Tag: Founder Compass

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 16 · Friday 25 September 2026

It is not the absence of doing. It is thinking, with your position still on the table.

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I met someone who traded for a bank. Real money, at pace, all day.

Every afternoon she was called in, just like all the others, to the manager’s office.

You sat down and you accounted for every position you held.

Buy. Sell. Or hold.

Her manager was clear about one thing, and this is how she put it.

“Holding is a choice. A conscious choice and often the right one. But it needs to be catalogued and seen as a choice.”

Then she said the part that hit me in the face.

“That has been a huge lesson in my life, because it does not only apply to stocks.”

Here is what she handed me.

There are two modes. Doing, and thinking.

Buying is doing. Selling is doing. Both feel like work, because they are.

Holding is the other one. It is not the absence of doing. It is thinking, with your position still on the table.

My worst decisions came when I tried to run both at once.

When I am moving, I cannot see. Everything goes into the moving.

And here is the part I missed for years.

Nothing stops while you hold.

Prices move. People change jobs. A competitor overreaches. A supplier gets greedy. Somebody who would not take your call in March comes looking for you in October.

You stay where you are, the board keeps turning, and an opening appears that was not there when you were busy.

That is not waiting. That is the trade.

The best investors spend most of their working life holding. Yet almost every story ever told about them is about the buying and the selling.

Nobody tells the story of the year somebody sat still and was right.

And sitting still is the hard part. It takes nerves of steel and patience as deep as the ocean, because the moment it matters most is the moment everyone around you is telling you to move.

That is always when it is hardest. The room is loud, the advice is confident, and doing nothing feels like losing.

I am not naturally good at it.

My instinct is to push, and I have pushed hardest when everyone around me was doubting. I would do it again.

But the calls I am proud of are the other kind.

Holding while everyone else pushed their chips into the middle. Staying patient in a room full of eager people. Getting ready for the next crisis while the boom was still being celebrated. Going one way because the whole trade was going the other.

None of that is sitting still in the lazy sense. It is the harder mode, because nothing you do shows up anywhere that week.

Now the one I got wrong.

Years ago I lost a market that had been promised to me. I have written about that morning before.

What I did next was not a hold.

I spent two or three weeks trying to negotiate a version of the ending in which I had not been wrong. A split. An arrangement. Some shape that let me keep a piece of the promise. Everyone in that room had already decided. I was the last to know.

It looked like work. It was avoidance wearing work’s clothes.

I was moving so that I did not have to stop and look at the thing.

When I finally stopped, the answer showed up in about two days.

A few months earlier I had said no, twice, to Jeremy Burkhardt and Origin Acoustics. An American speaker brand I did not think I needed.

I wrote him a short email. Could we have a call.

That was the move. Stopping is what let me see it.

And I did not stop on purpose. I stopped because the clever route was finally dead.

So how do you tell a real pause from hiding?

Write three things down. If you cannot write them, you are hiding.

Why you are holding. One sentence, in plain words.

What it is costing you to hold. In money, or in time, or in the attention of your best people.

The date you will look at it again. A real date, in the calendar.

No reason, no price, no date, and it is not a pause. It is a drift.

Take the question from that trading floor. Leave their timetable.

Every afternoon is a trading floor’s speed. If I had to defend every hold of mine that often, I would sell good things just to have something to report.

Once a quarter is enough. What matters is that a date exists at all.

A boat at anchor is not doing nothing. The chain is loaded, the wind is on the bow, and the whole thing is working hard to stay in one place. You chose that spot. You know how much chain is out. You get up in the night to check she has not moved.

That is a hold.

From the shore, drifting looks exactly the same.

So pick the thing you have held longest. The customer everyone knows is difficult. The country. The product line. The person.

Say which one it is. Buy, sell, or hold.

Then say why, out loud, to one person who is allowed to tell you that you are wrong.

If you cannot finish that sentence, you are not holding it. You are avoiding it.

I did that for years and called it patience.

One last test, and it is the one I trust most.

If everyone around you agrees, and people compliment you on your patience, you are probably drifting.

If all you get is pressure to move, and you can still answer those three questions, you are holding.

The signals are that clear. They always are.

So which one is it, and who have you told?

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 13 · 4 September 2026

You won’t believe it until you’ve fired two or three. Before that, it’s a poster on the wall.

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We were sitting in a leadership meeting, the kind where the agenda never quite gets through because two names keep coming back up.

Two of our eight. Again.

Someone in the room finally said it plainly. Here we go again, talking about the exceptions, instead of the business with our true partners.

We were serving around 300 companies at the time. B2B, we call them partners, not customers. Three hundred is not a small list. But the number was never the problem.

