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All Relationships Are Long-Term

Definition

The principle that BD professionals should treat every relationship — with founders, investors, bankers, and advisors — as inherently long-term, regardless of whether a near-term transaction is possible. Adopting this mindset shifts sourcing from a conversion-rate optimization exercise to a relationship investment practice, producing faster yeses, faster nos, and fewer "long maybes."

Origin

Introduced by Karl Rectanus in Ep. 1: Decoding the EdTech Founder. Karl offers this as his primary advice to BD professionals: "The second an early stage business development person starts to see all relationships as long-term, it becomes not about the first call or the no or the, you know, making 50 calls or shooting out X number of emails and what kind of conversion rates."

Application

Karl describes several practical manifestations of this principle (Ep. 1):

  • Trust-building loop: Karl set expectations about LearnPlatform's annual goals, then sent year-end updates showing he had met them. PE firms that followed up — having tracked those stated goals — demonstrated long-term investment in the relationship.
  • Process advantage: When LearnPlatform ran its exit process, 50–60% of the approximately 100 engaged parties had prior relationships with Karl. Those firms carried deeper understanding into management meetings and final rounds.
  • Post-transaction continuation: After the exit, Karl continued to "engage, partner and sometimes directly work with second, third and fourth place" finishers — treating even unsuccessful suitors as long-term relationships.
  • Authenticity over tactics: Karl argues that gifts and tactics matter less than the compounding trust that comes from consistently setting and meeting expectations: "There's only one way to build trust. It's to set expectations and then go beat or exceed those expectations."

Rod Jimenez provides independent validation in Ep. 4: The Truth About PE from a Founder's Perspective. Rod's eighteen-month relationship with Dan Herr at Serent Capital — progressing from a conference meeting to in-person visits to detailed conversations — enabled a LOI within days once the transaction window opened. Rod explicitly credits the time investment: "It wasn't because you guys were so amazing that you could take a company you knew nothing about and then have an LOI three days later. It's because you had invested a year and a half of relationship building." The relationship also meant Rod chose not to run a competitive process — "we didn't even think about engaging with anybody else" — directly illustrating Karl Rectanus's principle that long-term relationships produce faster outcomes. (Ep. 4)