A follow-up from the Maggie’s Farm article, two months later.

Partnerships end. I used to think that endings were failures, mistakes or defeats. But the truth is that many working relationships, however productive and however well-intentioned, have a natural terminus. A turning of the wheel. A point where you can tell, with a quiet certainty, that the journey has run its course.

Sometimes this is mutual and even gentle. I have a dear set of friends who run a company in Ulm, Germany. For several years, we had an intense partnership, but at a certain point, we recognised what we did not really want to say out loud: we needed a break from each other. This was not because of any rupture in respect or trust, but simply because we had reached a point of exhaustion. We were becoming tired of one another and our paths needed some air between them. So we stepped back. The friendships and the respect remain intact. We still admire each other’s expertise. Nothing was broken, nothing was lost, just the end of a particular chapter.

Other times, endings are dictated by circumstance, A partner organisation decides to bring your expertise in-house and you are no longer required. Another might choose a cheaper option. Another company might be acquired by a larger one and your role does not figure in the new design. Suddenly, you are part of the ancien régime. The new court does not even know your name. These things happen and they are not personal, even though they often feel that way. They are just turns of the wheel.

But not all endings are so neutral. Particularly when your business is built on white-labelling partnerships – as ours has been – you soon discover that endings carry their own risks.

Matériel de Guerre

In a white-labelling arrangement, you work invisibly behind a larger partner’s brand. Your name, your company, your fingerprints and DNA are all suppressed so the end-client sees only the prime contractor. You deliver the expertise but not the visibility.

The risk is that when the partnership ends, you leave behind what in military language would be called matériel de guerre. You leave your equipment on the battlefield: templates, frameworks, reports, methods, entire ways of working. You leave behind networks, contacts, clients and sometimes even individuals who were once part of your circle. All of it becomes the property of someone else, to be reused, repeated or resold.

Unlike an army in retreat, you cannot destroy the weapons you abandon. You cannot break up the machine guns or burn the maps so they cannot be used against you. In this arena, your matériel, i.e. your intellectual property – remains intact, albeit abandoned. And it can be deployed by people who do not possess your depth of knowledge, your craft or your context.

Over the years I have seen this play out in numerous ways. We have had our logo copied because it appears on our templates, despite its origin being personal and deliberate: the hummingbird – the colibri – chosen to honour the Jamaican heritage and origins of Gibson Research Consultancy and was designed by a respected Jamaican artist. We have had our strapline lifted wholesale, a line that my son, 9 at the time, came up with. We have seen our templates resurface years later, presented back to us by new clients who thought they were their own. We have been handed report formats to “use” which were, word for word, our own documents, only stripped of our name. I have seen phrases from our strategy papers, that were shared confidentially, lifted and repurposed in conference decks by other people. A seed of a business idea, shared in confidence, stolen and our authorship erased.

Our know-how often feels like flotsam washing back to shore, familiar, yet unmoored from its origin. And I have asked myself more than once: does anybody have their own thoughts anymore?

The Case for Leaving Maggie’s Farm

When I wrote the article ‘Maggie’s Farm’, I gave myself a hard time. I admitted that I had too often equated defiance with leadership, walking away in anger or self-righteousness rather than doing the harder work of building and listening. But there are cases where leaving a partnership is not only legitimate but necessary.

Disrespect is one of them. There have been partnerships where our knowledge and expertise were dismissed with a wave of the hand. It reveals a lack of understanding of what we do and a lack of respect of the skills required. And then, once we have left the relationship, the partner realises with a cold sweat: “how are we going to do that project in Mogadishu now?”

There have been moments when  our humanity has been ignored. In one instance, members of our team were living through multiple earthquakes in their region, at a time when projects were being delivered on deadline. There were hundreds of tremors over a period of 36 hours, the smallest of these were 3.8, which would bring down a typical British house. And yet, not a single message came from our partner to ask if they were safe. They knew about the earthquakes but chose to ask only about the status of deliverables. That silence said everything we needed to know.

