Maris Skujins

I didn't go to business school. I'm educated as a rock, if we're being honest. What I did do is grow up in Soviet Latvia, figure out early that you could sell anything if you understood what the other person actually wanted, and spend the next 25 years testing that theory in progressively higher-stakes rooms.

The first thing I sold was empty 35mm film canisters. I was a kid. My dad ran photographic stores and the canisters were going in the bin. I saw something other people overlooked and found someone who'd pay for it. No training. No framework. Just the instinct that there's always a gap between what something is worth to the person who has it and what it's worth to the person who needs it.

The first real business was a building survey company in London. My co-founder and I had just arrived from Latvia, no credentials, no clients, and no money. We needed access to a Faro laser scanner — a piece of precision equipment worth around £60,000 — to do the work properly. We called the manufacturer and talked them into lending it to us. Two broke Eastern Europeans convincing a company that works with Boeing to hand over their equipment on good faith. That was the Trust Sequence before it had a name.

After that came the bike company. A fourth-floor London flat, bikes from Craigslist, a WordPress blog with PayPal buttons, and eventually 33 countries via Shopify. No warehouse, no funding, two flatmates, and a workshop on Shacklewell Lane. I learned more about how people decide to buy in those years than in any sales training I've done since.

Then a few failed startups. They're worth mentioning because they taught things the successes didn't — mainly that a good idea and good execution aren't enough if you can't get the person across the table to trust you with their time and money first.

Eventually I joined Scandiweb, an e-commerce agency. Came in as a project manager, which was a bad fit. Too entrepreneurial for a developer-led organization. Someone with better judgment moved me to sales, and something clicked.

Over the next decade I led commercial teams across 20+ countries, managed accounts in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and sat in hundreds of rooms where someone had to decide whether to trust us with their money. Some went well. Some didn't. I started recording everything.

600+ recorded calls. 33,000+ emails. 350+ deals. At some point I stopped thinking about what worked and started asking why. Why did some conversations end in a yes when the product, the price, and the team were the same? The answer was always the same thing: the sequence in which trust was built. The best calls followed it. The worst ones skipped a step.

The Trust Sequence is what happens when you pull that sequence apart, name the pieces, and teach them to other people.