Every story has a beginning...
... ours is made of science, engineering.
The Trust Foundry grew out of Australian consulting. Our founder started as a consulting engineer in climate risk: water scarcity, extreme rainfall, flooding. He did business development the way most engineers do. He tried to convince, rationally.
Then he trained with the Business of Trust. Keith Dugdale became his coach, mentor and business partner. He rebuilt his approach by choice, because it made sense. It rests on pragmatism, field realities, first principles and one truth: people buy from people. It also holds up to the scientific method: hypothesis, samples, measurable evidence. Recent brain imaging research helps explain how it works.
Since 2015, we have built on those foundations in trust building and conversational intelligence. We apply the same method to commercial systems: processes, tools, KPIs, compensation, training and coaching. Since 2024, we integrate AI tools.
We are a small boutique. We have worked in 19 countries and trained or coached more than 1,600 professionals. That comes from 15 years of focus on trust in business.
We are proud of our lineage with the Business of Trust, and excited to write the next chapter. Technology, sharp pricing and creative business models matter. Our observation is that the recurring limiting factor is trust-building skill, and it is a differentiator you can observe.
Our clients add trust-building capability to their technical edge. As trusted advisors, they sharpen their value propositions, protect margins and accelerate their pipeline.
You can read more about our story, and why we believe not all sales stories should be listened to.
- 2015Building on the Business of Trust method
- 2024Integrating AI tools
- 19Countries we have worked in
- 1,600+Professionals trained or coached
- 15Years focused on trust in business
A lot of sales stories... fail the B2B field tests.
Some of these stories have real roots in the history of sales. Our founder believed them. So did many of the people we train: of nearly 900 participants surveyed between 2016 and 2019, 56% agreed that the training significantly changed how they perceive sales. In today's complex B2B sales, these stories no longer hold, if they truly ever did.
Sales is about controlling the narrative. Influence, convince, outcompete. It is manipulative, and not a respectable profession.
Sales is about helping buyers make a decision they will not regret. The buyer carries the risk, and notices when they are being worked. Manipulation adds to the doubt instead of removing it. Done well, sales is a service, and that is what earns respect.
Sales is a numbers game. More activity means more revenue.
Activity volume is not trust volume. Reach without relevance costs reputation. The bill comes due, usually in the deal you needed most.
A brilliant solution sells itself. The technical edge is unique, so it wins.
Buyers are surrounded by solutions that look comparable, or are. Their hard problem is not choosing a technology. It is making a decision inside their own organisation, and finding trustworthy individuals that may support them.
Relationships open doors. Arguments, technical edge and sharp pricing close deals.
Trust works from the first conversation to the last. It reduces the sales theatre and creates the conditions for real conversations. Without it, even good arguments are heard as a pitch. Buyers can not care about your ideas until they believe you care about their priorities.
Our role is to rescue the buyer.
Nobody is waiting to be saved. Buyers are already working it out. The best we can do is help them do it better or faster.
Which of these stories is your team telling itself right now? And what is it costing your commercial performance?
Our purpose
Helping you build trust, one great conversation at a time, and get more of the clients you want.
Helping you build trust, one great conversation at a time, and get more of the clients you want.
A lot of commercial advice optimizes the transaction. We work on what produces it.
Every conversation with a customer, partner or employee adds to trust or takes from it. We help you make it add, on purpose.
Get that right and the transaction tends to follow: better-qualified pipeline, shorter decisions, and growth that holds because it rests on trust the buyer has experienced.
Our values
We apply these values to our own work before we ask anyone else to. The same candour, diagnosis and discipline we bring to an engagement is what you can expect from us with your clients and their prospects.
| Trust is the skill | In complex B2B sales, trust decides outcomes as much as technical expertise does. We help experts build it deliberately, through listening, candour, and how they frame a conversation. |
|---|---|
| Candour, without pressure | We challenge assumptions openly, including our clients' own, and let decisions happen at their own pace. |
| Built from first principles | Every engagement is shaped by how your buyers, your market, and your delivery constraints actually work. |
| Revenue quality first | We design for margin, durability, and a pipeline your team can actually deliver on. |
| Capability that stays | Our work builds ownership and judgement in your people, so it doesn't leave when we do. |
| Selective by design | We choose the clients and sectors we work with, and favour organisations built for the long run. |
Our approach
We are hands-on, delivering results at pace. We work with leadership teams at Professional Services Firms, Technology Companies, Start-ups & New Ventures, and mission-driven institutions to redesign how they build trust with the people they sell to.
We are a small boutique firm by choice. You work directly with senior people — no handover to a junior team after the pitch — and the practical experience gathered on one mandate feeds straight into the next.
Engagements are targeted, senior and outcome-anchored. No one-size-fits-all playbook: the design fits your market, your sales motion and your culture.
And the goal is a system your team can run without us — not a dependency on us. The ultimate measure of our success is yours.
Trust, by Design
Many organisations treat trust as a byproduct: run enough transactions and trust follows. In our experience, it works the other way around. Trust does not have to wait for years of repeat business to emerge. It starts in conversations that are engaging, relevant and valuable. Those conversations can be designed, prepared and practised. Sales motions and systems adjusted to enable them.
Our Founder
"The entire market preaches the necessity of trust, but virtually no one provides the engineering specifications or protocol to achieve it. Far from motivational slogans, we exist to solve that structural failure."
Before any of this, Julien trained as a civil engineer — a discipline with no patience for wishful thinking. A structure either carries the load or it doesn't; a claim either holds up under measurement or it's marketing. That instinct didn't stay behind when he moved into business development. It's why "just be authentic" never read as an answer, and why he stopped treating trust as too soft to be engineered deliberately — the same way you'd engineer anything else that has to bear weight.
From there: Big Four and BearingPoint consulting, the World Economic Forum and the International Chamber of Commerce, DeepTech scale-ups growing from €0 to €100M. Stops from Sydney to Boston, Dublin to Cape Town, Station F to Tel Aviv. What carried across all of it: a practical lens, an allergy to the status quo, and communication blunt enough that people remember it.
Why a foundry?
A foundry doesn't cast one alloy and call it finished. Conditions change — new demands on the metal, new stresses it has to survive — so the work is finding the next formula that holds. Trust works the same way: what earns it shifts with the culture, the technology, and what we keep learning about how people actually decide. That ongoing search is the discipline the name is borrowed from, not a fixed recipe applied once.
It's also a statement about where the attention goes. A foundry's output was never the mechanical part or the sword : that's what someone else does with the alloy afterward. The output is the material itself, the property that lets the sword hold an edge at all. We spend less time on the form work — the pitch, the script, the close — and more on the alloy underneath it: the conditions that make trust possible before any of that starts. Trust isn't what's left over once a deal closes. It's what the deal was cast from.
Contact us
We're always happy to discuss your opportunities. Reach out, and connect with Julien.
The booking calendar can’t show here because scheduling cookies are off. Click the button to pick a time on the Calendly booking page in a new tab, or allow cookies through “Cookie preferences” in the footer to book without leaving this page. You can also email julien@trustfoundry.eu.