The Bridge Between Two Mountains

“Lose my number.”

That’s the last thing a longtime industry friend ever said to me. Not “let’s talk later.” Not even a swear word I could respect. Just three words, and then nothing, for years.

Somebody once told me business isn’t personal. That somebody has clearly never had a friend hang up on them over plywood.

THE TWO PEAKS

In my third-year sales course at Trent University, my professor, Benoit Bourguignon, gave me an image I’ve never let go of.

Picture two mountain peaks. Between them is a river, and in that river is a raging waterfall. On one peak is the company whose product you sell. On the other peak is the client you’re selling it to. Your job as a sales rep isn’t to stand on either peak. Your only job is to be the bridge between them, carrying information back and forth across that waterfall.

Both peaks carry risk. Your client worries about being overcharged or getting material that shows up late, damaged, or just plain wrong. Your supplier worries about something different: will this client take the full order, pay for it, and stay loyal if the price drops somewhere else?

Nothing tests a relationship like a delivery of warped panels or a delaminated shipment, suddenly you’re doing damage control over a pallet of damaged goods.

THE WINTER THAT NEVER CAME

In 2019, Russia had its first winter in recorded history with temperatures that stayed above freezing. Sounds harmless. It wasn’t.

No hard ground meant logging equipment couldn’t get into the forest without sinking. No frozen ground meant no access to the tall, straight timber that makes good veneers. Mills were left peeling whatever gritty, mud-caked logs they could drag out, which tore up their rotary lathes. And because the trees never went dormant, sap kept running, which meant the veneer peeled rough and uneven instead of clean. That was the last we saw of good 5×5 material and especially the beautiful B grade.

I told every client, coast to coast: prices are going up, quality is going down, buy now. Nobody else in the supply chain was saying it yet. Some clients listened and filled their warehouses before the shortage hit. Others didn’t.

I don’t sell Russian plywood anymore. But the clients who trusted that warning still trust me today. That’s the whole job, in one forest full of mud.

FISH SMELLS AT THE HEAD

My longtime friend Cheryl Brown at TAFISA taught me a phrase I now use constantly, usually the moment I walk into a shop and smell something rotting long before anyone tells me the nasty details: fish always smells from the head.

Whatever’s happening in a company starts at the top. If leadership values honesty and their own people, that shows up in every decision made below them. If leadership is a mess, you’ll smell that too, usually about ten minutes into your first meeting.

DOING YOUR JOB DOESN’T MEAN OWNING THE OUTCOME

Which brings me back to “lose my number.”

I was selling Spanish plywood, and a friend who ran a distribution centre asked me for distribution rights. I said no. Not because I didn’t want to help him, but because flooding one region with too many distributors on the same product doesn’t just water down the value for the existing distributors; it waters it down for the new guy too. He’d have been competing against people already established with that product, fighting for margin on day one. I said no to protect him as much as anyone else already in the game.

He didn’t see it that way. Three words, and years of knowing each other were apparently over.

I took it personally for a while. Then I realized: that’s not my business to own. I’d done my job; I protected the product, protected the existing distributors, made the honest call. What he did with his disappointment was his.

If you’ve read enough of my articles, you already know I’m a yellow. I collect relationships the way some guys collect CNC bits that are “still good”. It’s exactly why “lose my number” landed harder than it should have.

MANAGING YOUR OWN EXPECTATIONS

You will build real relationships in this business. Some will outlast the job entirely. Others will end with three words and a dead phone line, and you’ll never fully know why.

That’s not a reflection on you. It’s what happens when careers keep moving and not everyone carries the relationship forward the way you do.

So have an identity outside your job. Have friends who couldn’t pick a veneer grade out of a lineup. Because the day the bridge changes, and it will, you don’t want to be standing on a peak all by yourself.

Careers change, companies change, and somewhere out there, a new “Doug” has my old territory.

Business is personal. Just don’t let it be the only person you’ve got.