The author
I’m Greg Trinidad. I build companies, and I get called in when things stall without anybody being able to point at why.
Usually the solution has been there for ages. The technology works, the money is there, the plan adds up. And still nobody decides anything.
Then there is a question under the table that was never asked. This book is about that question, and about how you find it.
How I got here
Not all at once, and not from a book. The first steps are the years I spent inside it without seeing the pattern. After that I knew where to look.
To be hired you needed three things: French, mental arithmetic, and a presentable appearance. I had all three, so I was hired. I barely needed the French afterwards.
Only years later did I understand why those particular requirements were on the list. Not because they explained anything, but because you could verify them in a twenty-minute interview.
The casino didn’t have a staffing problem. It had a design problem.
Pensions and annuities, driving to people’s homes every day with a folder under my arm. I knew the products, the numbers and the tax rules, and I knew exactly how to handle objections.
And still most people bought nothing. Until one day I stopped talking and started looking. That conversation at the kitchen table is in chapter 1.
The less I talked about my product, the more likely people were to buy it.
In 2002 I founded BelCash with my partners in the Netherlands. A few years later the company moved to Addis Ababa to do something nobody thought possible: banking on an ordinary mobile phone, in a country with almost no banking infrastructure.
As co-founder and Director of Marketing Operations I sat with regulators, ministries and banks. The team taught people who had never held an account how to receive and send money by text message.
The technology was never the problem. The question was whether people dared trust their money to a phone. That isn’t a technical question but a matter of trust, and we solved it by making it as small as possible: first receive money from somebody you know, and nothing more.
Today that is how East Africa banks.
At the same time I was working in Amsterdam on something completely different. Short Stay Group had just started renting apartments for a few weeks or months. A market that officially didn’t exist: hotels were hotels, houses were houses, and there was nothing in between.
I was hired for marketing and sales, and set up our own call centre in Manila handling the whole customer journey, from first click to check-out. Three desks: sales, customer service and helpdesk.
Everyone asked how we could answer more calls. I asked why people were calling at all. It turned out not to be about the phone. Is the neighbourhood safe for a family? Are there really four towels for four people? Can I still cancel?
The team answered immediately and cancellations dropped sharply. Short Stay Group grew to a thousand apartments in Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona. Booking.com started on the same Amsterdam street.
They weren’t calling with a question. They were calling for oxygen. Once we started answering that, cancellations fell sharply.
Among other things, enterprise software implementations. A different scale, a different language, different amounts. Projects where dozens of people have to say yes before anything happens.
The business case always added up. That was never the problem. The problem was that somewhere in the chain sat somebody wondering whether he could handle this himself, and that question was never asked out loud.
Agreement is not action. “You’re right” is not a decision.
The technology was there. The installers were there. The subsidies were there. The advisers were standing by. Everything a business owner appeared to need was available.
And still it stayed remarkably quiet. Nobody wanted to take the first step.
The assumption is that business owners don’t invest because it costs too much. So for twenty years the government has been lowering the price with subsidies. But the business owner isn’t doubting the price at all. He can’t judge whether it suits his building, he distrusts the installer who is also the salesman, and he doesn’t know whether he can take this on.
Three open questions, and none of them is about money. That is why every project of ours starts with a baseline session in which nothing is sold, independent of whoever installs it later.
A subsidy is fuel. For twenty years the government has been throwing fuel on a fire that has no oxygen.
For twenty years websites were brochures. Visitors got lost in menus, forms sat unanswered for days, chatbots irritated more than they helped.
AskHenk is built on exactly the same approach as that call centre in Manila, only without anybody having to stay awake. The same desks, now inside Henk.
Here too the technology isn’t the problem. The question is whether somebody dares believe a machine. That is why Henk asks for nothing, records nothing and sells nothing.
Mobile banking, hospitality, sustainability, AI. A different sector, a different amount, a different language. And every time the same thing: the solution had worked for ages and nothing was decided, until we stopped explaining and went looking for the question that was still open.
That isn’t a trick and it isn’t a talent. It is a pattern, and it is the same pattern every time. It just took thirty years to get a name.
How I work
Years ago I noticed a lot was going wrong for me. Not because I wasn’t trying. Everything just fell short.
And afterwards there was always a reason. I hadn’t done it quite well enough. Somebody had lied to me. I had made a bad decision because my ego decided for me. A different explanation every time, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
At some point I stopped repairing my behaviour and replaced the design. Three rules, and I have kept to them since. At work and at home.
By that I don’t mean affection but respect. You don’t have to like somebody to treat them as they deserve.
That respect comes from me first. If I don’t get it back, no hard feelings — then I know where I stand with you, and I stay respectful.
It isn’t a trade. I simply start.
Say what you do and do what you say. If you do something, do it properly. If you can’t keep an agreement, discuss it in time with the person you made it with.
What I have noticed: where there is real commitment, it comes off a hundred per cent. Where it is missing, it dilutes and nothing happens.
I never make a commitment I can’t keep. I would rather make no agreement at all.
This is the hardest one, because honesty is often used against you. And still.
If you are honest, the conversation is about the problem you have. And in my experience there is always a solution to a problem.
If you lie, the conversation is about the lie. That is a breach of trust, and it never fully heals.
“Never promise me anything.Just do it.”
My wife, when we first met
Both halves count. Without the first it is just a fridge magnet.
That is how we designed our trust. She can be a hundred per cent certain I will never promise her something I don’t deliver. Because there is no promise. There is only the act.
A promise is uncertainty. You never know whether it will work, and if it doesn’t there is disappointment afterwards. An act is certainty, because it has already happened.
The rule underneath
Designing trust is an act, not a promise.
Whoever promises trust is asking for it. Whoever does it gives it away.
My clients know the same thing about me within two conversations. He says what he will do and he does it. He speaks to me with respect. And he promises nothing he doesn’t deliver.
These aren’t tricks and it isn’t marketing. They are three rules you can feel in a person. And without that step your client never takes the next one.
Where it comes from
The Fire Triangle is a pattern I ran into again and again over thirty years, and only named much later.
In the early years I didn’t see it. I came in through the wrong door, I asked the wrong question for years, and I used more matches than I care to admit. Those stories are all in there, because without that detour I would never have found the pattern.
After that I watched it work at scale, in sectors with nothing in common. That is what I have to offer: not a method from a book, but a pattern I first applied wrongly and then correctly.
What else I’m working on
These companies aren’t a showcase but the proof. What is in the book was built, tested and adjusted here — and it holds up.
Free · Part I complete
You get the first part of the book free. Six chapters, including the conversation at that kitchen table that changed everything.
Getting in touch
Start with Henk. He asks the first question and works out which of the three is missing. After that you’ll know whether a conversation with me makes sense.
FIRE INSIGHT
Waiting is the safest decision there is.Chapter 13 · Heat