Then there are the games around payments. In one case, we were fighting for an invoice to be paid after 23 months of submitting it. This was our new record, the previous one being 15 months. Then there are invoicing systems that are so labyrinthine and hostile that you wonder if they were designed to make smaller vendors give up in frustration. Imagine every 20th vendor deciding not to bother invoicing because of the poor usability and opacity of the payment platform where invoices are to be submitted. This is a money-making scheme that only a sadistic genius could devise. We have noticed also that bigger companies like to extend their payment terms in times of higher interest, where deliberately holding onto the money makes them more in interest than paying you on time. Other times, it is simple dysfunction: their internal sh*tshow undermining your carefully run ship. Whatever the reason, chasing up money is corrosive and ‘weathering’.

Another recurring theme is the imbalance of knowledge. We bring in specialist expertise to strengthen their service but too often the people we hand over to inside these large firms have little idea of what they are selling. They do not know what goes into our reports, what data we collect, or how to interpret it. Even after years of working together, there is little sign of learning or evolution on their side. That is disheartening.

And then there are the more obvious affronts. Being invited to a meeting in Manhattan and flying myself there from Leeds and two of my colleagues from Guatemala, only to be ghosted. Then, the meeting is rescheduled for Boston three months afterwards, and arriving there, only to be ghosted again. We try to tell ourselves that better angels prevail, that these slights are not intentional. Perhaps it is just the blindness of “salary people” in huge companies who do not stop to consider the cost to small businesses. But intent or not, the impact is the same: disrespect and waste.

Finally, there is bullying and hostility. It often begins as a symbiotic relationship: we provide a service they cannot, they provide the scale and access we cannot. But over time, this can curdle. Individual managers or directors sometimes grow defensive, threatened by what they do not understand. Leaders without much empathy or with personality disorders begin to use passive aggression, with biting hostility or outright intimidation. I used to call the emails I would receive from one director “baseball bat emails” because the effect of reading was similar to feeling a crack of a baseball bat across my face (I do actually know what that feels like). What began as cooperation ends as coercion.

One client relationship can display all of these characteristics at once. And when this happens, the decision is simple: no thank you, we are out of here. We leave Maggie’s Farm. There is always another farm, just down the path. In places like Boston, New Jersey or Manhattan, you stop working with one company and you literally only need to cross the street and introduce yourself to another. It is that easy.

The Wheel Turns

I am not naïve. I know that sometimes beggars cannot be choosers. I often cite that Bob Marley line “If you are the big tree, then we are the small axe” to illustrate who really wields the power in the white-labelling relationship. But this is fantasy. The reality is the smaller partner like us does not have that much power at all. So, there are periods in the life of a company where survival requires you to accept less-than-ideal terms. White-labelling partnerships can open doors that would otherwise remain closed. They can give you reach, exposure to global projects and a steady stream of work.

But the costs are real. And the risks of staying too long in a toxic relationship are greater than the risks of leaving. To anyone considering this route, I would say: weigh carefully. Symbiosis can be productive, even beautiful, when both sides respect each other’s roles. But when it tips into exploitation, erasure or hostility, it is time to recognise the signs of the wheel turning.

Not every ending is a failure. Some partnerships end with a handshake and a smile. Others end with a shrug, the result of structural change. Some end in silence, leaving behind all your matériel de guerre for others to use. And some end in confrontation, when you finally draw the line and say: this is not acceptable.

Each of these endings is another turn of the wheel. It is a reminder that business – or life – is never static. Just as people evolve, so too do relationships, companies and contexts. What matters is not clinging desperately to every farm, every field, every partnership but recognising when the season has changed.

And in the end, leaving Maggie’s Farm is not just about defiance, but about discernment as well. It is also about remembering that what you can carry forward, i.e. your craft, your integrity and your humanity, cannot be stolen, copied or ghosted. Those remain yours, even as the flotsam drifts back to shore.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, August 2025