Influence Of Organizational History

How do you build long-term relationships with customers? It’s not about clever sales tactics. It’s about mindset. One of the biggest shifts I’ve learned is this: neediness is the enemy of trust. When a potential customer senses that your advice is driven by your own urgency or desire to close a deal, it sets off alarm bells—because it means your motives might not be aligned with their best interest. The alternative? Focus on being a trusted presence over time. ✔️ Show up consistently ✔️ Listen carefully ✔️ Offer value without strings attached When you’re guided by genuine curiosity and service, customers come to see you as a long-term partner—not a one-time vendor. That’s the foundation of loyalty and that’s how relationships endure.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 Recruitment is known as a fast paced industry, but there’s one part of our role as recruiters that can’t be rushed; building relationships. In my experience, creating long-term relationships with our clients, candidates, and colleagues is invaluable. Not only does this approach lead to better hiring decisions, but it also shapes careers, fuels business growth, and creates networks of trust that last for years. Here’s why long-term relationships should be the foundation of any great recruitment strategy: 𝟏. 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞  The best partnerships – whether with clients or candidates – aren’t built in a single conversation. They develop over time, through consistency, honesty, and delivering results. When businesses work with recruiters they trust, they gain a true partner, not just a service provider. The same applies to candidates. Many of the strongest hires come from professionals we’ve known for years and placed more than once. 𝟐. 𝐀 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐁𝐞 𝐚 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 One of the most rewarding aspects of long-term relationship-building is seeing how careers evolve. Many candidates we’ve placed early in their careers have gone on to become hiring managers or senior leaders, and when they need to build their own teams, they often return to the recruiters they trust. A single placement can turn into a lifelong professional partnership. 𝟑. 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬  Understanding a company’s culture, leadership style, and long-term growth strategy takes time. The deeper that understanding, the better the hires. Clients who treat recruiters as strategic partners rather than short-term vendors see the biggest return on investment – not just in speed to hire, but in quality and retention. 𝟒. 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬  In today’s job market, candidates expect a personal, transparent process – one where they feel valued beyond a single application. A recruiter who stays in touch, offers advice, and provides genuine career guidance builds relationships that last. And when candidates have a great experience, they refer others, expanding the recruiter’s network even further. 𝟓. 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧  The recruitment industry is built on trust and reputation. The most successful recruiters are the ones known for honest, long-standing relationships that create value for both businesses and professionals over time. At the end of the day, recruitment is about people, not transactions. The strongest partnerships aren’t measured in placements but rather in careers built, businesses grown, and trust earned.

Every legacy system is a crash course in how the business really works. They’re seen as outdated, bloated, and ready for the trash bin. But here’s the truth: • They’ve handled real users, traffic, and edge cases. • They’ve survived years of business changes and still deliver value. • They’ve been battle-tested in ways shiny new systems haven’t. My take: 1- “Rewrite” is often a seductive trap. You want clean slates, but that’s rarely what the business needs. The cost of a rewrite is underestimated; the risk of losing hidden logic is ignored. 2- Smart refactoring wins. Replace the tires, not the whole car, unless you’re willing to delay product work for quarters. 3- Stability is undervalued until it’s gone. The most “boring” systems are often the most critical. Don’t underestimate a system just because it’s old. -> Stability is a feature. One week in the legacy codebase > three months of onboarding docs. Do you believe in “rewrite from scratch” or “refactor in place”? Why? P.S. You are not a Senior Engineer until you have worked on legacy code.

