How we see it
Call them values if you like. To us they are the rules for how we deal with other people: anyone working with us picks them up in a week, so they may as well be written down first. Every one of them is arguable — and that is exactly the point.
Business language is full of military metaphors: markets get conquered, competitors crushed, customers targeted, and there is always a sales force out there somewhere. Every supply deal we work on sits between someone who will have to reorder and someone who will be asked a favour next month: treat it as a battle and you win it once, and never again.
Nobody lent us money: no investors, no board, nobody who will want to sell us on in five years. It means we can turn down work we don't believe in, and that the only thing we owe anyone is the promise we write down.
Almost all urgency is invented. Ours is not: if the ship sails on Thursday it sails on Thursday, and no meeting moves it. That is exactly why we keep the two apart: urgent is what carries a deadline printed on a document. The rest waits until morning, and in the morning everything is almost always clearer.
We write documents for a living, and the trade teaches you early what the wrong ones cost: an ambiguous clause costs an arbitration, a sloppy goods description costs a rejected batch, a "let's touch base soon" costs an order. Which is why the words "innovative solutions" appear nowhere here: what appears is who does what, by when, and how.
Stopped goods do not argue. They wait.
A document can be read when you need it, filed, and two years on it still says exactly the same thing. Two years after a meeting, four people remember four different things. Putting down in writing what has to hold up over time is literally our job: it would be odd not to do it for ourselves.
A no said straight away is a gift. A maybe kept alive for three weeks is damage, and the damage is done to whoever was waiting. When something isn't our kind of work we say so in our first reply, and if we know who does it better, we say that too.
Our business plan is one line: take in more than we spend. It sounds unambitious until you look at what it buys: the right to turn down crooked work, to work with the right client, and never to say yes just to get through the month. Companies that close rarely do it for want of ideas.
The price is said up front.
A thousand-employee company already has a legal department, an in-house export manager and an IT team: we would be left filling in a form. A ten-person company with half its turnover outside the country does not — there, a badly written clause or an ERP that won't talk to the warehouse is felt immediately, and felt in the bank account.
The software we produce and the platforms we launch hold nobody hostage. Anyone who leaves takes their data with them, without permission and without an exit fee. A customer who stays because they can't leave isn't a customer, they're a prisoner — and prisoners eventually get out.
The world applauds the ones who begin. We look at who is still standing after twenty years: a supplier who disappears leaves a hole someone has to fill in a hurry, usually at the worst possible moment. So before looking at how brilliant someone is, we look at how long they have been around. The person behind this company has been doing this trade since 1996: not a boast — the reason we already know what consequences certain mistakes lead to.
A market's rules change every six months and a whole market can close in a week. A three-year plan, today, is fiction. We plan short and often — weeks, not quarters — and what we learn on the way goes into the next plan instead of being treated as a surprise.
No container was ever held up for a contract that was too clear.
A certificate of origin looks like a five-minute form, right up until it is wrong: then it is a held container, a penalty, and a customer who doesn't call back. The boring part of international trade is boring precisely until the moment it becomes the expensive part.
No tickets, no chatbot, no "your request is important to us". You write, and someone who knows the subject answers, usually the same day. If we are out in the world or at a conference it might land in the evening, but it lands from us.
We don't sell software we haven't installed, broken and put back together ourselves. That holds for our own products and for anything we would point someone else towards: if we haven't spent nights on it, we are in no position to say it works.
We don't send progress reports. We send the closed file, the signed document, the system that runs. If a stage produces nothing you can look at, that stage isn't finished — and talking about it further doesn't finish it.
The same convictions, cut to the bone. These are the lines that turn up on their own around the site, between one section and the next.
Customs does not read intentions. It reads documents.
The price is said up front.
Better a no on day one than a maybe in month one.
Software we do not run ourselves, we do not sell.
A figure typed twice will eventually be two figures.
A market is not opened. It is held.
Stopped goods do not argue. They wait.
Whoever signs answers for it.
An artificial intelligence that removes no hours of work is a demo.
No container was ever held up for a contract that was too clear.
The awkward call is made early, not late.
Work that is done does not need to be told.
If we disagree on any of these, better to find out now than on the third order.
