Twenty years old, feet in Milan, a book always in the backpack
In my last two years at university in Milan — the ones that coincided with my first steps in the working world — I became what people now call a frequent flyer. I flew constantly: short flights, usually 50 minutes to an hour and ten, but with all the ritual that surrounds an aeroplane even for such a small distance.
If you counted the trip to the airport, the security checks, the boarding, the landing, the wait at the carousel and the trip from the destination terminal, every one of those flights ate up four hours of pure intensity. The familiar smell of the terminals, the generic boarding gates, the announcements over the loudspeaker, that permanent state of alertness any traveller of those years will recognise instantly.
Mobile phones were not yet the pocket computer they are today. No Instagram, no podcasts at one click, no Netflix. And honestly, all the better: what I did during those hours was read. I read a lot. Books, essays, biographies, professional magazines I picked up at Linate kiosks. Each flight was another chapter.
Pedro's story
Among all those readings there was one book that left a mark I still carry almost twenty years later. It was a business management book, written by someone from the Italian telecommunications sector. The central story revolved around a character named Pedro.
Pedro worked at a state-owned Italian telephone company at a time when enormous amounts of money were being poured into communication technologies: expensive equipment, exclusive international fairs, training courses out of reach for the average employee. It was a period of great technical transformation, and the company was trying to keep its people up to date with courses, travel and certifications that were neither easy to organise nor cheap to fund.
Pedro had a gift. He wasn't the most technically brilliant, he wasn't the top seller, he wasn't the one with the highest invoiced revenue. Pedro built teams. He created a good atmosphere, made people collaborate, patiently organised the impossible training sessions, connected departments that didn't talk to each other, secured slots at the expensive fairs for the people who actually needed them. People in the company looked for him — not because of his title, but because of what he brought just by being there.
But companies, as we know, are sometimes just numbers. And Pedro, viewed through the spreadsheet, was a low number. His individual revenue was modest. And one day, in one of those budget-optimisation exercises that sound so good in meeting rooms, they fired Pedro.
The book described what happened afterwards. Without Pedro, the training programmes collapsed. The team lost cohesion. The fair slots stopped being used. Departments went back to ignoring each other. People disconnected. And after a few months, the Pedro effect was painful to watch — painful because there was no Pedro left to call back.
I closed that book on some Milan-Bari flight and sat staring at the cabin for a while. The idea felt obvious to me and yet ignored by every company I knew: the human value that holds an organisation together rarely shows up in any individual's number.
Almost twenty years later, an electrical-supplies provider
For years now I have been working with a local electrical-supplies provider. It is a very specific sector — installations, wiring, all the technical material behind any project — and working with a good provider changes your life when you are juggling sites, tight budgets and impossible deadlines. The salesperson assigned to you, in this sector, makes a much bigger difference than the catalogue.
The first two sales reps I had were, frankly, one worse than the other. Distant, slow, with zero initiative. They got back to you whenever it suited them, quoted prices with no context, didn't understand what you needed or why. I started losing hope. I thought everyone in this sector was simply built that way.
Then one day they assigned me a different rep. He happened to be a friend of a common friend — but the difference wasn't there. The difference was in how he worked.
What sets a good sales rep apart
This guy steps outside office hours just to get the most for his clients. Not only to sell more — well, also that, let's not pretend, sometimes he is a bit of a bastard and pushes us to buy a little more than strictly necessary — but mainly so that when a problem appears, the problem actually gets solved.
If it's Saturday and I have an urgent issue, he picks up. If it's Sunday and I need a part to open a site on Monday, he moves. If the part isn't in the catalogue, he calls another provider. If the part exists but lead times are too long, he finds an equivalent. If the end client is asking me for explanations, my rep hands me the technical arguments to defend the decision we took.
And above all, this guy understands. He understands when I'm in a rush, when the end client is nervous, when there is no margin left, when we have to improvise. Before he sells me anything, he reads me. And that, in any sector, is pure gold.
The human value numbers can't measure
My electrical-supplies sales rep is, with all the differences in sector and time, the Pedro of that book I read on small Italian flights almost twenty years ago.
If his employer measured their reps purely by the direct ticket of monthly sales, mine probably wouldn't stand out. Others sell more. But none of them keeps up the relationship with customers like me, who have been working with that provider for years out of the absolute trust generated by a single person. If that person disappears, much of that revenue follows him out the door. And the day the financial department decides this rep is too expensive because his individual figure is modest, the Pedro effect will repeat itself identically: the relationships will cool, the customers will drift to competitors, the impossible orders will simply stop being possible.
The direct number never captures that indirect value. It captures the signed sales, not the relationships that enable those sales. It captures the fair slots that were sold, not the fair slots a Pedro arranged from the inside. It captures the quarterly KPIs, not the internal training programme that survives because someone insists on keeping it alive even though nobody pays them for it.
Companies are people — and people are feelings
I have spent almost twenty years wanting to sit down with the heads of HR of many companies and tell them this: companies are people. And people are emotions, feelings, stories, bonds. They are not a cell on a spreadsheet.
The customer comes back to a place because someone greets them by name. The team stays together because someone organises the Christmas dinner. The training programme works because someone insists, year after year, on keeping it alive. The relationship with the supplier survives because someone answers the phone on a Saturday afternoon expecting nothing in return. All of that is people. And all of that disappears the day the financial department decides those profiles are too expensive.
I'm not saying numbers don't matter. They do. A company that ignores the numbers shuts down. But a company that only looks at the numbers also shuts down — only it shuts down a few years later, when it can no longer understand why its best customers have left, why its teams perform worse, why its culture has evaporated.
If you have a Pedro, hold on to him
If your company has someone who builds teams, who organises what nobody else wants to organise, who keeps customers happy with that extra touch that never shows up in any CRM, who answers when they shouldn't, who understands while others only execute — hold on to that person. Pay them well. Promote them. Recognise them in public. Make them know, again and again, that you understand what they're worth.
Because the day you decide their individual number doesn't justify their salary and you let them go, your company will lose much more than that saving suggests. As it happened to the state Italian telephone company in that book. As it would happen to my electrical-supplies provider the day they fail to understand what they have.
Every business has a Pedro, even if we almost never spot them in time. The company discovers the Pedro the day they leave. And by the time the company discovers them, it's already too late.