What I Stopped Chasing

Earlier this month I spent several days away from the business. No meetings, no notifications, no family obligations. For the third year running I blocked out time to do nothing but think, about what I want from the years ahead, the kind of company I want to build, and the kind of person I want to become, and answer the big question "what do I want to be when I grow up". The exercise is uncomfortable by design. This year it surfaced a question I had been avoiding.

For years I worked towards a particular recognition inside a vendor ecosystem, the kind of tier most firms in our industry treat as a milestone. We did the work that earns it. Capability was never the question. What I came to understand was that the recognition was never really about capability. It was about alignment, about behaving the way the ecosystem wanted you to behave, and the final step asked something of me that I was not prepared to give, then or since. So I did not give it. We do not hold the tier, and that was my choice rather than a verdict on our work.

For a while I blamed politics and personalities for that, and some of it was fair. But the more honestly I looked, the more I saw I had been asking the wrong question. The question was never why we had not been granted the recognition. It was why I had wanted it so badly, for so long. When the real price of it became explicit, I found that the answer was that I no longer wanted it at all.

Over the last eight years I have built a business from nothing, earned the trust of some of the largest institutions in Asia & UK, and developed expertise that few teams hold. I am proud of that. Running it has also been hard, and under pressure from customers, employees, partners and my own expectations, it is easy to justify compromises in the name of growth. If I am honest, there have been times when I became more political than I wanted to be, more willing to tolerate things that did not sit with my values, more focused on reaching an outcome than on asking whether the outcome was worth reaching. The success we built at Midships came from being independent and willing to tell customers things others would not. Somewhere along the way I had started to lose sight of that.

That realisation forced me to look at the structure honestly. A partner programme is, at its core, a commission structure. The vendor rewards the partner for growing vendor revenue inside the customer. That does not make it unethical. It makes it something fundamentally different from an advisory relationship, and the two cannot honestly live inside the same firm at the same time. The deeper the tier, the more the partner's economics depend on the vendor's roadmap closing rather than the customer's problem being solved. Elite status is awarded to the firms that move the most product. It is not awarded to the firm that tells a client the renewal price is no longer defensible, that the licensing model has quietly shifted under them, or that the incumbent has engineered a cost trap into its own terms and a migration is now the right move. That second conversation is the one our clients actually pay us for, and it cannot happen honestly if our profit depends on the renewal closing or if a regional vendor team holds any leverage over how we get paid.

From the outset, we made the choice structural. We do not take reseller rebates. We do not let referral fees, marketing funds or partnership tiers shape what we recommend. From our recent experience we have now added the following to the above:

"We will not pursue elite tier with any vendor, by deliberate choice."

And the same logic that keeps us honest with vendors applies to how we win work in the first place. We do not want to win because we hosted the best dinner, ran the best event or entertained the right people. We do not want customers choosing us because we are popular. We want them choosing us because they trust our judgement.

I am saying that with more conviction than I would have a few years ago, maybe even a few months ago, because I have been close to getting it wrong. Not long ago we had an opportunity that looked attractive commercially, where the path to winning had very little to do with expertise or outcomes and a great deal to do with relationships and entertainment that did not reflect the standards we are trying to build. We walked away. Earlier in the life of the business I might have found a way to justify it. I would now rather lose that kind of work every time, because winning it produces engagements that flatter everyone and serve no one.

There is a cost to all of this, and if you are a founder reading this, you need to consider this. When you stop behaving like a channel, some vendors stop treating you as a partner. Referrals slow. Joint opportunities disappear. Roadmap access narrows. In a market where most boutique firms live on inbound from vendor account teams, that is not a small thing to give up. I used to see it as a problem. I have come to see it as confirmation we are doing the job correctly. If our independence makes us less convenient to a vendor, that is usually evidence it is intact.

There is a pattern underneath all of this that took me eight years to see. When you chase recognition you become more political. When you chase status you become more defensive. When you chase approval, from vendors, from the industry, from people whose opinion has no bearing on whether a client is better off, you become less willing to challenge the system you are part of. The behaviours I am least proud of in myself all trace back to pursuing goals that were never really mine. The opposite holds too. When you anchor on principle the decisions get simpler. Not easier. Simpler. You know who you serve and which compromises you will not make.

Trust is the only asset I know of that compounds indefinitely. Technology changes, vendors change, products change, markets change. Trust remains, and unlike any badge or tier it is harder to earn and easier to lose. The clients who hire us do not need another firm telling them what they want to hear. They need one willing to tell them what they need to hear, whether that favours a vendor, a competitor, or doing nothing at all. Our responsibility is to the outcome, not the supplier. For years I thought recognition like that was worth chasing. I no longer do. We will not be the most celebrated partner in any ecosystem, and we are not trying to be. We are trying to be something more useful.

Writer’s Overview

Ajit Gupta – Co-Founder & CEO, Midships  

Ajit leads Midships Group’s transition from a specialist identity consultancy to a portfolio of autonomous, AI-native business units. He focuses on long-term business relevance through platform thinking, customer outcomes, and scalable operating models.

Short bio: Ajit is a strategic founder with deep expertise in IAM, platform delivery, and AI services, driving Midships’ expansion across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.

📧 ajit@midships.io  

🔗 LinkedIn: Ajit Gupta