The conversation went well.Then you heard nothing.

The model

A fire needs three things. So does a decision.

Fuel, oxygen and heat. Take one away and there is no fire — however many matches you use.

Decisions work the same way. Stake, trust and urgency. Take one away and nothing happens, however good your argument is.

That sounds simple. It is. And it explains something that most sales training, change programmes and policy schemes get wrong: they all add more of the same when one condition is missing.

More explanation. Another meeting. A bigger subsidy. Another reminder.

More matches.

Where this comes from

Thirty years, three continents.

This isn’t a theory I worked out at a desk.

I started as a croupier in 1985. In the nineties I studied International Marketing Management in London while working at British Rail on the Eurostar project — and watched a technical marvel open to empty trains, for reasons that had nothing to do with the trains.

In Addis Ababa I helped build mobile banking in a country with almost no banking infrastructure, at a time when everyone said it couldn’t be done. In Manila I ran a call centre serving two thousand apartments across Europe, years before Booking.com existed.

Every one of those had the same pattern underneath it. It took me thirty years to give it a name.

Part I · The Fire

Eighty pages. No charge.

Six chapters, complete. How the model was found, why convincing doesn’t work, and the question that replaces it.

You may share it, forward it and print it as much as you like. No account, no drip campaign, no follow-up sequence. One email with the file, and that’s it.

The full book

Why you only get Part I today.

I’d rather explain this properly than let you wonder.

I wrote this book in Dutch. That wasn’t a strategic decision — it’s the language I think in, and the first people I tested it on were Dutch business owners at their own kitchen tables.

Four hundred and forty-two pages. Thirty chapters. It’s finished and it’s with the editor.

Then I looked at who actually follows my work, and most of you don’t read Dutch.

Why I’m not translating the rest yet

Because I don’t know whether you want it, and I’d be guessing.

Translating sixty thousand words properly — not machine-translated, but in a voice that carries — is months of work. I’m not doing that on a hunch, and I’m certainly not taking pre-payment for a date I can’t give you.

What I need is a number. How many people actually want this in English. That decides whether it gets finished this year, and whether the paperback gets printed in English at all.

So there’s a list. No payment, no obligation, no sequence of marketing emails. One message when it’s ready, and then you decide.

And yes, that’s the book applied to itself

Chapter 15 is about the smallest possible first step. The one you can still walk away from tomorrow.

Asking you to pay for something that doesn’t exist would be the opposite of everything in here. Asking for your name is not.

When the English edition is released you’ll be able to pay by card, PayPal or Apple Pay — whatever is normal where you are. The Dutch edition is available now at vuurdriehoek.nl if you happen to read Dutch.