Field Notes: August 2026

Some months the same question keeps showing up in different clothes.

In August it was forecasting. How do you plan for something you can see coming and have never done here before. It ran through all four of these, which I only noticed afterwards.

First published on LinkedIn, collected here in the order they were written. Each one links back to the original.

The KPI that is not a number

It’s week five of the Dutch school holidays, and there are six of them here.

If you have young children, you already know what that does to a working week.

So mine look nothing like they do in October. I work in tighter blocks, start earlier and say no to almost everything that isn’t essential, which means the work still lands while the margin around it quietly disappears.

What I don’t do anymore is push through that and call it commitment.

I learned that on a tennis court long before I learned it in retail. The pressure I trained under was entirely my own, and there were long stretches where it took the joy out of the thing I loved most. If I couldn’t do it perfectly, I couldn’t enjoy it at all.

In my coaching years I watched founders run a more expensive version of the same thing. Revenue climbing steadily while the person behind it slowly disappeared, until what was left was a shorter fuse, less energy and no room for whatever used to keep them steady.

So I run this business on a different metric. My most important KPI isn’t a revenue number but a regulated nervous system, because the calmer I am the more accurately I read what a situation actually needs. Running on fumes I push harder and see less.

That’s not a rule I’d hand anyone. It’s mine, and it took me long enough to admit it.

It shows up in the work too. Getting into Dutch retail is a long game counted in quarters rather than weeks, and you can’t sprint through a process that moves that slowly. What carries you is stamina, and stamina needs something underneath it.

Rest isn’t what you earn after the work. It’s what makes the work sharp.

So the question isn’t whether you’re working hard enough, because you are. It’s what’s left of you by the time the yes arrives.

What did you say no to this week?

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Everyone had the date. Nobody had the number.

Astronomers had this eclipse timed to the second, decades ago.

And still, about an hour before it happens, this is the Dutch market for a piece of cardboard with a filter in it. Screenshot above. Thirty euro. Eighty. A hundred and fifty. One seller down to his last pair, asking 35.

Cost of goods: cardboard only? Safe to say this is no longer a margin, but a scarcity premium.

(I doubt I was the only entrepreneur scrolling this and thinking: missed opportunity. Next restock opportunity: 2081 👍 )

Everyone who didn’t pay the scarcity premium is stacking two pairs of sunglasses, or digging through a drawer for a CD in 2026. Good luck with that.

Predictable, it turns out, is not the same as predicted.

The last eclipse this size was 1999. So there is no sales history, no baseline, nothing to draw a line through. Everyone had the date and nobody had the number. Retail stocked it, however, not enough of it. So Marktplaats, our version of eBay, priced it instead.

That is roughly where your brand sits in a Dutch buyer meeting. Entirely knowable, but a tough one to forecast.

So the empty column gets filled with home market sales. Which proves the product sells. It does not tell a Dutch buyer what happens on a Dutch shelf, next to Dutch competition, at a Dutch price.

That translation is the work, and usually the part that gets skipped.

Nobody missed the date tonight. Everyone guessed the number.

What did you see coming, and still not plan for?

PS. The 5 unread messages in my inbox folder are purely research. Obviously 😂

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The seats are already taken

You’re not getting listed.

Not because the product isn’t good enough. You’re asking for a seat in a category where every seat is taken, and nobody is planning to stand up.

I know that wall from the other side. As a category manager at Albert Heijn and Jumbo, I was the one saying no. Then watching good brands try to fix it. A fourth email with “just circling back” in the subject line. Twenty-two slides cut to fourteen. Five percent off the price.

None of it moved me. Not because I wanted to say no, but because nothing in it gave me a reason to make room.

Small confession. I have no sense of direction. Drop me in an unfamiliar street and I’ll turn my phone around six times, pick a side and still walk the wrong way. In car parks I photograph where I left mine, because to me it’s just cars.

Put me in a supermarket and I’m precise. What sits next to what, which category is growing, what’s missing. Shelves seem to be the one map my brain can read 😉

So let me read yours. That no wasn’t a judgement on your product. It was an answer to the question you walked in with.

Walk in as one more tomato sauce and the buyer weighs you against the sauces she already lists: a rate of sale you don’t have yet against a benchmark she trusts. You lose, politely.

Now put bone broth in that sauce. You’re not SKU #4 in pasta sauce anymore. You’re a functional benefit in a category that has never carried one, and a reason to stop for a shopper who walks past today.

That’s what a buyer means by incremental value. Not a bigger slice of the same shoppers. New shoppers, new occasions, a bigger and more valuable category.

And categories do get built. Fifteen years ago alcohol-free was a bottom shelf apology. Now it’s defended space with its own targets. Someone made that argument first.

So before you send that fifth email: which shopper does your product bring in that the buyer isn’t reaching yet?

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Leuk spannend, or spannend spannend

There is a Dutch word for this feeling: spannend.

Exciting and frightening at once. Dutch never bothered separating the two, and that turns out to be the more accurate version.

At home it has become a question we ask each other. Leuk spannend, or spannend spannend? The fun kind, or the real kind.

First swimming lesson this week. My kid had been dreading it for days, finding reasons why today might not be the day, right up until we walked in.

So I said the thing I always say. What feels spannend at first is usually the thing you end up loving.

Three minutes in the water, and the spannend spannend was gone.

The hard part was never the water. It was standing next to it.

I meant what I said at the door. I just never say it to myself anymore.

Because the grown-up version of standing at the edge is quieter. I am busy, with real work, and busy is an excellent place to hide. Productivity even applauds you for it.

Which is why the honest question is not what is on my list this week. It is which kind of spannend I am avoiding.

The leuk spannend I do voluntarily: I go and make something. A post, a piece of writing, work I am good at and can finish by Friday without waiting for anyone to say yes.

The spannend spannend is sales. Reaching out. Following up. Sitting in the not-knowing while someone takes three weeks to answer.

I do not have a tidy ending for this one. Only the sentence I keep handing over at the edge of a pool and almost never turn around.

Which kind of spannend are you avoiding this week?