Why I Stopped Saying ’10x Multiplier’ — And Nearly Lost a Client Because of Honesty
Erwee Coetzee
Diamond Stack
Cape Town, South Africa
I promised her 10x.
Not in those exact words. I was too smart for that. But it was there in every slide—the revenue trajectory, the “multiplier effect,” the language of transformation. I showed her what the research said. I cited growth metrics from Seibert et al. (2011). I pointed to case studies. I made the numbers look inevitable.
She signed on. We spent 18 months rebuilding her business architecture.
At the 18-month mark, her revenue had grown 30%.
Not 10x. Not 1000%. Thirty percent.
She didn’t call me. She didn’t email. She ghosted. Her operations manager sent a final invoice and the relationship was over.
The Silence Was Worse Than Anger
I’d prepared for anger. I’d practised the conversation: “Your baseline was weak. You didn’t implement disciplined. The market moved.” All the consultant deflections.
But she didn’t even give me that. The silence meant something worse: she’d decided I wasn’t worth engaging with anymore.
I sat with that for a week. Then I did something I almost never do. I re-read my original pitch deck, and I read it as she would have read it—not as a consultant reading slides, but as a business owner reading a promise.
Here’s what I saw: I’d used every trick. Aspirational language (“unlock your potential”). Implied guarantees (“the research shows”). Social proof (other case studies, vaguely referenced). I’d weaponised credibility to paper over uncertainty.
The 30% she achieved? That was real. That was structural improvement in operational efficiency, a 15% margin uplift, and founder wellbeing that shifted from “crushed” to “sustainable.” In most businesses, that would be a home run.
But I’d trained her to expect 10x. Against that bar, 30% felt like failure.
I’d set the frame. I owned the outcome.
Three Weeks Later, an Unexpected Email
I was prepared to swallow the loss. Then this arrived:
“I’ve been angry for three weeks. But something happened yesterday that made me rethink. My operations manager pulled aside a senior artisan and asked if the new decision-making system we built was actually working. The artisan said: ‘For the first time in my career, I feel trusted to make choices. I used to wait for Johan to decide. Now I decide, and I’m better at it than I thought.’
That happened because you didn’t promise me the artisan would change. You promised me a system, and you were honest when it didn’t deliver 10x. You said, ‘Here’s what actually happened.’ You didn’t blame me. You didn’t make excuses.
Every other consultant I’ve worked with would have spun that 30% into a victory. You didn’t. And that honesty—that willingness to say ‘I was wrong about the multiplier’—is worth more to me than any 10x promise could ever be.
I’m ready to keep going. Not because I think you’ll deliver 10x next. Because I believe you’ll be honest about what actually happens.”
I read that email five times. Then I called her. We talked for an hour. And somewhere in that conversation, I realised something that shifted how I think about credibility.
What Actually Happened: A Lesson in Signalling
Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for a simple insight: in markets where information is asymmetrical—where the buyer can’t easily verify what the seller claims—signals matter more than reality (Spence, 1973).
A diploma signals competence (even though it doesn’t prove it). A luxury brand’s high price signals quality (even though price isn’t the same as quality). These signals work because they’re costly to fake. You can’t easily fake a Nobel Prize. You can’t easily sustain a luxury brand reputation if your product is garbage.
But here’s what Spence also showed: when a signal becomes easy to fake, it collapses. When every consultant can make the same 10x claim, the signal stops differentiating. It becomes noise.
So what’s a costly-to-fake signal in a high-trust market (like yours—a jewellery business deciding whether to restructure operations)?
Honesty about what you don’t know.
That’s costly. It’s uncomfortable. It requires admitting uncertainty. Every ego-driven consultant avoids it. And because it’s costly, when someone does signal it, you believe them.
I thought my credibility came from my claims. It actually came from admitting my claims were overstated. The moment I said “I was wrong about 10x; here’s what actually happened,” I signalled something more valuable than any promise: I signalled that I could be trusted to tell the truth.
Why This Matters for What Comes Next
I’m sharing this story first because I want to be clear about what this series is and what it’s not.
This is not a promise that the Coetzee Convergence Framework will transform your business into a 10x revenue machine. It won’t. The research I’m grounding this framework in shows that well-executed operational improvement in small luxury businesses produces a 25–30% revenue uplift and a 15% efficiency gain over 18 months. That’s meaningful. It’s not transformational.
What is transformational is this: your team will start making better decisions. Your founder burden—the cognitive load of being the only person who thinks about the business—will lighten. Your culture will shift from “waiting for the boss to decide” to “we decide, together, within a framework.” Your margins will improve because decisions are more informed. Your retention will improve because your people feel trusted.
I know those changes are real because I’ve seen them. Not in hypothetical case studies. In actual businesses. In actual founders’ shoulders dropping when they realised they could breathe again.
But here’s my commitment: if I tell you something, I’ll cite it. If I don’t have data, I’ll say so. If the research says “maybe,” I won’t pretend it says “definitely.” And if I’m wrong—which I will be—I’ll tell you that too.
The Real Question Underneath All This
You’re reading this because you suspect that something in your business isn’t working.
Maybe you’re the bottleneck. Maybe your team isn’t as engaged as they should be. Maybe you’ve tried frameworks before and they felt like extra work layered onto your already impossible schedule. Maybe you’ve been promised things by consultants and they didn’t materialise.
If that’s you, I don’t blame you for being sceptical. You should be sceptical. Every consultant claims their framework is different. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending mine is the only one worth reading.
But here’s what I can offer: in the next 15 posts, I’m going to show you exactly how this framework works. Not in abstractions. In moments. In the specific point where your master artisan makes a decision differently because they have a structure to make it in. In the ritual that takes 10 minutes a day and somehow frees you for the strategy work you’ve been too busy to do. In the conversation with your CHRO where you realise, for the first time, that psychological safety is infrastructure, not nice-to-have.
And I’ll be honest about what works and what doesn’t. About where the science is clear (empowerment drives performance; habits scale organisations) and where we’re still learning (how to adapt the framework for different cultural contexts, how blockchain provenance specifically changes founder economics).
That honesty—that willingness to say “I don’t know yet, but here’s what I’m learning”—is the foundation everything else is built on.
What Happens Next
Post 2 is about the structural ceiling most jewellery businesses hit around 8 people. Why it’s not a failure of leadership. Why it’s physics.
And more importantly: how it becomes an opportunity.
But before you go there, I want to ask you a question. Sit with it. Don’t answer yet.
If your business could run without you making every decision, what would you do with that time?
That question—what you’d do with your founder’s time back—is where all of this begins.
Research & References
Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. (2011). Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(5), 981–1003.
Effect size: ρ = .41 for team performance; ρ = .35 for innovative behaviour
Spence, M. (1973). Job market signalling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374.
The foundational work on how costly-to-fake signals communicate credibility in asymmetric information markets
Zucker, L. G. (1986). Production of trust and institutional choice. Research in Organizational Behavior, 8(1), 53–111.
On how honesty and transparency function as institutional trust-building mechanisms
