Home / Articles / A solution, not a problem: a coach sent me a link to a product he could not sell me, what that moment teaches about business, security teams, bookshops and travel agents, and why RiskMandate has been making the same mistake

A solution, not a problem: a coach sent me a link to a product he could not sell me, what that moment teaches about business, security teams, bookshops and travel agents, and why RiskMandate has been making the same mistake

By Dinis Cruz · 2026-11-02 · article v1.0.0 · newsroom v0.14.35 · businesssolutionsconveniencetransparencywardley-mapsapplication-securityriskmandateecommercearticle

Abstract: After a padel lesson in the Algarve I asked a coach about something in my arm. He told me which product to buy and sent me the link. I asked if I could buy it from him, or anywhere nearby. He said no. In that moment he gave me a problem instead of a solution, and it is the most useful business lesson I know. People who come to you with a problem do not want a list of next steps; they want it solved, and they will pay a fair price for that, a price set by how much time, effort and waiting it saves them. I learned it in application security, where a list of vulnerabilities is a problem handed to a team that has no time, and an engineer paid from my budget, who fixes them and leaves the team better than he found it, is a solution. Bookshops that say "we can get it for you" and travel agents that hid their commission show both sides of it. And it is what RiskMandate has been doing wrong: we offer people a way to control their agents, and then hand them a list of tasks, without a clear return. This article is the principle, the evidence, and what changes.

In short

• A coach told me what to buy, sent the link, and could not sell it to me. He gave me a problem.
• The lesson: when someone brings you a problem, give them a solution, not more steps.
• A solution has a price, and there is a range where paying you is a no-brainer and a point where people do it themselves.
• Transparency widens that range: say what you charge on top, and people judge the convenience, not the suspicion.
• In security, a list of vulnerabilities is a problem; an engineer who fixes them is a solution.
• Bookshops and travel agents show both sides of the same choice.
• RiskMandate has been handing people problems, a way to control their agents and then a list of tasks.
• With AI, the solution can now be automated: the shop, the link, the follow-up.

The moment

I had something in my arm after playing, and I asked one of the padel coaches in the Algarve what he knew about it. He knew exactly what I needed: a sleeve, and he sent me a link to buy it.

So I asked: can I buy it from you? Can I buy it somewhere here? No.

Think about what happened in that moment. I arrived with a problem. I left with the same problem plus a set of tasks: find a shop that sells it, or a website I trust, check the delivery, wait. He knew more than me, he was trusted, he was standing in front of a customer who wanted to pay, and he handed the ball back over the net.

The answer I was hoping for was: yes, here it is, or I will have it tomorrow, it costs this. That is a solution. The next article is the shop that coach could have had; this one is the principle behind it.

Do not pass the ball back

The biggest lesson I have learned in business is this: if you want to get things done, you do not give people problems, you give them solutions.

People who ask you something rarely want to hear "here is what you should do next". They want to hear "here it is", or, failing that, "here are your options, and this is the one I would take". A link to a product is information. "Pay me now and I will give it to you" is a solution, and it is the easiest one to say yes to.

The price of a solution

A solution has a price, and that is fine. If someone says "too expensive, I can get it cheaper over there", they are trading convenience for price, and that is market economics working. For anything there is a range where buying from the person in front of you is a no-brainer, and a margin above which people say "I will do it myself".

What sets that range is not only the price of the product. It is what the buyer gets for it: the time they save, not having to find a seller they trust, having it tomorrow instead of in two weeks, being able to do something else instead. For something health related, five or ten euros on top to have it tomorrow can be a good deal. Where the seller got it from does not matter to me. If they bought it on Amazon or a supplier ships it to me, what I care about is whether the price matches the value, the timing and the time saved.

The research on what people will pay for convenience is thinner than you might expect: a 2018 UK doctoral study of online shoppers found that customers "will pay between £0 and £5" for faster delivery, which fits the small markups I mean, but I would not claim more than that from it.

Transparency is part of the solution

There is an interesting business in telling people exactly how much the middleman takes and how much the supplier takes. Travel agents show what happens without it. For decades they were paid by commissions built into the ticket price, which the customer did not see. When the US airlines cut those commissions, many agencies started to charge service fees instead, and the US Government Accountability Office described the old commission as one "that was invisible to the consumer". Between 1999 and 2002, online bookings went from 7% to 30% of tickets and the airlines' payments to agencies fell by 57%. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics now says travel agents held about 61,500 jobs in 2025, with no growth expected, because travellers book online.

Some of that was inevitable. But an industry whose job was to solve a problem, find me the right trip at the right price, did not say clearly "I am here to find you the cheapest ticket, and this is what I take", and a lot of its customers left as soon as they could do it themselves.

