Saturday morning. Doug sleeping. Kids still asleep. Coffee made. Laptop open at the kitchen table because the bedroom desk felt too formal for what I was about to do.
I Googled “client retention consultant.”
I’ve been staring at three case studies for three days, and I know what I do, and I cannot figure out what to call it. So I did what every corporate person does when they don’t know something. I Googled it.
The results were instructive. There’s an entire category. Client retention consulting, customer success strategy, renewal management. Individuals with LinkedIn profiles that say things like “I help B2B SaaS companies reduce churn by 30%.” That sentence does something mine doesn’t. It tells you the outcome with a number.
I tried to write my version. “I help enterprise companies retain at-risk accounts by reading the human signals the data misses.” I stared at that for about four minutes. It’s accurate. It’s also the kind of sentence that would make someone at a networking event say “oh, interesting” and then pivot to the appetizer table.
I tried again. “Renewal risk consulting.” Too narrow. “Relationship intelligence.” Too vague, and it sounds like a dating app. “Stakeholder insight consulting.” That one made me close my laptop for ten minutes.
Here is what I’m running into. The consultants I found online, the ones doing something adjacent to what I do, describe a process. A methodology. They have frameworks with names and steps and deliverables. “The Renewal Readiness Assessment.” “The Stakeholder Alignment Matrix.” “The 90-Day Retention Playbook.”
I don’t have a framework. I have twenty-four years of paying attention to when someone’s tone shifts in the third quarter of a sentence, or when a VP who used to respond in twenty minutes starts taking three days. I’m not running a methodology. I’m running an instinct I’ve spent two decades training and never once thought to package.
That’s not right. It’s not instinct. Instinct is the thing you’re born with. This is what happens when you start a job you’re not qualified for at 22 and your survival strategy is to watch everyone else very carefully and figure out what they need before they ask. Do that for 24 years and it starts to feel like breathing. But it’s not breathing. It’s a skill. I just never treated it like one.
The market doesn’t care about that distinction, though. The market buys process. Repeatable, trainable, transferable systems. The reason those consultants charge $300 an hour is because they can point to a document and say, “here’s the framework, here are the steps, here’s what you get.” Their framework might be doing exactly what I do, just slower, with more slides. But it has a name. A shape.
What I do has no shape. It’s just me, in a room, noticing things.
Somewhere around the fourth article I read this morning, I found a point that stuck. I didn’t bookmark it, which is very on brand. The idea was: you don’t have to name the skill. You name the problem.
I’m not selling “I notice when people go quiet.” I’m selling “your $800K account is about to lapse and nobody on your team sees it coming.” One of those is a personality description. The other is a problem statement. The problem statement is what goes on the website.
I sat with that. Zoe came downstairs around 8:15, got cereal, asked why I was up so early on a Saturday. I said “just reading” and she gave me the look teenagers give their parents when they suspect something but lack the energy to investigate.
I wrote it down: “Your enterprise accounts are at risk and your dashboard doesn’t show it yet.”
It’s not perfect. But it’s the first thing I’ve written about this that sounds like it belongs on a business card instead of in a journal entry.
I haven’t solved the naming problem. I’ve maybe turned it sideways. Instead of asking “what do I call what I do,” I’m asking “what do I call what goes wrong without me.” Those might be the same question. I’m not sure yet. But the second version has numbers attached. $2.2 million. $840K. Accounts that renewed because someone was paying attention and would have lapsed if nobody was.
Doug came downstairs around 8:30. I closed the laptop. Not hiding it. Just not ready to explain what I’m doing with a search history full of consultant titles and a problem statement in my Notes app.
He said, “you’re up early.”
I said, “couldn’t sleep.”
That was true. It was also the eighth time I’ve chosen a smaller truth over the whole one. I’m keeping count now, which is either progress or just a more organized version of avoidance. I genuinely don’t know which.