Eight of them were.

They never really behaved like partners. That’s not only on them. We were vague about where our limits were, and slow to act when they were crossed. So asking turned into demanding. And not paying, on time or at all, started to feel like a favour we were somehow supposed to be grateful for.

We’d talked about doing something about it before. First in 2014. Seven years of knowing and not acting.

What about firing customers

That afternoon I remembered something someone once told me. Treat your B2B customers like employees. Find them. Interview them, both ways. Onboard them properly. Grow them, keep them.

He never mentioned firing one.

But we already fire employees who won’t work our way.

I said it out loud, half to myself. What about firing customers.

Three of us in the room liked the idea immediately. Not everyone did. Some people always want to keep appeasing, because a number on a spreadsheet feels safer than the hidden cost of the person behind it.

We wrote down two things. No more.

Pay on time. Someone who pays systematically late doesn’t hold agreements. I’ve learned to tell the difference. A trustworthy partner who’s going to be late tells you in advance, doesn’t haggle, doesn’t surprise you, and it happens once or twice a year and you work it out together. An untrustworthy one always surprises you, and always has a story. After two or three times, you know.

Be respectful. They treated our engineers and our office staff with disrespect. It usually wasn’t a surprise. The ones who treat your team badly tend to treat their own the same way, if they can afford a team at all.

No grey zone. The eight stood out like red flashlights against the other 300.

Deciding turned out to be the easy half

We stopped doing two things. We stopped making exceptions on payment terms, which for some of them ended in us formally pursuing what we were owed. And we stopped answering disrespect at all. Total silence. The two nearly always travelled together.

Here’s where I’m supposed to tell you which one we got wrong. Which of the eight didn’t deserve to be cut.

None of them.

All eight went shopping for a lower price the moment we let them go. A few left a trail of unpaid invoices at other suppliers too, which told me everything about who they’d always been. Today I count it as an advantage that they buy from our competitors now. What they cost in unpaid invoices, admin, and crisis management will never be covered by the business they bring in.

It cost us in 2021, the year we finally acted. Revenue down four to five percent. Three of the eight were large by volume, and volume doesn’t care why you walked away from it. It was a record year anyway.

But the calm it bought the team, the focus it put back on our real partners, the consistency it let us finally build into how we treat everyone else, made most of that back within six months.

The friction came from two directions

The revenue wasn’t the hard part. The friction was, and it came from two directions.

Internally, we were still rewarding our salespeople on top-line numbers alone back then, which meant the people closest to the decision had the least reason to like it.

Externally, our own suppliers pushed back too. Most of them are chasing short-term volume just as hard as anyone, and more than one quietly helped our exited accounts find someone else to supply them. It cost us energy, and a few standing arguments with vendors who don’t see us as a team member. We’re one of their sales channels. Nothing more.

If they ever priced what that costs their own brand, long term, with the accounts they keep propping up, I wonder if they’d act differently.

Maybe not.

This works with vendors too. We did it with them first, a few years earlier. We just didn’t notice it was the same lesson until now.

A poster on the wall

Write down what you actually want from a relationship with a customer. Write down what you don’t want from it. Work toward the first, relentlessly. Get rid of what you never wanted in the first place, even if it’s been on your books for years.

You won’t believe it until you’ve fired two or three. Before that, it’s a poster on the wall.

So here’s the question, not the lesson.

If you had to interview every one of your customers for the job tomorrow, the way you’d interview someone joining your team, how many would you hire again?

w. 🌊

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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 12 · 28 August 2026

Nobody gives you a second chance because you are sorry. They give you one because you are still worth backing.

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“Hi Wim, I am Jeremy Burkhardt. I started SpeakerCraft to be the market leader in architectural speakers. I sold it, and I am doing it again with Origin Acoustics. I do not know you, but I have heard a lot about you. We have to work together. I will have someone contact you to make it happen. Bye.”

I did not get a word in.

He was in Switzerland. I was in Spain. He was using the phone of a man I do not trust. He had asked that man for my number, then said, call him and put him on.

No email. No introduction. No polite route.

I picked up anyway. I always pick up.

A few days later his European rep wrote to arrange a call. Her first line was that Jeremy had told her we had spoken, and that I wanted to work with Origin Acoustics.

I had not said that. I had not said anything.

I said no on that call. Softly. The way you say no when you would rather leave the subject open.

They did not take it as final.

So a few weeks later, at the show, on the afternoon before the doors opened, I said it again. To their faces. Properly.

My reason was the true one, which is not always the case.

