The call was Wednesday. The post-it has been on my desk since Wednesday. I read it again this morning and found no new information in it, which I expected, and could not stop myself from doing anyway.
It is Saturday. Coffee, no agenda. The kind of morning that either turns into something or doesn’t.
I decided to try to turn it into something.
What I tried: looking at what happens if the post-it doesn’t produce anything.
I have five names I contacted over the past four months. One real conversation. One promise of some thinking. Four silences. What I’ve been working from is relationship capital. People who know me, who have some reason to understand why I am calling, who have a direct reference point for the problem I am describing. I chose them because they felt like the most defensible first move. They knew the problem from watching it happen. They knew me from working alongside it.
The question I sat with this morning: what happens after this list?
So I made a second list. The once-removed people. A contact from a 2019 conference who runs customer success at a company I’ve never worked with. Someone referred to me by email two years ago, right before a particularly bad stretch at work, who I was too pressed to follow up with properly. A former colleague from a previous company, twelve years out, who I liked and lost track of. I built this list for about forty minutes at the kitchen table.
What I found: almost everyone on it knows me through the institution.
Not because I lack a life outside work. Because the professional relationships I built were built as part of the company. Every conference I attended, I attended as a representative of my employer. Every introduction was attached to something, even when no one said it explicitly. The shorthand was always partly organizational. The part that wasn’t organizational was the part I actually built myself, and that part is harder to separate out than I thought.
Twenty-three names. That is what I have when I subtract the five I’ve already contacted from what I can loosely call my relevant professional network. Twenty-three people who know me in the way that matters for this, who I haven’t yet contacted.
I wrote the number down. Then I sat with the fact that writing a number down is not a plan.
I had thought, for a while, that the challenge of client acquisition was about having enough relationships. Enough names, enough history, enough people who would pick up when I called. What I am starting to understand is that the challenge is about how relationships travel.
Mine are mostly tied to a context that is about to change. Right now I am still Leigh from the company. The company name does not appear in my outreach emails, but it appears in the subtext of every conversation. When I call someone from a shared professional past, what travels with my name is a context. That context has another two and a half months.
After September 19, I am just Leigh. I am genuinely not sure what that does to the twenty-three names, or to whatever list comes after that. I think it might actually help, in ways I cannot prove from this side of the date. But I cannot tell this morning if that is a real insight or something I am telling myself because September is still six weeks away and today is a Saturday with coffee and nothing else on the calendar.
I don’t know how to distinguish those two things before I am on the other side. That might be the whole problem.
The post-it is still on my desk. The number is twenty-three. I need to refill my coffee, which is a small thing, but it is the clearest next step I have this morning.