Everyone talks about AI like it’s magic—just sprinkle some algorithms, and suddenly entire industries transform overnight. I wish it were that simple. Because there’s one reality I keep coming back to, over and over again, in my work with executives, founders, and investors trying to build the “next big thing”: the law of LEGACY. People hear “legacy” and think old code and systems, Excel spreadsheets or dusty filing cabinets. But it goes much deeper. Legacy means the roads, bridges, and buildings designed for yesterday’s tools and assumptions. But it also means the societal cultural norms and the legal systems built for a pre-digital world, grinding forward at a snail’s pace while tec races ahead. The architecture of our economies is also legacy—capital flows, pensions, debt—that can’t just pivot overnight without chaos. Lastly and most importantly, legacy is our link with past through present and towards the future through the mental models running in our heads, shaping how we judge risk, trust information, and react to change. Legacy is humanity continuity law. None of these swap out with an API call. This is why we live in a two-speed world when it comes to AI bit we fail to acknowledge iti. On one hand, I see AI models evolve every few months, while the companies I advise wrestle with ERP systems from the 90s or regulators still operating in paper files. I’ve watched founders pitch groundbreaking products that look flawless in a demo—but fall apart the moment they hit real-world legacy constraints. Investors often underestimate how expensive and time-consuming it is to navigate these layers. That’s why innovation pilots stall. Why impressive demos never scale. Why billions get burned chasing “transformation” that never lands. The legacy layers of our world are ignored. Yet here’s the twist: legacy isn’t just an obstacle. It can also be a moat. The people and companies who figure out how to bridge new tech with old infrastructure, laws, and cultural contexts build advantages that pure technical innovation alone can’t replicate. Of course in the process our legacy world gets an upgrade too, but it essential to fully account legacy. My advice to all those investing or building with AI - plan for the world as it actually is—in all its messy yet layered reality. To capture it well, think of it as cake, with different flavours that will give that unforgetable taste: • The top layer is digital tech—fast, modular, exciting. The juiciest. • The middle layer is institutional systems—laws, governance, rules. A bit dry but tasty • The bottom layer is physical & cultural legacy—bricks, roads, norms, beliefs. The most solid of layers with vintage taste, no soggy bottom. When you cut through top to bottom layer, each piece has all the right balancing flavour for the unforgetable Bake Off taste. I am curious how does your cake looks and taste like lately?

⬛ Things I Wish I'd Known About Legacy UX. How to survive a modernization project, and how to design for, with and around messy legacy systems ↓ 🔸 1. Legacy Software Is Successful Software We often assume that legacy is a broken software that everyone would love to retire sooner, rather than later. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Legacy software is successful software that survived for decades because it works. Rebuilding it from scratch almost always costs more and delivers less than expected. We never just modernize a legacy system — along with it, we migrate data, workflows, mental models, habits, muscle memory and the messy world of conflicting stakeholders, priorities and (eventually) zombie features. --- 🔹 2. The System Around The Legacy System The hardest part is rarely the system itself — it’s the system around the legacy system. Internal politics, incentives and embedded knowledge are as much a part of the modernization project as its front-end or design. It’s painfully difficult to uncover critical dependencies and map them — you will need system thinking tools, such as Wardley mapping, causal loop diagrams and system maps. Beyond that, you need to discover “shadow systems” — tools that people use to make sense of or work around legacy as well. --- 🔸 3. You Design With Power Users, Not For Them First and foremost: you will need to build a very good relationship with expert users. They have been relying on legacy software for years, and they know every keyboard shortcut and every key feature and every workaround there is. But: our job isn’t to transfer them all for feature parity, but rather make sure that the mental models and muscle memory are supported in the new design. The goal is parity for key workflows that are frequently used and work well, redesign where users complain about friction or bottlenecks and delete zombie features that expert users haven’t touched once. -- 🔸 4. Designing The Messy Middle And Change Management Many legacy revamps succeed on a technical level, but fail miserably on sluggish adoption. Adoption must be enabled, and a path there must be designed. Change management is designing the journey between old and new system — the transfer of data and preferences, onboarding, retraining, navigation between old and new, signals for where they are, where data syncs and where it doesn't. Incremental rollout often means that users get the disruption of each phase without the benefit until the very end — with years of migration pains along the way. A better way is to slice by “user value”: modernize one complete workflow end-to-end, so users experience an improvement early. It also builds trust that you will need for the project to be successful. --- 🌻 If this is helpful, I'm running a 4.5h workshop on exactly this — How To Modernize Legacy UX (Without Breaking Everything) (July 16): → https://lnkd.in/djhTP2zp #ux #design

