Tag: OSBB

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.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 11 · 21 August 2026

When you do not tell your story, somebody else tells it for you. And they choose the columns.

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I did not lose that pitch. There was no pitch.

Belgium, the mid-nineties. Skikot was a few years old, a student ski trip business run by students, and I was selling to associations in every university city in the country. Two of the largest had travelled with us the year before. They had been happy. I had the renewal conversation with both the way you talk about something already decided, and I moved on to the next city.

Weeks later I was working down the list of confirmed groups and they were not on it. Signed elsewhere. Done.

Four or five buses. Around two hundred students. Fifteen to twenty percent of the year.

That was not the damage.

The damage was doubt.

Two groups who had been with us, who had loved it, gone without a word. So the questions start. Did they not actually like it? Were they just being kind last spring? Should we drop the price? Is something broken in this business that everybody can see except me?

And the worst one. How many more am I going to lose without ever knowing why?

In sales, doubt is the killer. Not losing. Doubt. You carry it into the next meeting and everyone in the room can feel it. You start to believe your competitor has found some kryptonite against you, and you have not even seen it yet.

It did not kill us. We were stubborn and we had put everything into it, and that carried us through. But I sold badly for months.

The customer was us

Skikot ran on one rule that was almost too simple to say out loud. The customer was us. We built the trip we wanted to be on.

So the whole week was designed for one thing. Connection. Ski lessons given by fellow students instead of hired instructors. Activities arranged so that anyone who arrived alone did not stay alone. Evenings we ran ourselves, and had a blast running them. And on arrival day, while everyone was up on the mountain, we carried the luggage into the apartments. People came off a ten hour bus ride, picked up a key at the bar over a beer, and walked into a room where their bags were already waiting.

None of it was an accident. All of it was on purpose.

And none of it was written down anywhere a stranger could read it.

That is the biggest mess I have ever made.

We should have made the promise, and then delivered on it. We only ever did the second half.

A promise you do not voice is a promise anybody can claim. That is how you become a sitting duck for the companies with a better front. They never have to beat what you do. They only have to say it first.

They chose the columns

I found out later what our competitor put in front of those committees. Detailed pricing set against ours. Photographs of the season before. And a comparison sheet, us in one column and them in the other.

They positioned themselves as the Skikot alternative.

It took me years to read that properly. Their whole pitch was built on our name. We were the benchmark. We had defined what a good student ski trip was, so completely that the only way to sell against us was to claim to be the same thing.

And we lost, because the comparison sheet was the only document in the room, and it was not ours.

When you do not tell your story, somebody else tells it for you. And they choose the columns.

So why did I never say any of it out loud?

Not humility. Not contempt for marketing either.

I had the best story in that market and the only place I ever printed it was on a t-shirt.

Everyone went home wearing one. Skikot, and the names of three resorts. To the people who had been on that trip it meant a week they would talk about all year. To everyone else it was a word.

Run by students who were on the trip with you, against a travel agency repackaging a week in the Alps for a customer it had never once been. That is a perfect thing to say. I was living it and I never once wrote it down where a stranger could read it.

Because I believed, the way most builders believe at some point, that a true story tells itself.

It does not. Somebody has to tell it, and the only person who could tell ours was me.

Every engineer and every manufacturer I have met in the thirty years since carries a version of this belief. The product will sell itself because it is the best. It will not. The product does not talk.

The relief

A year later, a new person on one of those committees asked me quite openly whether choosing us meant his trip would be free.

I pulled the thread and it came apart. The decision makers had been given free trips. Against every student body code, and against ours, which is exactly why it had never occurred to us.

Here is the part I will not dress up. My first feeling was relief.

Not anger. Relief. Because it meant the business was sound.

Which tells you what the doubt had cost me. I had spent a year quietly wondering whether we were still any good, and news that somebody had bought the decision arrived as good news.

We talked about it inside the company and we swallowed it. What we took from it was not outrage. It was an education in how complex sales actually works. The influencers and the decision makers are not the whole game, but they are essential players. And you can make those people feel important without going anywhere near what our competitor did.

The cold start

Last week I wrote that the paint is not the problem, the wall is. Robert Skuba put the other case in the comments, and he was right.

Sometimes the wall is excellent and twenty years of bad paint is hiding it. A prospect cannot see your service desk. They cannot see how you handle a bad week. They cannot see the craft. They see your presentation, sitting beside four others.

Which is when I finally understood my own sentence about Skikot. We were brilliant once you knew us. We were nothing at all at the moment somebody was choosing for the first time.

That is not a quality problem. It is a cold start problem, and it is a completely different thing to fix.

The worst thing that could have happened

We won both associations back the following year. The students pushed for it. They had seen both trips from the same bars and they wanted ours.

I used to call it the Skikot forcefield.

Winning them back was the worst thing that could have happened to me.

It confirmed the wrong lesson. Stay the course, be better, and they come back. That is true. It is also a trap. It is slow. It hands the first move to whoever is loudest. It pulls you into a fight you never wanted. And the whole time, you get to tell yourself you are being principled.

There were three lessons in that season, and for years I had them in the wrong order.

The smallest one first. I walked into that renewal like a formality, because eight or nine out of ten groups came back every year. Under-prepared, no follow up, no close. It knocked me flat and it has never happened again. I am now the most prepared person in any room I walk into on a real opportunity, and I have that season to thank for it.

I fixed that one inside a month.

The second took a job change. I changed nothing about how Skikot presented itself. Not one folder. The lesson arrived at my next job, in a pure business to business division of a large petroleum company. A business built on promises, marketing and relationships, all pulling in the same direction instead of sitting in separate rooms. Promises made out loud, and then kept.

That is where the light came on. Skikot did not rise because we were clever. We had found product market fit and we were riding a wave and enjoying the ride. We could probably have grown it five or ten times over if we had understood the fundamentals.

The third one took ten or fifteen years. That was the forcefield, and I believed in it long after I knew better.

The habit outlasted the belief

There is a type of company in every trade. Big words, a flashy website, events with more show than substance. They benchmark themselves against the quality company that under-markets itself, and claim to deliver the same thing. Their reputation is built on revenue, size and customer numbers. And they move on every three to five years, to a new company with a new flashy boat.

Beautiful is never the enemy. Flashy is.

I still run a version of the same bet I ran in the nineties. Let the customer try them. They will find out. They will come back.

They often do. But I lose the biggest ones on the way. The biggest ones are exactly where the facade companies go hunting, and promising. And picking up the pieces afterwards is slow, and expensive, and does not always end with the work.

Waiting to be discovered is not a strategy. It is a hope with a price, and the price is the deals you most want.

We have started to fix it. We market ourselves properly now. We prepare, and we say out loud what we actually deliver instead of assuming it is obvious. There is more to do.

And it is getting harder, not easier. The cost of building a convincing front has collapsed. Anyone can produce a website, a brochure and a year of content in an afternoon. The gap between looking good and being good has never been cheaper to fake, which puts the burden back on the people doing the real work to make it visible.

You could read all of this and say I lost to a bribe, and have built a marketing lesson on top of it thirty years later.

Fair. I will never know how much each of those two things weighed.

But here is what is not in doubt. They made a promise they could not keep.

We kept a promise I never made.

Only one of those two things was ever mine to fix.

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.