Week 3, 2026—Issue #396

🧀 Your Business Needs a Wedge

Photo by hey emmby on Unsplash

Does your company have a wedge offering?

Mine doesn't. But it probably should.

Here’s why:

When we started TeamStack, we wanted to retain everything great about MAQE (e.g., culture, systems) and change everything else (e.g., volatility, uncertainty).

We did this, in part, by insisting on long-term customer contracts. We reasoned that long-term engagements would translate into financial stability.

We were right. One year in, and our organization has stabilized. The team is happy, customers are satisfied, and the company is profitable.

But we’re not growing.

There are probably many reasons for this, ranging from shit marketing to poor economic conditions, but none seem as important as the fact that we’ve inadvertently built a trust-dependent business.

Long-term contracts are a double-edged sword. Yes, they’re a big part of why our (admittedly small) organization is now stable and profitable. But they’re also why new engagements are so hard to come by. The number of prospective customers who are able and willing to sign year-long contracts with a provider they’ve never worked with is, for obvious reasons, few and far between.

Enter wedge offerings: small, low-commitment engagements that establish trust and naturally extend into our core work. Not just smaller projects, but formats specifically designed to demonstrate value and lead into long-term collaboration.

I’m working on a couple of options, including something I call a Team Design Sprint. It identifies the roles, capabilities, resources, and systems that a team needs to fulfill a specific mission. The output naturally reveals where ongoing support would help.

Whether this solves the growth problem remains to be seen. But doing nothing certainly won’t.

/Andreas

Sidenotes

📚 My Favorite Books of 2025

I didn’t read as much as I would’ve liked in 2025, but here are some of my top picks across categories: Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0, (Science), Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way (Business), Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanac (Biographies), and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (Fiction).

How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Back issues are marinated for three months before being published to Medium. This article was originally published on Friday, Jan 16, 2026. If you are reading this you’re missing out. [Subscribe to email newsletters at www.workmatters.studio](http://www.workmatters.studio).