Every phone call you make today relies on an idea from 1937. Alec Harley Reeves, an engineer working in Paris, was trying to solve a stubborn problem… Long distance calls lost clarity because noise kept increasing with every signal boost. His breakthrough? Instead of sending continuous analogue waves, convert sound into digital pulses, something that could be perfectly regenerated at every step, no matter the distance. This idea became Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). It was revolutionary. It was also unusable at the time. The technology needed to make it work didn’t exist yet, so Reeves had to set it aside. Years later, with the arrival of transistors, PCM finally became practical. It quietly powered secure wartime communications, then went on to become the backbone of global telecom systems. Today, it underpins everything, calls, streaming, video, data. Reeves never saw the full impact of what he started. But his story highlights something important: A good idea doesn’t become wrong just because the world isn’t ready for it yet. Sometimes the gap between invention and adoption isn’t failure, it’s timing. If you’re working on something that feels ahead of its time, don’t discard it too quickly. The world has a way of catching up to the right ideas. #Innovation #DigitalHistory #TechThoughts

We fired half the team ...and did it in the worst possible way. Here is my lesson in crisis management 👇 In 2021, VC money was lying on the street. Valuations were sky-high. By 2022, the reality shifted. The money tap turned off. We were left with an organization "playing house": high burn rate (€40k-60k monthly), bloated costs, and a strategy that wasn't delivering. We knew one thing: We were addicted to VC money and were facing the moment it stops flowing. The next funding round might never happen and if we don't become profitable, the company will likely die. We had to cut costs and find a new strategy. And this is where I made my biggest mistake. Instead of doing it once and doing it right, I used the "salami method." I lied to myself that "this much is enough." First round of layoffs. Then a second. Then a third. Result? Instead of a fresh start, we gave the team six months of uncertainty and fear. I learned the hard way that hope is not a strategy. To survive, we had to change the organization's DNA. We realized we couldn't scale via headcount. We stopped hiring salespeople in every country and bet on partnerships with local market leaders instead. To regain full control, we even had to buy out an investor who demanded toxic terms (2x liquidation preference, 12% annual interest). At one point, we had €30k left in the bank account, waiting for transfers from Business Angels. It was a gamble. But it paid off. Where are we today? → Headcount: Same as in 2021. We stopped treating recruitment as a cure-all. → Scale: Foreign revenue is growing 3x year-over-year. → Result: YoY 70% growth. Targeting €6M revenue this year. We are profitable (€750k EBITDA). I stopped dreaming of being a unicorn at all costs. I'm building a "cockroach" – a company that survives anything because it earns its own keep. The takeaway for every founder? When a crisis hits, your job isn't to be "nice." Your job is to save the ship. If you have to cut – cut deep and cut once. Don't slice the patient piece by piece. What was the hardest decision you had to make to survive? — Follow me (Wiktoria Wójcik) for real lessons from building a global startup.

Negotiation in business shouldn’t be just about price cuts. It’s about building customer loyalty, which is far more valuable in the long run. When a client has a tight budget, don’t just say no. Instead, explore how you can add value without compromising on quality. This approach not only helps close the deal but also fosters trust and long-term relationships. Building customer loyalty starts with understanding their needs and constraints. Offer flexible solutions that meet their budget without devaluing your services. This could mean adjusting payment terms, offering a tailored package, or providing additional support that enhances their experience. Loyal customers are more likely to return and refer others to your business. They become advocates, helping you grow organically. This is why the focus should be on creating value, not just lowering prices. In business, loyalty is a currency. The businesses that thrive are those that prioritize relationships over transactions. By negotiating with the customer’s long-term satisfaction in mind, you not only close the current deal but also lay the foundation for future opportunities. How do you approach negotiations? Let’s discuss.