You are twenty minutes into the meeting, and it is going well.
They like you. You have answered the awkward question about capacity, you have handled the one about price without flinching, and there is a moment where you can feel the room turn slightly in your favour.
Then somebody at the far end of the table says it.
“So why you, rather than the other two we are speaking to?”
You answer. You talk about the experience, the years in the sector, the clients you have worked with, the fact that you understand this problem better than anyone else they are going to meet. It is all true. Every word of it is true.
Three weeks later you find out they went with the other firm. The one you know, with reasonable confidence, is not as good as you are.
That is the moment worth sitting with, because most founders file it under bad luck, or price, or politics, and move on. It is usually none of those. It is that everything you offered in that room was proof to you, and none of it was proof to them.
Testimony Is Not Evidence
There is a distinction that gets used in court and almost nowhere else in business, and it is one of the most useful things I know for this problem.
Testimony is when you tell somebody what you know. Evidence is the thing that lets them reach the same conclusion without having been there.
“I have been doing this for twenty years” is testimony. So is “we really understand this market.” So is “our clients love working with us.” All of it might be entirely accurate, and none of it does the job, because the person across the table has heard the identical sentence from the two firms they saw before you. They cannot verify it and they cannot compare it. So they discount all three and decide on something else, usually price, usually to your disadvantage.
Here is the uncomfortable part. This is not a pitching problem. That meeting is just where you find out about it. The same gap runs through three places in your business, and you have probably never had cause to look at any of them.
The Trophy Cabinet
The first is the wall of logos on your website. Ten or twelve names, arranged neatly, no context. What that row tells a visitor is that those companies once said yes to you. That is genuinely all it tells them. It does not say whether the work went well, whether they came back, what it cost them, or what changed as a result. Some of the strongest names on a logo wall are the projects that nearly broke the business, particularly where the price went low to win the name. The founder knows all of that. The visitor knows none of it, and the visitor is the one deciding.
A prospect once told me they had seen we worked with a large international firm and had assumed that meant we were expensive and out of their reach. They almost did not make the call. That is what an uncontextualised logo does. It answers a question the visitor was not asking and creates one you never get the chance to address.
Your Unwritten Answer to, “Why You?”
The second is your real answer to “why you?” Not the polished version on the website. The one that governs how you price, which clients you chase and which ones you quietly decline. That reason exists, it is usually sound, and it is almost always still in your head, unwritten and unexamined, applied by instinct. It works perfectly while you are the one applying it. It falls apart the moment it has to travel, which is exactly what you are asking it to do in that meeting.
This is why building commercial infrastructure properly, from the ground up, matters so much. Done well, it answers the question before it is asked.
Fifteen years ago a leading insurer approached us about taking part in a major tender. We had not pitched them. We had spent two years being the only firm consistently visible at the right industry events, with a differentiated proposition they could actually point to, and systems that looked like they could handle scale. They did not choose us because we were good at compliance. Plenty of firms were good at compliance. They chose us because we looked like a business that could handle the opportunity. The infrastructure was already in place, and it did the arguing for us before anybody sat down.
The Things That Only Work When You Are in the Room
The third place you will find the gap is anything in the business that only works when you are there. The deal that stalls until you get on the call. The proposal that only lands when you write it or sign it off. The team member who does good work and still cannot close. Founders tend to read this as a people problem or a training problem. Far more often, the thing that would let somebody else do it well has never been written down, because it has never had to be.
We have all watched this happen when somebody leaves a business. Six weeks after their last day, a query comes up. Nothing dramatic. A client asks why something was structured the way it was, or a renewal lands with terms nobody recognises, and the room goes quiet, because the only person who knew the answer is gone. Somebody eventually says what everybody is thinking: we should have asked them about this before they left.
It is such a familiar moment that businesses have built an entire ritual around it: notice period, handover document, sit with your successor, write down what you know. Which means the only time most firms ever properly extract what a person knows is at the exact point that person is halfway out the door and has the least reason in the world to be thorough about it.
The handover is the right instinct at completely the wrong moment. If it is worth capturing when somebody leaves, it was worth capturing while they were still there and had every reason to get it right. And that applies to you more than anyone, because you are the one person in the business who never hands over.
Three gaps, one missing thing: nobody has ever made you prove it, so it has never been built into something transferable.
What My Three Awards Taught Me
I did this myself for years and did not notice.
I have three awards: the Leading Wales Award in 2014, the Wales Digital Dozen in 2016, and the Wales Online Best Use of Technology in Education award in 2018. All genuinely earned, all good for profile, and for a long time I treated them as three of the same thing. They were not.
- 2014, Leading Wales Award – personal, and it came from a proper conversation with people who understood exactly what they were looking at. It opened a network I am still part of twelve years later.
- 2016, Wales Digital Dozen – not about me at all. It was built to push twelve firms towards outside investment, which we did not want and were not seeking, so we took the recognition and the actual mechanism of the award did not apply to us.
- 2018, Wales Online Best Use of Technology in Education – external recognition for my team, who had built a market-leading e-learning platform, and that does something for people that internal praise never quite manages.
Three logos on a page. Three completely different things being proved, and one proving nothing relevant at all. I only worked that out because I eventually sat down with somebody who asked what each one was for. Until then, nobody had ever asked me to. I had assumed proof was proof.
Three Tasks to Run This Week
- Audit your proof points. Take every logo, award and testimonial on your site, and write one sentence for each explaining what it tells a stranger about their problem, not yours. Anything you cannot write that sentence for is decoration. Take it off, or give it context.
- Interrogate your last three deals. Take the one you won, the one you lost and the one you walked away from, and write down why, in commercial terms, without using the words “I felt.” Whatever you cannot write down is still testimony, and it will not survive contact with anybody who is not you.
- Document what only you know. Take the last thing that only moved because you got involved, and ask what specifically you knew that the other person did not. Write that down too. That is usually the most valuable document in the business, and it almost never exists. Once you have a small list of them, teach them into the business, so that you stop being the blocker.
Do that, and the next time somebody asks “why you, rather than the other two?”, you will have something to hand them instead of something to tell them.
Which of the three is costing you most at the moment: the trophy cabinet, the answer to “why you?”, or the things that stall without you?
If you want a structured way to find out, the 7 Plateaus Assessment takes ten minutes and shows you exactly where your commercial infrastructure has gaps like these.
