First professional role, engaged to open a new provincial regional territory for an office furniture and supplies distributor. No existing customer base. No territory playbook. Just the structural reality of having to decide which relationships were worth building first.

Mentoring and coaching from senior operators reshaped the early instinct to chase every account. The discipline that emerged: identify the most profitable business relationships, build those first, scale the territory around them. The unnamed precursor to that discipline, applied before the language existed to describe it.