A Story About Self-Confidence

The third expert report this month is lying on my desk, and I have not even opened it.

Outside it is getting light over the yard. I hear the first shift starting up, the roller door, the forklift, the beeping as it reverses. In my office it is quiet. In front of me are forty-two pages, neatly bound, with diagrams and a recommendation at the end that I already know before I read it. The new production line pays for itself. It has paid for itself since the first report in the spring.

I leaf through it from the beginning anyway. Perhaps this time it contains the one sentence that gives me the final certainty. The sentence I can sign underneath without lying awake with a knot in my stomach.

It has been like this for weeks. An offer from the equipment supplier is in the drawer, valid until the end of the month. There is a grant we could take if the application goes out by the fifteenth. Two major customers are asking whether we can deliver the volumes from autumn. Everything points in the same direction, and still I order another report.

I am the managing director of an engineering company with around two hundred people. My father built the firm, I have run it for six years. On the outside I come across, I think, as calm and considered. On the inside I know a different sentence, one that has been with me for as long as I can remember: that I do not yet know enough to decide. That somewhere a figure is missing, a detail, a safeguard. So I ask. Once, twice, three times, until somebody gives me the certainty I do not have myself.

Last week I called a fellow managing director, just to hear how he would handle it. I asked our finance director to run the calculation through one more time, although it had already come out right twice. Everyone tells me it works. And every morning I find a new reason why I should wait a little longer.

In the afternoon Konrad drops by. He has sat on our advisory board for years, an old entrepreneur who handed over his own firm long ago. He says little and listens well. I value that in him, even when it is uncomfortable. We sit down at the small table by the window. I push the report across to him and talk about the line, the customers, the grant. I talk faster than I need to. Konrad leafs through it, skims the last page, sets the folder aside. The coffee between us goes cold.

“Well?” I ask. “How do you see it?”

He leans back. “That’s the third one, isn’t it?”

“The third, yes.”

“And all three say the same thing.”

“In essence, yes.” I notice myself hesitating. “I just want to be sure.”

Konrad nods slowly. Then he asks the question, calmly, almost in passing, as if he were asking for directions. “Are you making the decision safe, or yourself?”

I want to answer immediately and find nothing. The sentence stands in the room and will not be pushed aside. Outside I hear the forklift, the roller door, and inside me it has suddenly gone very quiet.

Because he is right. The numbers have been there for a long time. What is missing is not another number. What is missing is my trust that my judgement is enough. I commissioned three reports so that, if it came to it, somebody else would have said what I should have said myself. I spread the responsibility until there was barely any of it left with me. And I took that for diligence for months.

“I think I’m making myself safe,” I say eventually.

Konrad smiles, barely visibly. “I thought as much. You know, a fourth report will tell you the same as the first three. Only by then the offer will have expired.” He stands up and pats me briefly on the shoulder as he passes. “You know this company better than any assessor. Trust yourself with it.”

That evening I stay late. I stack the three folders on top of each other and push them to the edge of the table. I take the offer out of the drawer, read it one last time, and this time I am not looking for a sentence that will rescue me. I check what I know. The utilisation of the last three years, the commitments from the two customers, the costs, the hall the line is meant to stand in. I know how this company works; I have stood in it every morning for six years. Then the risk that remains. There is a remainder of uncertainty, and it will remain, no matter how many pages I read.

I sign. I finish the grant application and put it ready for the post. Then I write a short message to the equipment supplier saying that we are ordering the line.

The next morning I tell the leadership team. No long explanations, no report held up in front of me. “We are building the new line. I have decided it, and I stand behind it.” It is quiet for a moment, then my production manager nods and starts asking questions that point forward. For the first time in weeks we are talking about the line itself, about dates and handovers, because the question of whether I dare is off the table.

Certainty from outside will never fully exist. There is no report that delivers the final assurance, and no figure behind which the fear disappears. At some point the moment comes when I have to believe my own judgement, with the remainder of uncertainty that belongs to it. Deciding means bearing that remainder and putting your own name underneath it anyway.