Genuine trust is shown, not spoken. Talking about trust too much in business or relationships may signal the exact opposite.
How many times have you spoken to your spouse about trust? Honestly, I can’t recall that I ever spoke about trust to my wife. Double-check with her if you like, but trust has been given in our 20-year+ relationship.
Speaking for myself, I would be pretty alarmed if my wife talked to me about trust all the time. Knowing that I haven’t ever misused her trust, I would ask myself the question of why the trust topic would come up all the time.
Change of scene. In my role as Founder & CEO of Yonder, I get to meet way more new people than in my private life. If you want to sell your product, you need to speak to everybody interested in your product — no matter if this is at a tradeshow, at a networking reception, or when somebody randomly calls you.
Some of those acquaintances are serious, and some of them are less so. With some of them, you never know if they’re seriously interested in doing business with you or not. I find it fairly straightforward to assess the seriousness of a discussion with prospects, for example at a tradeshow. Discussions with potential partners are more difficult to navigate.
Here is a real-life example.
That Infamous Call
One autumn day in 2021, I got a call from a person I met previously at tradeshows who happens to be in the same industry as we are. He said he would have a potential business opportunity, but we would need to sign an NDA first. That sounded a little strange — we normally only sign NDAs before exchanging detailed data on an opportunity.
Anyway, I agreed to sign an NDA first, and then continue the discussion.
“Let’s Choose High Trust, High Risk”
It turned out that the potential business opportunity was with one of that person’s key customers and they asked for something the person couldn’t supply, but we could. That’s how business usually works — if you can’t fulfill all your customers’ requirements, you either build what they need, or you find suitable partners who can cover what you can’t cover.
In this specific example, however, my counterpart mentioned many times that working with us would require a “high trust, high risk” approach. Retrospectively, I think by this he meant the approach of not just supplying his and our product to his customer, but also an interface between the two products.
This is what we ended up delivering, and after a few hiccups during the project phase, this solution works well for the customer.
“Can We Take This Further?”
Fast-forward two years. Because the solution described above worked well, that person repeatedly approached our team at tradeshows if we were willing to extend our agreement to more of his customers. He would have tens of customers who could take advantage of the two-product setup we realized two years ago. We always said that we could discuss an extension of our collaboration if he could share the list of his interested customers.
That never happened. But he invited me to his office at the end of 2023, to discuss a possible way forward from founder to founder. I agreed to meet, even though my team said they didn’t trust that person at all.
The meeting was open and pleasant, but the key thing was not discussed: The famous list of his interested customers that could benefit from our collaboration.
Nevertheless, we drafted an agreement for an extended collaboration — remember I’m an entrepreneur, and I’m not put off lightly by difficult negotiations.
We parted by promising each other to revert with feedback from the teams and the boards after the Christmas break.
His feedback never came. In February, he WhatsApped me that he would have discussed a totally different agreement with his board and that he would like to meet with me personally to discuss this — as “building trust would be paramount at this stage.”
I replied that we wouldn’t proceed, neither with the discussion nor the agreement.
I haven’t ever heard back from that person since this reply.
Conclusion
Let’s return to my marriage. Because my wife never speaks about trust, I trust her.
The same applies to our team. We never speak about trust, we just get stuff done — no matter what time of the day or night. When we’re out of the office during the day, we’re transparent about it. When we screw up, we call each other and said we screwed up. When somebody is convinced by another person that he or she is right, we say “You are right.” Irrespective of the hierarchy.
Never has somebody used the word “trust” explicitly in a conversation.
That’s the fabric of trust.