We were deep with a large audio group and doing well. We had spent years earning a shot at more territory. It had finally come. Italy had just been promised to us.

An unknown American speaker brand would have complicated the only conversation I cared about.

So I protected what we already had. That afternoon it felt careful. Grown up.

The doors opened the next morning.

Safety by familiarity is not safety

Here is what took me years to see.

We did have something. That is the part worth your time, because a story about a naive man is no use to anybody.

We had paper for Spain and Portugal. Signed. Performing.

On Italy we had a promise. Given to my face by a man who had never once treated us badly. Then put in an email.

I let the paper vouch for the promise.

That is the whole mistake. The real deal made the empty one feel real.

I see it in a second now, in other people. We think we are weighing risk. Most of the time we are weighing familiarity.

The name is known. The man has been decent. The last contract was clean. So this must be fine.

Safety by familiarity is not safety.

The wind had already shifted. I was still trimmed for the old one, because somebody I trusted told me the wind was fine.

Ten seconds to decide what to do with my face

Then I walked past their stand.

Our Italian customers were standing there. Being received. Not by us. By our direct competitor, who had been given Italy while we were being told Italy was ours.

He was enjoying it. That stung. It came with the package.

Ten seconds to decide what to do with my face.

We walked over. Not just me. Every one of our salespeople.

We said hello to our customers, and then we stayed. As long as we could. On a stand that was not ours. In a room full of people who understood exactly what had happened.

You could feel it move around that stand. Why is Genesis here. Why are those clients still standing with them.

Walking away would have been honest. It would also have been an announcement. Beaten, and leaving.

We stayed. What we said that morning went a long way past Italy.

Now the true thing about me, not the modest one.

They poked the bear.

I meet grace with grace. I meet competition with competition. Not in a burst. Every day. Every week. Every deal. Every opportunity.

I would not want to compete with me.

That morning I decided Italy would be ours, and that we would go at that competitor in his own market. Italy is one of our strongest markets today.

The clever route

Now the part I am least proud of. Most of you will recognise it.

I did not call Jeremy. Not for weeks.

First I tried to be clever. I went back at the group and pushed for a split on Italy. Some arrangement that left me a piece of the promise without having to say the whole thing was gone.

Two or three weeks of that. It made no sense and it had no effect. I was negotiating with people who had already decided. Everyone in the room knew it except me.

That is what we do instead of going back. We hunt for the version of the ending that lets us avoid admitting we were wrong.

When the clever route was properly dead, I wrote the email.

It was short. Could we have a call.

Then I made the case. Not on my knees. He would have had no use for that, and neither did I.

We made a mistake. We were set up. We want the chance we turned down.

He said yes, and not cleanly. Other territories had distributors by then. We would have to live beside them and out-work them. And we would have to reach a level he named, inside three years.

We took it. We hit it.

A year later he flew over and drove four countries with us to launch the brand. A laptop, too much coffee, a different room of installers every night.

The line I keep is not even mine. It is what we worked out on that trip.

Together we redefined the pitch, and put the goal posts where everyone could win.

You do not get that from a handshake at a trade show.

That is not grace. That is a bet.

For years I told this story as though he had been generous. I want to correct that. The generous version is no use to you.

Knowing the man now, I do not think it was generosity.

Look at that first call again. He had heard a lot about me before he ever picked up a phone. He had been asking.

So when I came back beaten, he was not being kind to a man who felt sorry. He was looking at someone with more drive than sense, freshly humiliated, who would work like hell to prove it had been a mistake.

He could smell it.

That is not grace. That is a bet.

And a bet is worth more to you than grace, because grace cannot be earned and a bet can.

Nobody gives you a second chance because you are sorry. They give you one because you are still worth backing.

The apology gets you the meeting. What you built while nobody was watching gets you the answer.

If I had gone back softer, sadder, sorrier, he would have been polite. I would never have heard from him again.

The door I told myself was closed

I had treated no as a door that opens one way.

You turn a man down, he moves on, it is gone. That is how it feels. That is how I assumed it worked.

I had said no to him twice. The door was open both times.

The doors we call one way are usually the doors we are too embarrassed to walk back through.

You could say I was lucky. He happened to still be interested. He happened to be a man who bets on people.

I will not argue. Luck was in the room.

But luck comes to almost everybody, and most of it is left lying where it lands. Picking it up means saying out loud that you were wrong the first time.

Two things happened that week. For years I only told you about one.

We walked over to a stand where we were not welcome, and stood with our customers.

And weeks later I walked back through a door I had told myself was closed.

Same move, twice. A refusal to accept somebody else’s version of where the story ends.

w. 🌊

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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.