The Note Is In Between

Our sales tanked for four months before breaking records. What happened next taught me the biggest lesson of my career - 5min read.

TURNING EVERY RED LIGHT GREEN

When we hit our all-time sales record in June of that year, someone asked me: “How did you do it?”

I answered without thinking:

“By changing every single tiny LED bulb in the traffic light to turn it from red to green.”

And I told them to wait—there was more to come.

The truth is, for 18 months, our team had been working relentlessly, breaking down every barrier holding back business growth. We began with a deep analysis—and what turned out to be a surprisingly accurate diagnosis. We planned and tested every change with operations, convinced leadership, and rolled out a full transformation plan that reshaped every element of our commercial offer: product, experience, pricing, format and brand message. Everything.

It didn’t happen overnight in a big “boom” like senior management expected.

It came as a domino effect—an unstoppable sequence of unstoppable changes that built momentum, each one tipping into the next.

FOUR MONTHS OF SILENCE

At first, it didn’t look like success.

Despite alignment across leadership and the organization, sales continued to fall.

January. February. March. April.

Four consecutive months of negative results.

It didn’t take long before someone looked me in the eye and said:

“Your plan didn’t work.”

GRANDPA’S WISDOM OVER LUNCH

At the time, I was fortunate to still have my grandfather. Every Wednesday, we had lunch together. 

One day, I told him what I was going through.

He listened carefully, then shared a similar experience from the 1970s oil crisis.

His product sales were falling, so he launched a smaller format—believing that if people had less money, they'd opt for cheaper units.

He had lived through a war. He knew what it meant to have nothing.

“The only thing they can’t steal from you is your imagination,” he used to say.

Today, we’d call this size-price movement shrinkflation, or downsizing.

It made perfect sense on paper. Trial orders came in. But sales kept dropping—for an entire year.

Then suddenly, it clicked. Sales exploded. That smaller format became a cornerstone product for the rest of the decade.

A few months after that conversation, something similar happened to us.

Sales took off. Clients had run out of stock. Repeat orders flowed in, aligned with the faster product rotation we had planned for.

WHY IT TOOK MONTHS TO WORK

Why did it take him a year—and me five months?

Part of the answer is timing.

Families need time to empty pantries. Businesses must sell down inventory before reordering. That’s just the natural rhythm of the supply chain.

But there was also something deeper.

Later that year, after back-to-back record months, I ran a deep dive into the numbers.

That’s when I discovered something surprising.

LOYALTY AS THE HIDDEN ENGINE

Every product has a customer rotation cycle. You gain some, lose others—and a portion sticks around.

On the surface, we had grown by attracting new customers.

But the real reason we grew?

We stopped losing so many. 

Loyalty (User Experience) fueled our growth. And that changed everything.

We were selling a food product that had been in the market for over 30 years.

Yes, the recipe had changed. The packaging too.

But in the noisy world of marketing, these changes often go unnoticed.

The number of new customers was almost the same as before.

What changed was this:

We retained more of the ones we already had.

Retention + Acquisition = Sustainable Growth

Simple math. But it goes against popular thinking.

CHALLENGING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

In his bestseller book "How Brands Grow", Byron Sharp argues that brands grow mainly by acquiring new buyers—not by increasing loyalty.

I respect that logic and love how he has helped millions of managers understand Marketing principals.

But maybe the question is too limited.

Instead of asking:

How do brands grow?

Maybe we should ask:

Why do businesses grow?

In that context, loyalty becomes more than a footnote.

Gaining loyalty to attract even more buyers might sound unorthodox.

But I’ve lived it. And the results are explosive.

You can sell a weak product and get thousands to try it—once.

But if churn is high, you'll run out of market.

Yes, big brands often have high repeat purchases because they’re big.

But maybe they became big because they retained customers while they were still growing.

I've also seen the opposite:

Brilliant ideas with poor execution. Massive buzz. But once the entire market tries—and rejects—them, they vanish.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED (SO FAR)

• Change every “LED light” in the customer friction—turn signals from red to green
• Trigger the domino effect—small wins build into unstoppable momentum
• Respect the lag—transformation takes time
• Obsess over user experience—loyalty is also a growth engine

ONE LAST THING

And here’s the real answer to why the transformation worked:

The note is in between.

When I said earlier that our diagnosis was accurate, I didn’t explain why that mattered.

It wasn’t one thing that needed fixing—it was many.

The recipe. The format. The pack size. The packaging design. The price per kilo. The logistics box. The channel assortment.

We rebuilt the commercial offer around one core idea:

Deliver what customers truly expect—in quality and in price.

But that required multiple interconnected changes—each one reinforcing the others.

THE HARMONY BENEATH THE MELODY

It’s like music.

We remember the melody—the notes on top.

But it’s the harmony underneath—the blend of sounds working together—that moves us.

The jazz legend Thelonious Monk was once asked,

“What note is that?”

He replied:

“The note is in between.”

That’s the last insight I’ll leave you with.

Great strategies aren’t built on a silver bullet.

They’re composed of several smart, interdependent moves that together create something new, scalable, and real.

So the next time you see a business thriving from the outside—and no one can quite explain why…

(Think Spotify, Apple, Nvidia, Google, Amazon…)

Just remember:

The note is in between.