I used to sit in the very chair you are sitting in today.

I grew up selling expensive things - the kind where the price can carry six zeros. For the first few years I was devoutly convinced that whoever shaves off a few pennies wins. Until I met a client who spent an hour tearing his hair out, shouting that I was far too expensive and that he could not afford me. And the moment I moved from price to the value he actually wanted to achieve, he changed his tone in a single second: he calmed down, started laughing and invited me to dinner where - now completely relaxed - we closed the deal. He did it with such ease that I walked around in shock for a long time afterwards. That is when the penny dropped: you talk about price last, once everything else is already clear, and there are so many non-price arguments that the client can barely steer the conversation - because he knows that I understand what truly matters to him, that he is getting exactly that, and that I value my own worth. Because - as my motto goes - no one will value you more than you value yourself. So today, before anyone reaches for a calculator, I reach for my notebook: I want to know what keeps him up at night, who sits on his team and what that team lives for. People buy where they feel looked after; “two pounds” of difference then fade into the background. And when a salesperson tells me today about a “price war”, I smile to myself and ask: what do you know about your client beyond the price? Usually there is silence.

I once built a fine business resting on cooperation with a single large corporation. At first it was a romance straight out of a film: both sides were keen, calls answered on the first ring, terms like a dream. But the partner had other plans: it wanted to build a large sales network, and my company was to be just a small cog in the great corporate machine. The more partners there were in that network, the worse the terms of cooperation became and the higher the demands. It was only during my MBA that I discovered that the path this corporation took is a clearly described, stage-by-stage process of building a sales network, laid out in the literature. Had I known that earlier, I would have foreseen what was about to happen. Today, the moment I look into a client's company and see that one or two buyers or suppliers have him by the throat, a red light the size of a floodlight comes on. I say so plainly, even when it is uncomfortable, and then we sit down and spread the business across more legs - so that no single phone call saying “we're ending the cooperation” can topple the whole company.

I had a brilliant plan and - as is my way - boasted about it at once. I said out loud what I cared about before I had prepared a single thing. The result? The team felt the ground burning under its feet, the competition poached my best people within a week, and I lost the entire department overnight. The funniest thing about this unfunny story is that the only culprit was me, with my loose tongue. It taught me something simple and priceless: order can matter more than the idea itself - sometimes you first have to quietly arrange the process and the procedures, and only then take it to people. Today, when a managing director mentions in passing “oh, I've already told the team about that”, I can sense in half a sentence that he has just set off a landmine. Then I help steer the change so that people pick it up and carry it forward, rather than torpedo it.

I was certain I was holding the future in my hands: a product so brilliant that the market simply HAD to love it. The market looked, shrugged and moved on - and the money ran out well before my enthusiasm did. I repeated that trick more than once, because enthusiasm is a drug for which no antidote has yet been invented. So today, before you spend the first pound on building, we go together through three uncomfortably simple questions: does the market really have this problem, does it hurt more than the cost of the solution, and are there enough such clients. When the hard evidence is missing, we take a step back instead of setting the budget alight with a flourish. And so that you don't think I'm theorising: this very page you are reading I treated like a new product - I showed it first to family, then to friends, then to clients, took my share of knocks and rearranged a fair amount of it.

I know that voice in my head perfectly, because I listened to it for years: I won't touch the sales process, maybe it'll move on its own; I'll give this salesperson one more quarter, he'll get going in the end; I'll invest now, without a penny of profit, in the cooperation with a client, “because it's an investment in the future” - a classic of the genre. In nine cases out of ten it was not patience, but plain procrastination in an elegant disguise. The funny thing is that inaction does not hurt straight away - it seeps quietly, until one day you realise that “later” has eaten half the company. Today I sit down with the client, call the deferred decisions by their name, and then we work out coolly what each month of waiting really costs. Sometimes that one number works better than the best motivational speech.

In a small company the owner is at once head of sales, finance, HR, IT and psychologist for difficult Mondays - and yet he carries the hardest decisions alone, because he has no one to consult. I lived through that loneliness for thirty years and I know how easy it is, within it, to make a move that from the outside all but shouts “don't do that”. And this is where my favourite moment begins: I arrive as a software developer, and after a quarter of an hour it turns out that sitting across from you is someone who has run companies himself, lost them, rebuilt them, and has a store of stories up his sleeve for almost any situation. Code is part of the required programme, but the real value is born when I sit down beside you and help you think a move through before you make it. The best blunders, after all, are the ones we laugh about together a year later - ideally the ones you skirted with an elegant curve thanks to a single conversation.