Good Business Starts with Good People — And That's Harder Than It Sounds
There's a version of this post where I list our values in bold text and ask you to trust us. This isn't that post. This is about what happens when your principles actually cost you something.
There’s a version of this post where I tell you about our values, list some principles in bold text, and ask you to trust that we mean it. Every company does that. Most of them mean it at the time.
This isn’t that post.
This is about what happens when your principles actually cost you something — and why that’s the only version of integrity worth talking about.
What We’ve Seen Up Close
We’ve had a front-row seat to what happens when the person managing a merchant relationship doesn’t share the merchant’s interests. Not in theory — up close, with businesses we knew and had originally worked to serve.
What it looks like in practice is quiet. Fees shift. New line items appear on statements — ambiguous enough that most merchants won’t question them, specific enough to meaningfully change the economics. The transparency those relationships were built on gets hollowed out incrementally, and the merchant has no practical way to see it happening.
By the time anyone notices, the relationship has been restructured around dependency, not value. And the businesses on the other end of those statements are paying more for less — without ever being told that anything changed.
That experience didn’t just cost us revenue. It cost us the ability to protect people we’d made commitments to. That’s the part that stays with you.
Character Is a Stress Test, Not a Trait
Everyone has values when things are going well. The interesting question is what happens to those values under pressure — when a shortcut would be profitable, when nobody would notice, when the client doesn’t know enough to ask the right questions.
The payments industry is full of people who are perfectly ethical in conversation and perfectly extractive in practice. Not because they’re dishonest — because the distance between intention and behaviour widens under commercial pressure, and most people don’t notice it happening in themselves.
We’ve learned to watch for this in everyone we work with. Partners, associates, potential co-founders — the evaluation isn’t “do they share our values?” It’s “do they share our values when it costs them something?”
That’s a much smaller pool of people. And we’d rather operate with a small team of people who pass that test than a large team that hasn’t been tested yet.
The Table We Set
We use the phrase “no seat at our table” internally, and it sounds harsh until you understand what’s at stake.
When we bring someone into a client relationship, we’re extending our credibility to them. A merchant who trusts us is trusting the people we put in front of them. An organization that gives us access to their systems is trusting our judgment about who touches those systems.
If someone we work with compromises a client’s trust — through opacity, through self-dealing, through simple carelessness with sensitive relationships — we don’t get to say “that was their fault, not ours.” The client doesn’t care about our org chart. They trusted Telos One, and Telos One includes everyone we choose to work with.
So we choose carefully. Slowly, sometimes. We’ve left potential revenue on the table because the right partner wasn’t available and the wrong partner was eager. That’s a trade-off we’ll make every time.
What This Means for Clients
If you work with us, you’re going to notice a few things that are different from what you might be used to.
We’ll tell you things that aren’t in our commercial interest. If your current processing setup is actually competitive, we’ll say so — even if that means we don’t win the business. If a project scope feels inflated, we’ll flag it. If a cheaper solution exists that we don’t provide, we’ll point you toward it.
This isn’t sainthood. It’s strategy. We’ve found that the fastest way to build a relationship worth having is to demonstrate — early and clearly — that our advice isn’t filtered through our revenue model.
The merchants and organizations that align with this approach tend to stick around. The ones looking for the cheapest vendor don’t — and that’s fine. We’re not building for everyone. We’re building for the businesses that understand that the cost of bad advice always exceeds the cost of good guidance.
The Ongoing Test
I don’t want to end this by asking you to trust us. Trust is earned through behaviour observed over time, not through blog posts.
What I will say is that these aren’t principles we arrived at philosophically. They’re principles we arrived at by experiencing, firsthand, what happens when they’re absent. That tends to make the commitment more durable.
The Nugget: “Character is a stress test, not a trait. The question isn’t ‘do they share our values?’ — it’s ‘do they share our values when it costs them something?’”
We’re building a company that we’d want to hire if we were on the other side of the table. Some days that’s easy. Some days it costs us. Both kinds of days matter.
This is part of a series exploring how we think about business, technology, and the decisions that shape what kind of company you actually become.