Three posts went live in three days. Here they are in the order they published, with the actual text as the exhibit.
Post 1 · the first "no". What it actually looks like to take over a company and change how it runs: the night he walked away from a $100,000 project everyone, including his father, told him to take. It puts a number on the stakes, names the pressure, and resolves on a principle a buyer can borrow.
My first real decision after taking over the company was walking away from a $100,000 project.
My dad had stepped back in August for health reasons. He sent an email that basically said I make all the decisions now.
A few weeks later, one of our biggest clients was sitting on a 210 sqm booth for a flagship show. The team had been chasing them for over a year on this particular project. We'd already built for this client at the same show last year. The ticket was over $100,000.
The problem was he wouldn't sign. The show was three weeks away, the vendor was pressuring us, and everyone in the company, including my dad, kept saying the same thing: but it's so much money.
I remember walking around a park near my apartment one night, completely stressed, and realizing there was no middle here. Either we burn the company to the ground or we rise. We weren't going to keep being slaves to a number.
So I messaged the team and said I'm not taking this project, no matter what the client says.
They came back offering more money. I called the client myself. He had no idea who I was. I told him I'm the one making the calls now, and we're not doing it. But we didn't abandon him. We handed over every design and technical drawing, he found a new vendor, and he had a fantastic show.
That made me happier than if we'd built it ourselves.
We said no. First time. Not the last.
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Post 2 · the hire nobody understood. When an unconventional decision is actually the right one: why he put a photographer inside a company that builds trade-show booths. A first line that sounds like a mistake, then pays it off with a concrete outcome.
I hired a photographer to work at a company that builds trade show booths. Everyone thought I'd lost it.
She won us our biggest design account.
For the past two decades our company hired people who knew the software. That was the whole bar. They could run the tools, but nobody ever asked them to have taste. It worked fine while we sold to agencies.
Then we started working with direct clients, and they all wanted the same thing. Show us good design, and we'll sign. Money wasn't the issue anymore. The work was.
So I started hiring for taste instead of for tools.
The first was a photographer whose eye I'd always admired. She had no idea how 3D design works or how our industry runs. She just brought the aesthetic, taught herself the software, and trained some of our designers along the way. We won a major Italian brand purely on design.
Then I hired interior architects, and that genuinely changed the game. They carry spatial taste and technical knowledge at the same time.
A project that used to need seven people suddenly needed three.
Same output, better quality, half the team. The people who'd called me crazy went quiet pretty fast.
1,147 impressions20 reactions
Post 3 · the breakout. Has this person been through the thing I'm afraid of? The morning his family learned, by email, that a ten-year client was leaving and taking 80% of revenue with it, on his father's birthday. A business story carried by a human one. His best-performing post in twelve months, and the one that brought the inbound.
On my dad's birthday, a 10-year client sent one email that wiped out 80% of our revenue.
It was the 29th of September. My mom saw the email at five in the morning her time. Her heart dropped, and then she called me, and mine dropped too.
This wasn't just any client. It was the only real account we had. My dad had chased this company for three years before he ever said yes. He grew that account from a hundred thousand dollars to two million. We had basically become an extension of their company.
And the CEO emailed my dad to say they were done with us.
I could hear my dad almost tear up on the phone. He was trying to be strong about it. I went the other way and got overly optimistic, because in that moment I didn't care about the revenue or the company. I just wanted to be there for my father.
That was the first time the roles switched between us. The first time the weight of it landed on me instead of him.
It took my dad three months to shake the shock. Took me about a month and a half.
We made it tho, bigger and better than ever. Happy father's day pops ❤️
8,036 impressions37 reactions3 commentshis best post in 12 months