What happens when you stop waiting for work and start creating it?

My first role at AXI was as a sales assistant / engineer. Part of the job was reactive: customers contacted us, we found the right product, checked price and availability with distributors such as Ingram Micro and Tech Data, added margin and sent back a quotation.

When things were quiet, there was another instruction: take the Yellow Pages and start calling companies.

There was no script, no defined segment and very little guidance on whom to approach or what to say.

At first, I wasn't particularly good at it.

But I discovered something that would stay with me throughout my career: being good at something and becoming good at something are very different things.

Cold calling gave me an unusually fast feedback loop. Every call produced a response. Every response contained information. So instead of judging myself on individual calls, I started treating the process as a series of experiments.

Who should I ask for? The CEO? The IT manager? Someone else? What happens if I open with a company introduction? What happens if I simply ask for three minutes? Which questions keep somebody talking? Which ones end the conversation?

Then repeat.

Ten times. A hundred times. Eventually hundreds more.

Small improvements started compounding.

The same principle applied to the technical side of the job. Computers were already a personal interest, so whenever an unfamiliar product, technical question or unusual request appeared, I wanted to understand it. Vendor training led to certifications. Product questions led to deeper technical knowledge. Smaller requests led to larger tenders and PC-at-Home projects.

None of those individual steps was extraordinary.

The accumulation was.

The more I learned, the more useful I became. The more useful I became, the more difficult work came my way. And every new responsibility created another opportunity to learn.

Looking back, that early role taught me something I have repeatedly seen since when building teams and commercial organisations: performance is not only determined by the skills someone walks in with.

Give someone the right behaviours, a repeatable process, frequent feedback and enough repetitions, and capability can develop remarkably quickly.

Curiosity matters because it makes people want to understand.

Self-motivation matters because nobody needs to keep pushing the process forward.

Structure matters because it turns effort into learning.

And repetition matters because small improvements compound.

I wasn't following some sophisticated methodology at the time. I was simply discovering, through experience, that progress becomes much more predictable when you stop treating performance as a fixed characteristic and start treating it as a system that can be improved.

That mindset gradually changed the role itself. I moved from responding to incoming requests to creating pipeline, handling more complex customer questions, working on larger tenders and building relationships across vendors and distributors.

The job didn't suddenly become more interesting. I became more capable of creating opportunity inside it.

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