I’ve spent 30 years learning what happens between people.

I’ve spent most of my career in enterprise sales and leadership — working with customers, managing teams, navigating expectations, negotiating, building relationships and sitting across the table from people making important decisions.

And somewhere along the way, I realised something:

It was rarely just about the transaction.

It was about the people.

The relationship.

The conversation.

The understanding.

The connection.

The trust.

And, increasingly, the willingness to genuinely understand the person sitting across from you.

That changed the way I worked.

A negotiation taught me something I still carry with me.

We had completed a POC with a customer and spent about seven months working together.

There was strong buy-in. We’d worked with multiple stakeholders, understood their needs and built relationships across the organisation.

So when we were invited for the negotiation, we prepared for what we expected to discuss:

price.

We walked into the room.

Price wasn’t the issue.

Instead, they said something completely unexpected:

“We won’t pay according to your terms. Our terms are payment at the end of delivery.”

For a moment, I was stumped.

I’d prepared for the negotiation.

I hadn’t prepared for that.

I remember keeping a small smile, taking a breath and saying:

“I’ll need to go back and discuss this internally.”

And that’s exactly what I did.

I went back to my management team.

They agreed to something that was a first for us — we accepted their terms and started the engagement.

But then something interesting happened.

Within about three months, they started paying us.

Not at the end of delivery.

The relationship we’d built continued to work in our favour.

That customer went on to become a great client for us for years.

Relationships aren’t the soft part of business. They’re often what makes the hard parts possible.

What stayed with me wasn’t the negotiation.

It was what made the negotiation possible.

We had built bridges long before we needed to cross them.

Across stakeholders.

Across teams.

Across conversations.

We had built enough trust that when something unexpected happened at the table, the relationship had somewhere to go.

Somewhere along the way, I became more interested in the conversation.

As I moved from individual selling into managing teams and working with people across different functions, I began seeing the same pattern everywhere.

A customer had one expectation.

A delivery team had another.

A salesperson heard one thing.

The prospect meant something else.

A leader wanted movement.

The team needed clarity.

A deal looked like a commercial problem.

But underneath it was often a people problem.

I became fascinated by what happens in that space between people.

What we say.

What we don’t say.

What we assume.

What we hear.

What we think the other person means.

And what we are sometimes afraid to ask.

That became more interesting to me than the transaction itself.

Then I decided to understand listening more deeply.

I pursued a Diploma in Counselling Skills.

It gave me another lens through which to understand people.

One of the most powerful things I took away was also one of the simplest:

You don’t always have to fix.

Sometimes you need to listen.

Without judgement.

Without immediately preparing your answer.

Without trying to make the other person see things your way.

Sometimes, simply being present gives another person enough space to hear themselves.

And sometimes, when someone feels genuinely heard, clarity follows.

I began to see how powerful that could be far beyond counselling — in leadership, sales, careers, relationships and difficult conversations.

Why 11th Hour?

Because there are moments just before something changes.

The deal is almost done.

The conversation can no longer be avoided.

The decision has to be made.

Something is about to change.

That’s the moment I’m interested in.

The 11th Hour is the space before the moment — when slowing down, listening and thinking clearly can change what happens next.

The Last Handshake

The Last Handshake is where I explore the moments just before something changes.

The conversations.

The decisions.

The people.

The judgement.

The trust.

The things we see only afterwards.

It is my way of thinking out loud about what I’ve learnt — and what I’m still learning.

What conversation are you preparing for?

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