Both are right, at different times. All of the difficulty is in the crossing.

Because getting out of the middle is not the next step up. It is not the same job done better. It is a pivot. A different job, with different skills, started from zero, in front of people who watched you be good at the old one.

And it is just as hard for them as it is for you.

You see it most clearly in sales. Somebody is brilliant at closing. Give them a team and everyone expects the skill to scale. It does not, because the job changed. Plenty never make the switch, and a few answer the pressure by closing even harder, becoming the hero twice over while the people behind them learn nothing.

That is what I did for seventeen years, with a company instead of a territory.

In July a reader asked me how a coach corrects course without becoming the bottleneck. I wrote back that I had dropped ownership on people without the tools, context or confidence to carry it. You cannot shock anyone into initiative. The silence I got was my failure, not theirs.

They were not refusing to step up. They were being asked, with no warning, to do a job nobody had ever described.

There is an honest edge against my own side of this. A system grows its own hero too. Write enough down and the process becomes the authority, nobody moves on anything outside the manual, and the speed you were proud of is gone. I have seen that in companies far larger than mine.

The goal was never procedure. The goal is that a capable adult can act without me and knows what good looks like.

So here is the test, and it costs you nothing but honesty.

Pick a week in the next two months and go away properly. No calls. No approving things from your phone. No quick question on the way out of the door.

When you come back, do not ask how it went. Sort it into the three piles.

What ran. What broke loudly. And then the hard one, the one nobody will bring you. What decisions never got made. What nobody started. What people waited on, and why waiting felt like the right call.

If the first pile is smaller than you expected, you have the same answer I got.

It took eighteen months and outside help to work through that list. Not a workshop. Eighteen months, with how to hold a meeting at the top of it.

The things that came closest to costing me the company were never the fires. They were the items nobody was shouting about, because nobody knew they were absent.

That was not the team’s gap.

It was the bill for seventeen years of being the fastest man in the room.

w. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 17 · Friday 2 October 2026

Generous is not a framework.

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In 1969 a French sailor was winning the first solo non stop race around the world.

Bernard Moitessier had the position and the boat. All he had to do was turn north for England, cross the line, and take the prize and the press that came with it.

He kept going east instead. Past the Cape a second time, and on to Tahiti.

He fired a message by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship. It read “Because I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul.”

It reads well on a poster. It also cost him the race, the money, the recognition, and a great deal at home. He counted all of that and went anyway.

That is the part people leave out. Choosing not to own the win is not free.

Here is the belief I am going to defend for the next seven Fridays.

You do not really own a business. You look after it for a while.

Now the honest part.

Nobody has to be argued into the opposite idea. It is the normal one. The one we all grew up with.

A business is a thing you own. You grow it. You take more out of it. You win, and somebody else loses.

Nobody chooses that story. It is the one we are all handed, and it arrives on its own wherever nothing else was said.

A default cannot be wrong, because nobody ever made it.

I found that out five times.

Five times I gave shares away at the start of a business. Foundation, or close to it.

The company was worth almost nothing. A few thousand euros, a dream, and a promise.

I never once said what the share was for.

I did not say that it paid for the risk taken on day one. I did not say that the work done afterwards was a separate thing, paid a separate way. I did not say what would happen on the day the share finally became worth something.

No framework. No rules. Not even a conversation.

They felt good that day. So did I.

I should say why I did it, because it was not carelessness.

I wanted the people building the thing with me to own a piece of it. I still want that. Handing over shares felt like the generous move, and generous felt like enough on its own.

Generous is not a framework.

Then the gap I had left got filled in by the only story available.

The first sign was small and I missed it. People stopped wanting the bonus at the end of the year and started asking for more shares instead. The share was growing faster.

The moment somebody would rather own than be paid, they have stopped thinking of themselves as crew.

Then came parity. Every one of them, in the end, wanted half.

They were not being greedy. They had worked hard for years, and nobody had ever told them that the hard work was not what the paper was for.

Some started behaving like bosses. They held shares, so they assumed they held the job as well. I had never separated the two. Why would they?

They wanted the reward. They did not want the risk.

They wanted the title. They did not want the training.

And I built the same shape every single time.

One minority partner per business. One person beside me, and everybody else outside the room.

So the only person that partner could measure themselves against was me.

The reason we split was different in every case. The fault line underneath was always the same.

Each of them runs their own company now. Some are doing well.

Not every partnership I have built went that way. Some of the best things I have been part of were built with other people and are still standing. But the ones that broke all broke on the same thing, and it was the thing I never wrote down.

What it cost me is the part they never saw, and I understand why.

For the first twelve or thirteen years I took a minimum salary and no dividend. Everything went back in.

When the crash came, and again in 2020, the guarantee was mine. One signature. A minority shareholder is never asked for one.

This is not a complaint. The risk was mine and so was the reward, and the reward came. That was the deal I made with myself and it worked.

But they looked forward and never backward. They saw a solid business and a plan that worked, and they were right about both. They could not see the years that had paid for it, because I had made those years invisible.

Now the part I like least.

Twice I called something stewardship when it was avoidance.

One business went wrong slowly for years while I told myself I could still turn it around. By waiting, the risk grew. Waiting is never neutral. The bill goes up while you decide.

And one person turned, once they understood the bigger stake was never coming. I knew. I did not act.

Every few months I found a reason. Not now, but soon, or someday.

In the end the team put me in front of a choice and told me straight what was happening. Then I moved. Four or five years too late.

That was not patience and it was not loyalty. It was me avoiding a hard conversation because I had no idea what was on the other side of it.

Last week I wrote about the difference between holding a position and drifting. This is the same question in work clothes.

So here is the obvious thing to say back to me.

Easy to talk about stewardship when you own the business.

That is fair, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I own it. I am not giving it away and I am not going to perform a version of myself that would.

But stewardship is not the opposite of owning. It is what owning is for.

A steward can hold the papers. What he cannot do is treat the thing as his to spend.

I want to be clear about one thing before I say what I would do differently.

The answer was never to keep it all. Sharing what you build is right, and it is also good business. People who own a piece of the outcome behave differently, and it shows.

The mistake was never the giving. It was giving without ever saying what was given and why I gave it.

If you are about to give somebody a share, write one page first.

What the share pays for. What the work is paid for, separately. And what happens on the day it becomes valuable.

Write it while the company is worth a few thousand euros, because that is the only day it is free. After that, every conversation about it is a negotiation, and you are negotiating with somebody who has already decided what they are owed.

We did write that page in the end. It is called a Virtual Equity Interest Plan, it has been running since the beginning of last year, and it gets a Friday of its own later in this arc.

It says what the stake is for, what it is not, and how somebody gets more of it. All the things I never said.

It answers every mistake above. Which tells you how long it took me.

So take the thing you are being patient about right now.

The partner. The country. The person everybody in your building already knows about.

Are you looking after it, or are you avoiding a conversation and calling it care?

For years I believed the handover was hard because of the people involved.

It was not. I made it impossible on day one and then spent a decade finding that out.

Like building a fast boat with a hole designed into the bow. She floats fine at the dock. You only find out at speed.

w. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.