I opened the yellow tab tonight.
Not on purpose. I was in the spreadsheet updating our grocery budget because Doug noticed we spent $87 at Whole Foods on what I described as “a few things for the week” and what the receipt described as twelve items including a $14 jar of olives. He didn’t say anything. He just held up the receipt the way a lawyer presents evidence, and I said “fair,” and then I was in the spreadsheet, and then I was in the other tab.
The 60-Day Save tab. Three bullet points I wrote at the end of Day 3 and haven’t looked at since. I highlighted them yellow because I didn’t know what color means “I think this might be real but I’m not ready to say that.”
Here’s what they say.
Pricing: $12-15K per engagement, or $4-5K/month retainer for portfolio monitoring.
Target client: Mid-market SaaS companies, $30-200M in annual recurring revenue, no dedicated renewals function.
Scope: 60-day engagement. Audit the at-risk accounts, build a save strategy, deliver an execution playbook. Optional: stay and run it.
That’s it. Three lines. I wrote them in maybe four minutes. They came out fast, which is either a sign that I know what I’m talking about or a sign that I haven’t thought about it hard enough. Both feel equally possible.
But here’s what I noticed when I looked at them tonight: they’re specific. Not “help companies with renewals.” Not “consulting around customer retention.” Three actual parameters. Price, client, scope. I’ve sat in enough vendor pitches to know that specificity is what separates a service from a vague intention to be helpful.
And I know this market. I know it the way you know your commute. Companies in that revenue range almost never have someone whose entire job is saving accounts that are about to churn. They have account managers who are also supposed to be upselling and also filing QBRs and also pretending to enjoy the company all-hands. When a $200K account signals it might not renew, everyone panics for two weeks and then goes back to their other seventeen priorities. I’ve watched it happen from the inside for, well. You know how long.
The 60-day save works because most accounts don’t decide to leave on the day they leave. They decide sixty to ninety days before the contract expires, during the period when nobody is paying close enough attention because the renewal date is still “a few months out.” By the time someone escalates it, you’ve got three weeks. I could write a case study about this from memory. I’ve done it at least forty times. I just never charged for it.
That’s the part that keeps snagging. I have done this work. I’ve saved accounts worth, I’m going to estimate conservatively, $8 million in lifetime contract value over my career. I just did it as part of a job that paid me a salary to do seventeen other things too. The idea that someone would pay $15,000 for something I’ve been doing for free feels both obvious and completely absurd.
I keep going back and forth. One minute I’m looking at these bullet points thinking this is a real service. There’s a clear buyer. I could articulate the value proposition in two sentences and the pricing is defensible. The next minute I’m thinking: you’ve never sold anything that wasn’t someone else’s product. You’ve never been the product. You’ve been the person who makes the product sound good. Those are not the same skill.
Or maybe they’re closer than I think. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I need to talk to someone who isn’t me about this. Not Doug, not yet. Someone who would actually know if this is viable. Someone who’s hired consultants for exactly this kind of work and can tell me whether $12K is laughable or low. I don’t have that person. I have 24 years of contacts in an industry I’m pretending I haven’t been mentally composing a resignation letter for, and I cannot figure out which of those contacts I could call without it getting back to my company by Thursday.
The spreadsheet says I can afford to leave. The phone note says I have an idea. The three bullet points say the idea has a shape. What I don’t have is a single data point from outside my own head confirming that any of this is real.
I’m starting to think that’s the next thing. Not more tabs. Not more bullet points. An actual conversation with an actual person who can tell me something I don’t already know.
I just have to figure out who.