Fifteen days.
I counted this morning. I have been measuring this in different units for months: seven months, fourteen weeks, September 19. Fifteen days has a different texture. It fits on a phone screen.
I have been adding notes to account files. I noticed I was doing it a few days ago, then went back and realized I had been doing it for two weeks, maybe three. Nobody asked me to. I have filed CRM updates throughout my tenure the way I have filed quarterly reports: accurate, sufficient, meeting the requirement. Not elaborately.
Now I am adding things like: Elena at the healthcare account asks the same question every time she’s nervous. She phrases it as an administrative question. It’s always a signal. Call her, don’t email. I am adding: the Q3 renewal on this account almost died not because of the product gap but because their CFO changed and nobody reintroduced the ROI story in terms the new one cared about. Keep that in mind when Q4 comes up. I am adding: they are going through a merger and have not said so directly, but the procurement process has gotten unusual, and that’s what it usually means.
Most of this is not in any file anywhere. It has been in my head for years. I am trying to get it out of my head before I leave.
I committed, back in June, to writing the Q4 summary. I called it my last deliverable. A handoff brief, done well, for whoever takes the territory in October. I still intend to do this. I have a template and some notes started.
What I am realizing is that the brief will be accurate and insufficient. I can write the contract terms, the renewal history, the key contacts, the ARR by account. I can write had a successful QBR in August, no outstanding risk flags. That is correct information. It is not the whole picture of what makes an account manageable.
The whole picture of one of my accounts is not in the CRM. The whole picture is that my contact there has worked at the company for eleven years, knows exactly where the friction is in their procurement process, and will tell you what is actually happening if you ask her directly. Not everyone asks directly. I always ask directly. It has never failed to get me a real answer.
How do you put that in a handoff brief? I have been trying different versions of it. “Contact her directly for procurement context” loses most of what makes it useful. “She is a more reliable read on internal dynamics than the VP who signs the contract” is closer. “She will tell you what’s actually going on if you build the relationship first” is probably what I would say to someone sitting next to me.
I am not writing that version in the official brief.
I want to be clear about something. Or, I want to be honest about something, which is a slightly different bar. I am not telling this story to suggest that accounts cannot be handed off, or that the next person will not figure it out, or that the company cannot function without me there. Companies manage. They always manage. Accounts renew. Relationships rebuild. Someone new will earn the access I have over a few quarters of showing up consistently.
I know all of this.
What I am sitting with is a different question. For twenty-four years, the company paid me to carry information that does not transfer cleanly. The pattern recognition, the reading of what the question behind the question is, the understanding of what unusual phrasing on a routine email actually signals: that lives in the person. Not the file.
I knew this. I used it as the consulting thesis. The whole 60-day save argument is built on it. Now I am inside it, trying to do the right thing with fifteen days left, adding notes to files nobody will look at closely, and I am not certain the brief is for the next person.
It might be, mostly. I would like it to be, mostly.
But there is something else happening in these notes too, something I have not quite named yet. Like I am trying to make legible, on my way out, a kind of attention I have been paying for a long time without writing it down.
Whether that is useful to anyone else is the part I do not know yet.