Saturday morning. Doug went to get the car washed, which takes him about ninety minutes because he also stops at the hardware store and the place that does the good breakfast sandwiches. I know this because I have been married to this man for twenty-one years and he has never once just gotten the car washed.
I had ninety minutes. Maybe two hours if there was a line.
I should have done a lot of things with that time. Sorted through the pile of college brochures on Zoe’s desk. Called my mother. Waited for Doug to come home and said the thing I spent all of yesterday writing about needing to say.
Instead I opened my laptop and started researching.
LLC formation in my state. $150 filing fee, done online, takes about two weeks to process. I learned this in eleven minutes. I also learned I need an EIN from the IRS (free, five minutes), professional liability insurance ($800 to $1,500 a year), and a DBA registration for $50.
Then I looked up consulting rate benchmarks for SaaS account strategy. Ranges are wide. $150 to $350 an hour depending on specialization and client size. I’d been saying $200 to $250 in my head. The data says that’s conservative for someone with twenty-four years and a renewals specialty. I found one consultant, a woman in Texas, who charges $275 for work that overlaps significantly with what I’m describing. Her website is three pages and a contact form. She has five testimonials. One of them mentions “the sixty-day window,” which is close enough to my language that I stared at it for a while.
Then I built a competitive landscape spreadsheet. Four columns: name, focus area, pricing model, what they’re missing. Seven people doing adjacent work. Three former VP Sales types who went independent. Two pure-play retention consultants. Two broader account management coaches. None of them are framing it the way I would. Most lead with the methodology. None lead with the problem.
By 11:15 I had a document with four sections, clean headers, bullet points. It looked like something you’d bring to a meeting.
That’s when I recognized what I was doing.
This is my pattern. When I don’t know what to do about a difficult account, I build a deck. When a renewal is at risk and I’m not sure how to handle the conversation, I research the client’s business for three hours so I can walk in “prepared.” Prepared is a real word for a real thing, but it is also, sometimes, a way to avoid walking in at all.
I spent the morning doing the corporate version of productive avoidance. Gathering data instead of making a decision. Building a document instead of opening my mouth.
The information is useful. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. I needed to know what the market looks like. I needed to see that someone is already charging $275 for work that overlaps with mine. I needed to know the filing fee is $150, not the $5,000 I’d apparently invented in my head as a logistical barrier. All of that is real progress.
But I know myself well enough now to see the shape of it. Research feels like progress because it has all the qualities of progress. Documents. Numbers. Artifacts you can cite. It makes you feel competent and serious. Which I am. I am serious. I just happen to be serious in a way that does not require me to talk to anyone in my actual house.
Doug came home at 11:40 with a breakfast sandwich for me. Egg and cheese on a croissant. He does this every time he goes, even though I’ve never asked. I said thank you. He said the car looks good. I closed the laptop.
He didn’t ask what I was working on. I didn’t tell him.
But here is what I noticed while eating that sandwich. I have built something real over three weeks. A validated idea. A problem statement. Four case studies. And now a competitive landscape that tells me my pricing is not delusional and my idea is not a fantasy.
None of it requires me to be hiding. All of it could exist alongside a conversation with my husband. The research and the telling are not in competition. I’ve been treating them like they are because doing one gives me a reason to delay the other.
Doug was in the garage doing something with a hose. I thought about walking out there.
I didn’t. But something shifted this morning. The not-telling is starting to feel heavier than the telling would.
Four sections, clean headers, a $150 filing fee. A woman in Texas charging $275. And a husband in the garage who still doesn’t know.