Others built their business on the opposite. Everlane says its customers "have a right to know how much their clothes cost to make", and shows the cost of each product. Costco's annual report says its volumes let it "operate profitably at significantly lower gross margins"; its gross margin in the year to August 2026 was 11.09%, and its membership fees, 5.9 billion dollars, came to almost two thirds of its net income of 9.2 billion.

Amazon is the reverse case for me. What it gives me is convenience and a huge range of products. I do not trust its rankings because of the paid placements. The US Federal Trade Commission, in its 2023 lawsuit, alleged that Amazon was "replacing relevant, organic search results with paid advertisements"; those are allegations, but Amazon's own results show advertising revenue of about 68 billion dollars in 2025. In Portugal there is not even a separate Amazon shop: amazon.pt sends you to amazon.es. So I am open to another provider, one that says: here is the product, here is when you get it, here is the cost, and here is how much I keep.

In Wardley's terms

Simon Wardley's maps place every component on an axis of evolution, from genesis through custom built and product to commodity, from what he calls "the uncertain, rare and constantly changing" to "the known, the common, the stable".

The coach's answer left me building my own solution: find the shop, check it, order, wait, chase. Every buyer goes through the same steps again, slightly differently. That is custom built. An offer with a price, a date and a link turns those steps into something that is the same every time, closer to a commodity. The friction is the gap between the two, and whoever closes it gets paid.

The engineer, not the list

I learned this in application security. If I arrived at a team with a list of vulnerabilities to fix, I was fighting for their resources. The conversation was not about what to fix, but about what they would have to drop from their plan to fix it. I was giving them a problem.

And, ironically, the worse the vulnerability, the bigger the problem. A minor one could be ignored, or done later. A serious one that had to be fixed quickly forced the team to stop what it was doing.

Because I had a security budget, I found a different way: I hired the engineers myself and gave them to the teams. The conversation changed. I arrived with a resource: here is an engineer, one you like, who will work in your team and fix this. Then we could also look at the non-functional requirements, the CI pipeline and everything else that made the next fix easier.

It is the Boy Scout rule. Robert C. Martin's version for programmers is "Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it", after Baden-Powell's last message to the scouts: "Try and leave this world a little better than you found it". We left teams better than we found them, because we fixed more than the vulnerabilities. That was a solution.

The bookshop

If I go into a bookshop and ask "do you have this book?", the answer should always be: yes, we can get it for you. The only question is whether it is in stock today. If it is not, they should find a way to get it, even if they make a little money or none. I have bought from them. They have the cash flow, and I have not gone somewhere else, which is how habits move.

Some bookshops already work this way: UK independents are reported to order from a wholesaler for delivery the next day, and Bookshop.org pays its partner shops a 30% commission on sales they refer and shares 10% of its other sales among independent shops. The ones that say "we do not have it" are giving the customer a problem.

Where RiskMandate gets this wrong

This is also the challenge we have at RiskMandate. We say: here is a good way to control your agents, here is a good way to reduce their risk. People say: great, how do I do it? And we give them a set of actions and tasks, such as writing their policies and listing their agents. Without a clear understanding of the return.

That is why our outreach, the emails asking people to write their policies, is not working. We are passing the ball to the other side of the court and saying: now you figure it out. Every one of those steps is a problem handed to a team that is already busy, exactly like my list of vulnerabilities.

The solution version would arrive with the work done. We would write the first policy for one agent from what we can see, show what it reaches and what that is worth, and leave a control in place, the way approved business mandates describes and the first steps of the roadmap propose, as a service and not as homework. That is a direction, not something we offer today.

With AI, solutions scale

This used to need a person: someone to stock the product, answer the message, send the link, chase the delivery. Now most of that flow can be automated. The coach's shop can be a page an agent maintains, with payment and delivery handled by a platform; the follow-up after a lesson can be a link sent without anyone remembering to send it. I described the same idea for my brother's site, where every lesson becomes a sellable unit.

Give people solutions. They will like you, they will come back, and they will recommend you to others. That is the loop, and agents now make it cheap enough to do every time.

What this does not claim

• The moment is mine, from a lesson on 2 November 2026; the coach is not named, and he did nothing wrong.
• The convenience research is thin: one doctoral study is cited; I found no strong figure for what people pay to save time.
• The FTC's statements are allegations in a lawsuit, not findings.
• The travel figures are from the US, where the data is good; I did not find the same series for Portugal.
• The RiskMandate solution is a proposal, not a service we offer today.

Where this comes from

The conversation of 2 November 2026. US GAO, GAO-03-749 (July 2003); BLS, travel agents and Beyond the Numbers, May 2020; FTC press release, 26 September 2023; Amazon's results for 2025; Everlane; Costco's annual report; Simon Wardley's introduction to mapping; the Boy Scout rule in 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know; Baden-Powell's last message; Bookshop.org UK; Lasisi, University of Brighton PhD thesis (2018); the European Commission on Amazon's commitments. All read 2 November 2026.

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