Monday morning. 9:00 AM standup. Seven people on Zoom, four cameras on, three off. My manager is sharing his screen, walking through the Q2 pipeline review. I’m nodding. I’m making the right faces at the right times. I’ve been making the right faces in meetings for so long I could probably do it asleep.
Here’s what I’m actually thinking about: whether $12,000 per engagement is too high for a first client.
He’s talking about one of our largest accounts. Their renewal is in 63 days. I know this because I put their renewal date in my calendar in January, which is more than anyone else on this call did. He’s saying we need to “get ahead of the renewal conversation,” like it’s a new idea. I have been ahead of this renewal since before he was promoted.
I am nodding.
This is the part I didn’t expect. I thought the hard part of doing this, whatever this is, would be building the business. The buyer question, the pricing, the pitch. Those things are hard. But the thing that’s actually changed in the last twelve days is how I experience the job I still have.
I used to sit in these meetings and think about the work. The account, the strategy, what needed to happen next. Now I sit in them and think about why I’m still sitting in them. Like having two browser tabs open and the wrong one is in the foreground.
After the standup I had a one-on-one with one of the newer account managers on my team. She’s about eighteen months in and she’s sharp. The kind of person who reads the client’s 10-K before a review. She asked me about a renewal going sideways. Mid-market account, unresponsive for three weeks.
I gave her the answer in about ninety seconds. The client isn’t unresponsive because they’re unhappy. They’re unresponsive because someone on their side got reorganized and the new stakeholder doesn’t know there’s a renewal coming. You don’t send more emails. You find the new person and start over.
She wrote it down like I’d handed her something valuable.
It is valuable. That’s the part I keep coming back to. What I know has a specific market value outside this building. Not in a motivational poster way. Specifically. I sat through a consulting engagement in 2022 where an outside team charged us $180,000 to tell us to “proactively engage stakeholders in the renewal window.” That was the deliverable. A sentence. I could have written, implemented, and measured that recommendation in the time it took them to schedule the kickoff.
OK, that sounds bitter. I don’t mean it that way. Or I do, slightly. But the point isn’t that they were bad at their jobs. The point is that the thing they sold is a thing I can do. And I’ve been doing it for free, inside a salary, for 24 years.
Here’s what else I noticed today. Sitting in the standup, watching my manager talk about “getting ahead” like he invented the concept, I realized something.
I’m not just thinking about leaving anymore. I’ve mentally left.
And I don’t know if that’s honest or dangerous. Maybe both. Because I still have this job. I still get paid. People are still asking me questions and I’m still giving good answers. But the part of me that used to care whether the strategy landed, whether the account actually renews for another three years, that part has gone quiet.
I’m not phoning it in. Not yet. I think I’d notice if I were. Probably. But there’s a version of this where the gap between showing up and being present gets wide enough that someone else sees it first. And I don’t want that. I’ve been here too long to leave badly.
So now I have two silences. At work, I’m not talking about leaving. At home, I’m not talking about planning. This is the only place I’m saying what’s real, and nobody in my actual life reads it.
Unless Doug gets very specific with a search engine. Which he won’t. Doug searches for two things: insurance regulations and restaurant reviews.
Probably safe.
Probably.