The cursor blinked. Once, twice. A rhythmic, digital heartbeat against the white of the screen. The email had been sitting there for four minutes, but the words felt like they were still arriving, moving at the speed of bad news. ‘Due to unavoidable capacity constraints…’ it began. I didn’t need to read the rest. It’s the corporate equivalent of ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ A clean, sterile, blameless severing of a five-year-long lifeline.

My best supplier-the one I’d visited, the one whose daughter’s graduation photo was on his desk, the one who called me ‘friend’-had just dropped me. And I knew, with the kind of acidic certainty that pools in your stomach, that ‘capacity constraints’ was just a six-syllable way of saying a much bigger company, probably one of my direct competitors, had just made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. I was screwed.

There’s this song that’s been stuck in my head all week. It’s not even a good song, just a dumb, repetitive chorus that loops and loops and loops. Our brains are funny that way; they grab onto a simple, predictable pattern and refuse to let go. We do the same thing in business. We’ve been sold a simple, predictable pattern: build a good relationship. We’re told that the dinners, the long calls, the careful cultivation of personal connection-that this is the bedrock of a stable supply chain. It’s a comforting lullaby we sing to ourselves as our container ships cross the Pacific. And I used to not only sing that song, I led the choir.

I was the guy who told everyone that loyalty was forged in trust, not transactions. I once wrote a 2,400-word article about it. I cringe thinking about it now. My central thesis was that if you treat your suppliers like partners, they’ll have your back when things get tough. Then I met reality, and reality doesn’t care about your thesis. My ‘partner,’ a factory manager I’d worked with for years, was facing a choice. My order was for 4,400 units of a complex assembly. The new offer, from a household name brand, was for 244,000 units of something much simpler. My friendship was a rounding error on their balance sheet. My ‘partnership’ was worth less than the fuel cost of the initial delivery truck. He took the big order. Of course he did.

Meeting Reality: The Unflinching Gaze of Theo W.

That failure sent me looking for a different way of thinking, which is how I met Theo W. Theo is a supply chain analyst who looks like he survives exclusively on black coffee and existential dread. He has a habit of staring into the middle distance while you’re talking, as if he’s watching global shipping routes shift in real time. The first time I told him my story, expecting sympathy, he just nodded slowly.

“You flew 14 hours to have dinner with a guy who sees you as a purchase order number. His real loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to his largest customer. You just never knew who that was.”

“

Theo believes that the entire concept of relational loyalty in manufacturing is a dangerous fantasy.

“Loyalty is a function of leverage,” he’s fond of saying. “It’s gravity. The biggest object always wins.” To him, a supply chain isn’t a network of people; it’s a portfolio of risks to be managed. You don’t manage risk with holiday cards; you manage it with data. He explained that a factory is just like any other business. It has a customer list. Some customers are huge, some are small. If you’re one of the small ones, you are, by definition, the factory’s most expendable client. When a massive, high-volume client wants more capacity, the factory owner has to find it somewhere. And they will always, always find it by cutting their smallest clients first. It’s not personal. It’s just math.

I argued with him, of course. It felt so cynical. “What about trust? What about integrity?”

“Trust is what you have left when you don’t have data,” he shot back. “And integrity is easy when you’re not choosing between a $44,000 order and a $4,000,000 one.”

“

Theo’s entire method is built on verification, not trust. He spends his days analyzing shipping manifests and bills of lading, essentially reverse-engineering a factory’s entire business by looking at public us import data. He sees who they’re really shipping to, how much, and how often. He can tell you, with frightening accuracy, what percentage of your supplier’s total output your business represents. He calls this your ‘Leverage Score.’ Most companies, he says, are shocked to learn their score is in the low single digits, often less than 4%. They thought they were a priority; the data shows they’re a footnote.

It’s not about being cynical; it’s about being clear-eyed.

Building Resilience in a Transactional World

This clarity changes how you operate. You stop investing all your energy into being ‘liked’ and start investing it into being ‘diversified.’ You don’t try to be the supplier’s best friend; you try to be the client who is least disruptive, pays on time, and has the cleanest technical specifications. You make it easy to work with you, but you operate with the constant, quiet assumption that you could be replaced tomorrow. Because you can.

This approach forces you to build resilience. You secure a backup supplier, maybe even a third. You don’t do it secretly; you operate with the professional transparency that this is a necessary business practice. You might even find that your primary supplier respects you more for it. You’re no longer the naive, hopeful ‘partner’; you’re a serious professional who understands the brutal mechanics of the game. You’re acknowledging the reality of their position, which is that they, too, are subject to the pressures of their biggest clients.

I remember talking to a factory owner in Dongguan a few years after my own supply chain disaster. I asked him how he decides who to prioritize. He was surprisingly candid. He pulled out a piece of paper and drew a big circle. “This is my capacity,” he said. Then he drew a huge slice, taking up more than half of it. “This is Client A. They pay on time and their orders are 200,000 units a quarter.” He then drew a few smaller slices. “These are my medium clients, 20,000 units.” Finally, he pointed to a collection of tiny, almost invisible slivers near the edge. “And these are my small clients. Maybe 2,000 units.” He looked at me.

“If Client A tells me tomorrow they need another 14% capacity, where does it come from? It comes from the slivers. I have no choice.”

“

It was the most honest explanation I’d ever heard. No talk of relationships or long-term partnerships. Just circles on a piece of paper. He wasn’t a bad person. He was a business owner playing by the rules of gravity. The biggest object wins.

Embracing Clear-Eyed Stability

Realizing your loyalty is rented, not owned, feels terrifying at first. It’s like learning that the solid ground you’ve been standing on is actually a floating platform. But then, a strange sense of peace sets in. You’re no longer a victim of circumstance. You’re no longer waiting for that ‘capacity constraints’ email to destroy your business. You’ve accepted the transactional nature of it all, and in doing so, you’ve taken back control.

You can’t change the laws of physics that govern global trade, but you can build a vessel that’s prepared for the storm. You stop trying to hold on to one supplier with a white-knuckled grip and instead learn to navigate the open ocean. Your loyalty to them is conditional, and theirs to you is, too. And in that mutual, clear-eyed understanding, you find a strange, more durable kind of stability.