Some losses teach you more than success ever could.
WHAT LOSING TAUGHT US
In 2024 we lost our largest customer. There was no real notice. One week we were part of each other's plans; the next, a relationship that had run for more than twenty years — where we had been part of their story and they a large part of ours — was over.
When something of that size lands on you, the first thing you have to manage is yourself. You have to think clearly, because one wrong move in that moment can make you lose your way completely, and the business carries the cost of it for a long time afterward. The easiest thing to do is look outward — to blame the market, the timing, a run of bad luck. It is also the most useless.
The harder work is to turn the question inward. Why had we lost the trust of a partner we had stood beside for two decades? What choices of our own had brought us to this point? If you cannot be brutally honest with yourself there, you have no chance of making a better choice on the other side of it.
Their CEO put it to me plainly. We had not grown enough to keep pace with where they were going. They were on a steep growth path, and in their view we had stood still. They wanted a partner who could help them grow again — and they no longer saw us as that partner.
I will be honest with you. It felt like being hit in the face with a wet fish. It was not a comfortable conversation. But every word of it was fair, and fair criticism is worth far more than comfortable silence.
That conversation became the starting point for rebooting Sunrise Logistics. We had to accept something harder than it sounds: what had carried us for thirty years would not automatically carry us into the next thirty. Our history had earned us that relationship. It had not entitled us to keep it.
And this is where an idea I keep returning to stopped being a neat phrase and became very real — the choices we had made in the past had determined the position we found ourselves in now, and the choices we made next would determine the reality we would live with, and the choices we would get to make after that.
What we did next is a story in itself, and I will share it across the issues to come. For now I will say only this: two years on, we are a different business, and a stronger one — not because we defended the choices we had made, but because we were finally honest about them.
Losing that client was one of the hardest things we have been through. It was also one of the most valuable, because it forced the introspection we should have been doing all along. The reality you live tomorrow is built entirely from the choices you are honest enough to make today.
That is a lesson I would rather have learned gently — but I am grateful we learned it at all.
Kind regards,
Larry Serman
Chief Executive O cer, Sunrise Logistics