The email hangs there, suspended in the blueish light of the monitor. A faint, high-frequency hum from the server rack down the hall is the only sound. The words themselves-‘due to ongoing global market fluctuations’-feel less like information and more like a physical weight. There’s a dull, familiar pressure building behind my eyes. It isn’t the hot flash of anger, not yet. It’s the heavier, colder feeling of resignation. Another un-schedulable fire to put out. Another meticulously planned budget to tear apart and re-juggle. Another conversation where I will show up holding a pair of deuces while my counterpart holds the entire deck.

We are conditioned to accept it. This phrase, this excuse, is the business equivalent of the weather. It’s an act of God. An unknowable, impossibly powerful deity that demands periodic sacrifice, and this quarter, it has chosen your profit margin. The supplier, we’re told, is just the humble messenger, forced to deliver the bad news. They send a boilerplate apology attached to a 26% price increase. What can you possibly do? For years, I believed the answer was absolutely nothing. I genuinely thought this was the unavoidable cost of doing business, the natural friction of a complex, globalized world.

I remember one case with a component supplier out of Malaysia. They hit us with a 16% increase, citing the familiar sticktail of raw material scarcity and rising regional energy costs. It was plausible, frustrating, but plausible. I sighed the deep, beleaguered sigh of the middle manager, spent a week exchanging performative emails, and managed to negotiate it down to 14.6%. I remember feeling like I’d won something. A small, hollow, deeply unsatisfying victory, but a victory nonetheless. I had “done my job.”

Six months later, I’m at a loud bar, sharing a plate of lukewarm fries with an industry friend who used to work for their logistics partner. He’s complaining about a former client. He asks, purely by chance, if my company was affected when their biggest account, a massive German appliance conglomerate, suddenly pulled their three-year, $46 million contract. He was just making conversation. He had no idea what he had just done. The loud music of the bar seemed to fade into a distant buzz. The beer in my hand suddenly tasted bitter, metallic.

They were banking on the story being better than the truth.

“

This brings me to Flora Y. I met her at one of those painfully awkward networking events where everyone just wants to go home. She’s an education coordinator for a small, surprisingly well-funded city museum. The kind of place that smells of old paper, lemon-scented floor polish, and the faint, lingering scent of popcorn from the lobby. Flora doesn’t deal with steel tariffs or semiconductor shortages. She orders a very specific kind of specialty archival paper from a single supplier in South Korea. It’s for a free after-school arts program that serves kids from six different low-income neighborhoods. This paper is her single biggest line item, a cost of $76 per ream. Her annual budget for it is precisely $16,666. Last Tuesday morning, she received an email. The price was going to $106 per ream. An almost 40% increase. The reason cited? “Unforeseen logistical challenges and raw material cost adjustments.” This increase wouldn’t just squeeze her budget; it would effectively cancel the summer and fall sessions for 236 children.

In the museum world, there’s a critical concept called ‘provenance.’ It’s the object’s life story. It’s the documented history of its ownership, its custody. A simple clay pot isn’t just a pot if you know its provenance. It’s a vessel that was crafted by an artisan in the 6th century, passed through the hands of a specific family for generations, was traded in a bustling market in Constantinople, was buried in a fire, and unearthed by an archeologist 876 years later. Without its provenance, the pot is just a piece of shaped clay with a vague attribution. It has no context, no soul. With its provenance, it’s a story we can trust.

We tend to treat business problems like artifacts without provenance. A price increase is just a price increase. A ‘market fluctuation’ is just what happened. We accept the label on the glass case without ever asking how it got there. We don’t dig into its story. We don’t ask why the fluctuation, why this specific supplier, why me, and why right now. We accept the story without demanding the evidence.

Flora was devastated. When she called me, she felt completely powerless. “What can I do?” she asked, her voice tight with frustration. “They’re the only ones who make this specific weight of paper that doesn’t yellow after 6 months.” We started digging, because powerless is a feeling, not a fact. The real story of her supplier, its provenance, existed. It just wasn’t in their carefully worded emails. It was in public manifests and shipping logs. By looking at publicly available us import data, we weren’t just guessing anymore. We were reading their diary. We saw the story unfold in black and white.

Her small, consistent order of 216 reams every quarter was a tiny, predictable blip on their radar. But two months ago, a new, much larger customer appeared on their manifests: a massive, multinational craft supply chain with thousands of stores. Their orders weren’t for 216 reams. They were for 26,666 reams at a time. Flora’s supplier hadn’t experienced rising costs. They had experienced a massive, company-altering success. They were now running their factory at 116% capacity just to service their new whale, and small, loyal customers like Flora were no longer a priority. They were a nuisance. The price increase wasn’t an apology for market conditions; it was a strategic nudge towards the door.

I have to admit, I hate this part of the process. I really do. It feels invasive, like reading someone’s mail. I got into my line of work to build things and create relationships, not to play detective with shipping manifests and bills of lading. My natural inclination is to trust people, to take their word for it, to believe that we are all partners trying our best. For years, that’s exactly what I did. But trust without verification isn’t trust; it’s just hope. And hope doesn’t keep your programs funded or your business afloat. It’s one of those infuriating contradictions you have to learn to live with: to build better, more genuinely trusting relationships with your partners, you first have to do the untrusting, forensic work of verifying the context. It’s completely backward, I know. But it’s also undeniably true.

Armed with this new provenance, Flora’s entire approach changed. She didn’t call her supplier to complain about the 40% increase. She called to congratulate them on landing the massive craft store contract. She led with that. She mentioned she saw their shipping volume must have exploded in the last quarter and that it must be an exciting time for them. The defensiveness on the other end of the line immediately evaporated. Then, she framed her problem not as an accusation, but as a shared logistical puzzle. “It looks like your incredible new scale is making it hard to service smaller, legacy accounts like mine,” she said. “I’ve been a loyal customer for 6 years, and we’d be lost without you. Is there a way we can structure my orders for your off-peak production times to keep the price at a level that allows our children’s program to continue?”

It was a masterclass in negotiation.

The tone of the call shifted instantly. They weren’t the powerful corporation dictating terms to the small museum anymore. They were two partners looking at a shared, transparent problem. The supplier was, for the first time, honest. They admitted the capacity strain was real. After some discussion, they ended up agreeing on a price of $86 per ream, a manageable increase, contingent on her placing one large annual order instead of four smaller ones. This helped their production planning immensely. It was still an increase, yes. But it saved the program. It saved the art shows for those 236 kids.