The paper feels too light for the number printed on it. Proforma Invoice. Twenty thousand dollars. Your finger traces the wire instructions, the SWIFT code, the beneficiary name that still feels like a stranger’s. You’ve had the calls. The WhatsApp messages are full of reassuring thumbs-up emojis. They seem nice. They sound professional. And yet, every cell in your body is screaming at you to close the laptop and walk away.

What do you do? You follow the playbook. You ask for references. The supplier happily provides a list of two contacts, one in California and one in Germany. You call them. They are, of course, glowing. “Henry is wonderful to work with!” says the man in California. “Shipments are always on time,” says the woman from Germany. You hang up, feeling a tiny bit better, but the knot in your stomach hasn’t dissolved. It’s just… tighter.

The Theater of Testimonials

That’s because you instinctively know that a curated reference list is a piece of theater. It’s the business equivalent of a movie trailer that only shows the two best jokes. You’re not getting the full picture; you’re getting a performance designed to secure your deposit. I learned this the hard way with a shipment of 2,222 custom-molded parts a few years ago. The references were impeccable. The deposit was sent. The parts that arrived looked like they’d been sculpted by a toddler. The factory was great at their main product line, which is what the references were buying. They just had no idea how to make my product. The references weren’t lying, but they were telling a different story.

Become a Document Archaeologist

Meet Luna K. Her job title is technically ‘Quality Control Taster’ for a high-end coffee importer, but what she really is, is a pattern-detector. When she evaluates a new farm in Colombia, she doesn’t just taste the coffee. She looks at rainfall data for the last 12 years. She checks their past export logs. She wants to know if they’ve been consistently shipping 42-kilogram bags of single-origin Geisha beans, or if their manifests show a suspicious mix of lower-grade Castillo beans and, one time, a bizarre shipment of ‘assorted tropical fruit’ to a different consignee. A single bad cup of coffee could be a fluke. A pattern of inconsistency in the data is a fact. She’s not tasting a beverage; she’s tasting their entire operational history. You need to learn to do the same.

Of course, analyzing all this can make you go a little mad. You start seeing phantom inconsistencies everywhere, questioning good suppliers for no reason. It’s a lot like trying to parallel park in a tight spot; overthinking it makes it worse. You check the mirror, you turn the wheel, you inch back, you check the other mirror, you pull forward 2 inches. Suddenly you’re completely crooked and a guy on the sidewalk is shaking his head. Sometimes you just have to feel it. That’s the contradiction: you need the data, but the data alone isn’t the answer. I’m telling you to become a data forensic expert, and I’m also telling you that a gut feeling based on nothing is sometimes more valuable. I haven’t figured out how to reconcile that yet.

The Red Flags in the Data

But the data is where you start. The first and most obvious red flag is a chameleon product description. Your supplier, ‘Precision Medical Devices Co.’, wants a deposit for an order of 2,322 sterile catheter kits. They tell you this is their sole focus. But when you pull their shipping records, their recent Bills of Lading list a wild variety of goods. One shipment to Brazil was ‘Plastic Garden Gnomes.’ Another to Nigeria was ‘Used Textile Machinery.’ Last month, a shipment to the US was for ‘Automotive Air Fresheners.’ This isn’t a specialized manufacturer. This is a trading company, an agent, or a scavenger. They don’t control the factory, which means they don’t control quality, production schedules, or materials. The risk of something going wrong just increased by a factor of 42. You need to know who you’re really dealing with, and the product description is the first chapter of their real story. Getting access to this information is the crucial step. You can’t ask them for it, so you have to look it up in public customs records to build an objective picture.

Irregular Rhythms

Next, you look at the rhythm. A healthy factory has a heartbeat. You should see a relatively consistent flow of shipments. Maybe it’s two containers a month. Maybe it’s 22. The exact number doesn’t matter as much as the regularity. What you should be wary of is the erratic history. You see a supplier who shipped 12 containers in January, then nothing until a single container in May, then nothing again until a burst of 22 containers in October. This isn’t the rhythm of a stable manufacturer with a consistent workforce and production line. This is the sign of a middleman who lands a big order, scrambles to fill it by subcontracting to 12 different smaller workshops, and then goes dormant again. They might get the job done. But the chance of inconsistent quality skyrockets. Luna would call this a coffee farm that only produces when it gets enough rain by chance, not one that has stable irrigation. One is a profession, the other is a hobby.

Misleading Destinations

Finally, check the destinations and consignees. The supplier sends you a slick brochure showing their products being used in American hospitals and on German store shelves. They name-drop a few well-known companies. But their Bills of Lading tell a different story. For the last 2 years, 82% of their shipments have gone to two companies in Panama. The other 18% went to a handful of consignees in West Africa. There isn’t a single shipment to the US or the EU. This doesn’t automatically mean they’re a bad supplier. But it does mean they lied to you. And you have to ask yourself: if they were willing to lie about something so fundamental, what else are they lying about? Their material certifications? Their labor practices? Their ability to meet your quality standards?

Intuition, Informed

It’s not about finding a perfect supplier with a flawless 22-year history. Those are rare. It’s about matching the story in the data to the story they’re telling you. When they align, you can feel that knot in your stomach start to loosen. The wire transfer still feels significant, but it no longer feels like a gamble. It feels like an investment.

The Bill of Lading isn’t just a shipping document. It’s a confession. And it will tell you whether to send that wire or to walk away, long before you ever pick up the phone to call a ‘reference’.