Tuesday night. Doug is watching a documentary about bridges. Not a metaphor. Actual bridges. Infrastructure engineering. He watches these the way some people watch true crime. Zoe is in her room with headphones on. Max is allegedly doing homework.
I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop open to a blank Google Doc titled “60-Day Save: Service Overview.” I have been staring at it for twenty-two minutes.
I have written hundreds of one-pagers in my career. Literally hundreds. Service descriptions, capability summaries, client-facing proposals. I have reviewed them for my team. I have sent them back with comments like “tighten the value prop” and “lead with the outcome, not the process.” I know exactly what a good one looks like. I could write one in my sleep for someone else.
For myself, I have written the following: one sentence, deleted. Another sentence, deleted. A bullet list that sounds like a job posting. A paragraph that sounds like a consulting firm’s website circa 2014.
Here’s the thing I keep running into. When I try to describe what I do, I either sound like a corporate brochure or like I’m explaining my job to someone at a dinner party who didn’t ask.
Version one: “Strategic renewal engagement consulting for enterprise SaaS organizations seeking to reduce involuntary churn in the final 60 days of the contract lifecycle.” I wrote that and then sat back and thought, I would not hire that person. That person sounds like a PDF nobody reads.
Version two: “I help companies keep their biggest clients by fixing what breaks in the last two months before a renewal.” Better. But also vague. What does “fixing” mean? Who is “I” and why should they trust me?
Version three: “24 years of enterprise account management distilled into a 60-day intervention that identifies why your client has gone quiet and builds the path back.” Getting warmer. Still sounds like I’m selling a product. But I’m not selling a product. I’m selling me. My judgment. My pattern recognition. The thing I did in ninety seconds for my colleague yesterday that she wrote down like it was valuable.
This is the problem Terri named without naming it. Who signs the check. Because the answer to “who signs the check” depends on what I’m actually offering, and I cannot seem to describe what I’m actually offering in a way that makes it sound like a thing instead of a person.
Selling a product is straightforward. Here’s the thing, here’s what it does, here’s the price. Selling expertise is different. You’re asking someone to believe that what’s in your head is worth paying for before they’ve seen it work. You’re asking them to trust your pattern recognition before the pattern shows up.
I’ve been on the other side of this. I’ve bought consultants. I’ve sat in kickoff meetings and thought, this person has nothing I don’t have except confidence and a slide deck. And now I’m trying to build the slide deck and I understand why the confidence comes first. You can’t describe expertise. Not really. You can only demonstrate it, or point to where you demonstrated it before.
Which means the one-pager might not be the right artifact. Or it is the right artifact but I’m solving the wrong problem. Maybe the question isn’t “how do I describe the 60-Day Save” but “who have I already done this for and what happened.”
I have names. Real ones. Accounts I saved that were 90% lost. The $2.2 million renewal in 2019 that my manager at the time called miraculous but was actually just me noticing that the VP of Operations had been moved to a new division and nobody had told our team. I found the new stakeholder, rebuilt the relationship in six weeks, and the account renewed for three years.
That’s not a one-pager. That’s a story. And I can tell stories. I just, apparently, cannot write the box that the stories go in.
The document is still open. It has two sentences that might be usable and a lot of white space. Doug’s bridge documentary ended. He’s making tea now. If he asks what I’m working on, I will say “just a writing exercise.” Which is true, sort of. In the same way “just some research” was true on Saturday.
The two silences are still intact. The one-pager is not.
I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe not in the kitchen.