I did the comparison last night. Forty-five minutes, not thirty. I had said thirty, which turned out to be wrong by a quarter of an hour, which I am going to call a reasonable estimate rather than a dramatic miscalculation.
I opened the exhibit PDF and the phone note side by side. The exhibit runs two columns: account name, category. The category designations are not dollar values, just tiers, which I found slightly interesting, or. No, mildly interesting. Not interesting enough to spend time on. The eight names I had estimated were there. Two I had been uncertain about were not on the list. That put me at fifteen names I can work with immediately and eight I will need to sort out the timing on, which the attorney and I can address before September 19.
Clean.
Except I kept stopping. Not because anything was surprising. The eight were exactly the kind of accounts the company would protect. If I had been the one building the list, I would have made most of the same choices. That is the particular texture of having this kind of specific knowledge: there are no surprises. You already know where the important things are.
I kept stopping because the document catalogues accounts and I kept thinking about people.
One of the eight names is a logistics company I have renewed three times. The exhibit entry is the company name and a tier designation. My relationship with that account is four years of quarterly calls and a procurement lead named Janet who asks, every time we meet, about something I mentioned the time before. She asked at our last QBR whether my daughter had started hearing back from colleges. I said we were early in the process. She hoped it went smoothly. Then we talked about the renewal.
The exhibit has the company name. I have Janet.
I am not saying this to argue that the document is wrong. The company has every reason to protect its interests, the clause is standard, and the exhibit exists to do exactly what it does. I knew the terms when I signed. And my attorney’s point, which she made clearly in June, is that the relationships travel with me. The clause restricts one category of action for one year. It does not touch anything else.
I am saying that sitting with a document that categorizes accounts by tier while I am remembering them as people felt different from what I had imagined it would feel like. Not worse. Just different.
That gap, the company sees accounts, I see people, is not incidental to the consulting thesis. It is the whole thing. The 60-day save works because somebody shows up who is paying attention to the person on the other side of the renewal, not just the contract terms. I have known this about myself for years. I had not considered that seeing it laid out on a PDF from HR would feel like anything at all.
What I have now is the clean list. Fifteen names, mine to work with after September 19. The outreach round got me through five of them already. The rest will require conversations I have not had yet.
I have thought carefully about what I will say. I have a version of the answer to “what are you doing now” that I have tested at home, out loud, more than once. It holds up.
I have not tested what it feels like to need it.
That part, the first call I make as just Leigh, is not something I can preview from here. Sixteen days.