The attorney’s office acknowledged my intake form Tuesday afternoon. Two business days to schedule a consultation. It is Wednesday. I have been thinking about what I need to have ready.
The agreement, obviously. I’m going to scan it properly before I go in, not photograph it the way I photographed every school permission slip during the pandemic years, crooked, with my thumb in the corner. The clause is on page three. I’ll have it flagged. I am, it turns out, the person who shows up to legal consultations with a labeled document and a written list of questions. I suspected this about myself.
What I’m less certain about is who else I need to be ready to discuss.
An employment attorney who works these cases is going to want more than the document. They’ll want to understand what I’m planning to do and who I’m planning to do it with. I can’t just say “consulting” and sit back. They’ll ask: have you identified potential clients? Have you spoken to anyone? Are any of the people you’re thinking of currently at companies doing business with your employer?
I haven’t spoken to anyone. But I have thought about people. And when I say I’ve thought about them, I mean I’ve carried approximately seven names around in my head for four months, maybe eight, without writing any of them down.
Two I can’t think about clearly yet. One is a VP of Operations at an account I’ve managed for five years, or I want to say five, but I looked it up and it’s six. The other is a Head of Customer Success I know from three years of QBR prep and one dinner in Denver where she told me exactly what their vendor selection process looked like from the inside. Whether I can call either of them depends on what the attorney tells me. That’s the clause. That’s why I submitted the form.
But the other six names are not in any disputed territory.
There’s someone I worked with at my second company who now runs a 200-person SaaS business I’ve watched on LinkedIn for a decade. There’s a woman I sat on a panel with in 2019 who said, flatly, “companies don’t lose enterprise accounts to the competition, they lose them to neglect,” and looked at me when she said it. There’s a former colleague who went in-house at a portfolio company and sends me a December email every year asking if I’ve thought about going independent. I have replied to those emails in a way that was not a no but was also not a yes. For four years.
I have been keeping them in my head because writing them down turns a vague comfort into an actual list. A list implies a sequence. A sequence implies calls. Calls imply pitches. I was not ready to think about pitches because the attorney question was still open.
The attorney question is still open. For these six, the list isn’t contingent on it.
Wednesday evening I opened a new note and typed six names. First and last, company, how I know them, when we last spoke. Five came easily. The sixth is someone I haven’t talked to in three years. He’s at a company I’ve never sold to. No conflict. I typed his name anyway and then sat there looking at it.
I know what I’d want to say to him. I know the shape of the conversation. What I don’t know is whether the opening I have in my head would land after three years, or whether I’d need to start somewhere else first.
The list is in my phone now. Six names. The other two are still waiting on the attorney, in a separate category, not gone. I’ve been carrying these people around for months telling myself I’d write them down once the legal question was settled. I have not settled the legal question. I wrote the list anyway, minus two.
The thing I keep learning is that I know what I want to do. I don’t know how to start. I thought I would have to solve that exactly once.