I Built a Fleet on a Strategy That Wasn't Mine to Set

We had taken over McDonald’s deliveries after acquiring Foodpanda.pl, and building our own fleet was my bet on where the business went next. Not a side experiment. Vehicles, drivers, contracts, a real operation.

Then the holding changed strategy. The UK fleet was closed over a single weekend. One call from Berlin, and the thing I had built was over.

The mistake was not the bet

I still think the fleet was the right call for that market at that time. What I got wrong was more basic: I committed capital, people and two years to a strategy I could execute but could not defend. Nobody had asked, before we started, who was able to reverse this decision and under what circumstances.

There is a version of this mistake in most companies that sit inside a bigger group, or depend on a single platform, or build on one customer’s roadmap. You can be completely right about the market and still lose, because the person who can end it does not need your agreement.

What I would ask now, before starting

Three questions, before committing anything I would be sorry to lose.

Who else can end this. Not who disagrees with it. Who has the authority to stop it without needing me to sign anything.

What would make them. Not whether they would today, but what change in their situation makes ending it the sensible move from where they sit.

What survives if they do. If the answer is nothing, the bet needs to be smaller, or the arrangement needs to change before the money goes in.

How it ended matters too

The UK fleet closed over a weekend. I refused to do it that way in Poland. Obligations of around 7 million złoty were negotiated down to under two million, the drivers were helped into other jobs, and the accounts closed with money left over. Weeks later I resigned.

When the transport pulled away with the last cars and I stood alone on the street, I cried for the first time in that job.

I would make the same choice on the wind-down again. It cost time and it cost me the role. But how a thing ends is the only part still in your control once somebody else has decided that it ends, and the people who worked for you remember that part longest.

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Source: adapted and translated from Part Two of the Polish original Siła Pędu*, ch. 6: partnerships, expansion, and M&A.*