Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” It has sat on my weekly review sheet for years. It doesn’t say much about banking on its face. It says almost everything about how trust actually gets built.
Transactional selling doesn’t believe in trees. It believes in seeds that sprout by Friday. Identify the need, make the case, close the deal, move to the next name on the list. It’s efficient. It is also why so many relationships between banks and the people who want to do business with them feel thin the moment the pitch ends.
Institutional trust runs on a longer clock — and the businesses that last are the ones willing to run on it.
The banks and partners worth building with are rarely won in the first conversation. They are won well before that — by the people who showed up consistently, long before there was anything to close.
That isn’t a metaphor for us. Some of the relationships doing real work for Links today trace back to conversations that began years before Links existed — a closed deal that earned a referral, a referral that earned a reputation, a reputation that opened a door decades later. None of it was engineered as a sales funnel. It was a body of work, compounding quietly, over a stretch of time when most of it looked like nothing was happening at all.
That is uncomfortable for anyone measuring by the quarter. It is exactly how institutional relationships are actually formed. A bank CEO deciding whether to trust a new partner with the balance sheet is not weighing a pitch deck. He is weighing pattern — has this person, this firm, shown up the same way in the fifth conversation as the first? Has the relationship survived a stretch where there was nothing to sell?
We think about this every day at Links. Some of what we are building right now — a relationship in a new region, a conversation with someone we respect but have no active deal with, a note sent for no reason other than staying in touch — will not produce anything this year. It may not produce anything for several. That is not a flaw in the plan. It is the plan.
We are planting trees we may never sit under. That’s part of the responsibility that comes with building institutions instead of transactions.
The shade we’re sitting in today wasn’t created by us alone. It came from partners who believed in us, colleagues who invested in us, mentors who challenged us, and relationships nurtured long before there was any immediate return.
The discipline is simply to keep planting.
— Bob Kaestner
Founder & CEO