Wednesday. I tried again. Not in the kitchen. At my desk in the bedroom, which is technically a desk but functions primarily as a place where mail goes to die. I moved three catalogs, a field trip packet for a trip that already happened, and a phone charger that doesn’t work but that I keep because it might. Optimism in a cable.
I didn’t open the one-pager. Instead I opened a new doc and started writing the $2.2 million story.
Not as a service description. Not as a pitch. Just as what happened.
- Enterprise account, one of our top ten. Three-year contract up for renewal in four months. Everything looked fine. Usage strong, stakeholders engaged, quarterly reviews green across the board.
Then the contact went quiet. Not hostile quiet. Just absent. Emails returned a day late instead of within the hour. Meeting requests accepted but rescheduled twice. The kind of drift that most people read as “they’re busy” and I read as “something changed.”
I pulled their org chart. Not ours. Theirs. The public one on their website, then the real one I’d been building in my head for two years. The VP of Operations, our primary executive sponsor, had been moved to a new division. Not fired, not promoted. Laterally reorganized into a role where our product wasn’t relevant to her anymore.
Nobody told us. Nobody was going to. The contract was going to expire and the person who would sign it had never heard of us.
I found the new stakeholder in three days. Got an introduction through a former colleague, had coffee, rebuilt the relationship in six weeks. The account renewed for three years at $2.2 million.
My manager at the time called it miraculous. It was not miraculous. It was noticing that a person had moved and doing something about it before the silence became permanent.
I wrote all of that in about forty minutes. It felt like a breakthrough. Actually, I don’t know if it was a breakthrough. It felt like forty minutes of writing something true, which is different from a breakthrough but better than three hours of trying to sound like a consulting firm’s website.
Then I sat there and thought: now what.
Because the story is real. It has a problem, an insight, and a result. But it’s still just a thing I did once, in a specific context, for a company I can’t name publicly. How do I turn “I notice what other people miss” into something someone would pay for?
This is what kept me up last night. Not the usual inventory of fears. A more specific one. What if the thing I’m good at isn’t a process? What if it’s not something I can package into sixty-day engagements with deliverables and timelines? What if my value is just attention? Paying attention when everyone else has stopped?
You can’t put that on a one-pager. “Leigh: she pays attention.” Nobody writes a check for that.
Except they do. That $180,000 consulting engagement I mentioned yesterday, the one that produced a single actionable recommendation? The recommendation was basically “pay attention to your stakeholders during the renewal window.” They just said it with more syllables and a framework diagram.
So maybe the question isn’t whether attention is sellable. It’s whether I can be the one selling it instead of the person inside the company quietly resenting the consultants who sold it worse.
That sounded angrier than I meant it. I don’t resent them. Much. I resent that they had the confidence to charge for something I’ve been doing for free. Which is a different thing. A useful thing, maybe, to be angry about.
Doug came upstairs while I was writing. He stood in the doorway for a second, then said “I’m going to bed.” It was 11:15. I said goodnight. He paused, like there was a follow-up coming, and then there wasn’t.
I don’t know what he almost asked. Maybe nothing. Maybe “what are you working on up here.” I closed the laptop at 11:40 and went downstairs to check the locks, which I always do and which takes ninety seconds and which felt tonight like a very long walk through a very quiet house.
The case study is written. The one-pager is still blank. And I’m starting to think the thing I’m best at might be the thing that’s hardest to explain.