There’s an awkward kind of silence that falls over a dinner table when someone successful admits they’re not sure it was all worth it.

I’ve seen it happen. Two or three drinks in, someone with a big fancy title and the house in the right county and school fees handled, half-jokingly says that they’ve started to wonder what all of it was for, and the table doesn’t quite know where to look. Somebody changes the subject. Because in the circles I’ve spent twenty years in, consulting, banking, finance, the rooms where ambition is the shared language, that question isn’t supposed to have a place. You’re allowed to want more. You’re not allowed to ask whether more is the thing you want.

So most people don’t ask the question out loud. They ask it at 5am before anyone else is up. They ask it on the train home from the win that was supposed to feel like something and didn’t. They ask it, and then they get back to work, because the machine doesn’t pause for an existential wobble and the mortgage doesn’t care how you feel about the corporate climb.

Here is what I’ve learned, both from my own version of that question and from the hundreds of hushed conversations I’ve had since I started writing here. You are not the only one. Not even close. The people you assume have it figured out are asking the same thing behind the same closed doors. The difference is nobody says it first.

This is where I say it first.

I’m not here to sell you an escape plan, or a four-step method for “designing your dream life,” or a screenshot of my revenue. I had a head start on some things and started well behind on others. I’ll be honest about both. What I write about is the part that gets left out of the success story: the trade-offs, the sacrifices, the cost of the extra mile you never agreed to pay, and the strange, difficult work of figuring out what “enough” looks like once you already have the thing you were chasing.

If you’ve felt that question forming and had nowhere to put it, this is the place. Pull up a chair. Stay a while.

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For me the questions had been arriving for a long time and I’d been pushing them down. One ordinary Thursday, one of them didn’t leave.

I was mid-way through something I couldn’t step out of, the kind of work I’d have described, without a second thought, as important. My phone was going, there was a presentation to prep and internal politics to navigate. And somewhere underneath the noise of it, a small, inconvenient thought surfaced and refused to leave. I have been doing a version of this exact day for years, and I have never once stopped to ask, do I still want it.

I want to be honest about what that thought was not. It wasn’t burnout, exactly. It wasn’t a breakdown or a crisis or a single dramatic straw. From the outside, nothing was wrong. That was the disorienting part. Everything was, by every metric I’d inherited, going well. The problem was that “going well” had stopped translating into anything I could feel.

I’d spent over a decade getting very good at answering other people’s questions. What’s the risk? What’s the cost? What’s the fastest route from here to the number? The one question I’d never turned on myself was the simplest one, the one every consultant is trained to keep asking until they hit the root of the problem.

Why.

Why this.

Why more.

Why now.

When I finally asked it, the answers were thinner than I expected. A lot of it turned out to be momentum. Some of it was other people’s definitions of a good life that I’d absorbed so early I’d mistaken them for my own. And a surprising amount of it was fear, the quiet, respectable fear that if I stopped climbing, I wouldn’t know who I was.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about. Defining enough sounds like relief. In practice, it’s harder than wanting more ever was.

Wanting more is the easy part. The whole system is built to reward it, and you never have to justify it to anyone. Enough is the opposite. Enough means saying no to things you’re entirely capable of doing. It means turning down the retainer, taking the summer off, disappointing people whose approval you’re used to earning. It means sitting in the silence with“what do you do?” and not rushing to fill it with a title that makes the other person nod.

And it means giving up the story that one more rung will finally be the one that settles you, because that story, for all its costs, is also a comfort. As long as you’re still chasing, you never have to find out whether arriving would have been enough.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve got this fully worked out. I haven’t. I still catch myself reaching for more out of pure habit. But I’ve stopped mistaking the habit for a value, and that one shift has changed more than I can put in a single post, which is part of why I keep writing here.

I’ve come to believe the most useful thing I can do isn’t to give you my answer. It’s to give you permission to ask the question, and company while you do.

So let me ask you the one question I avoided for years. If more isn’t the answer, and some part of you already suspects it isn’t, what would enough look like for you?

Not the version you’d say share confidently at dinner. The real one.

I’d like to know. And if you’ve been whispering the question and haven’t had anywhere to put it, subscribe and stay. This is what I write about and you’re in good company. More of us are asking than anyone lets on.

I’d been avoiding a talker at a fintech event by feigning thirst and heading for the bar. It was February, at a fancy law firm in the City, one of those buildings with a lot of glass, an open-plan lobby, and lifts that smell of new carpet. Drink in hand, I said hello to the man standing next to me. He said his name was Dan. Then he asked what I did.

“I’m a consultant.”

Then a few minutes of me trying to explain what that meant: strategy consulting, working with early-stage founders, a bit of lecturing. Each part was real, but the sum of them describing no one I recognised. I heard myself add another clause, then another, then stopped as abruptly as I’d started. There was a beat before Dan spoke.

“Cool. You should meet James over there, he works on corporate spin outs. He might be able to help you.”

He didn’t offer to make the introduction. He was already looking past my shoulder, working the room.

I nodded and hovered, working out how I’d introduce myself to James.

I’d quit my company and any remaining corporate work over Christmas, so I was two months into whatever this was. Long enough that the excitement had thinned. Not long enough to have anything solid to say in its place.

When you work for a big firm the question is easy. Hi, I’m Neema, VP of Transformation at impressive-name company. Earlier, as an analyst, the company name on its own was enough. Repeatable. Solid. The company name does almost all of the work - you just supply your first name and a title, and the person opposite decides in under a second whether you’re worth another two minutes of the evening.

Without the company, you’re on your own.

I did introduce myself to James. The lack of conviction must have shown, because after a brief exchange he said they weren’t looking to add to the team. I found myself hovering between the bar and the exit.

There’s an arc to this that I’ve noticed since. In the first weeks after leaving, you’re excited. You have a story about the next chapter and you tell it with the confidence of someone announcing a plan. It gets you through the first ten conversations. By month two or three you’ve had enough of those conversations that the words have started to feel borrowed. You hear yourself say “consultant” or “advisor” or “coach” and none of them describes how you spend your week. Every time you use one, the thing you were trying to describe moves slightly further away from what you just said. So you add clauses. Then more clauses. Then you’re the person at the bar reading out three job adverts, watching the other person’s eyes go slightly out of focus while they wait for you to finish.

Getting up after each brush-off is harder than any business or productivity coach tells you. Fake-it-till-you-make-it works when you’re faking superhero powers to a five-year-old, because a five-year-old asks questions that help you shape the story as you go. Adults at drinks receptions do the opposite. They watch you not answer and take a small internal step back.

I spent the train home replaying both conversations, working out where I’d lost each of them, what I could have said differently, what opportunities had slipped through my fingers because I couldn’t hold a sentence together for a 90-second pitch. The carriage was busy for a late night. I had my notes app open, and as I surfed in my standing spot on the train I wrote things down, which is what consultants do with anything they can’t immediately solve. In true consulting style, I asked myself what my lessons learned were.

The honest one was: I didn’t know who I was yet. Not in any way I could hand to a stranger in 90 seconds.

It’s taken me about seven years to arrive at a sentence I don’t flinch from. Hi, I’m Neema, I work with executive teams and boards on restructuring initiatives for growth and efficiency. I say it and I leave it. I don’t flinch, don’t add clauses. It doesn’t come out apologetically, and I don’t shift halfway through into what I might do instead.

Seven years is a long time to describe your own work. Nobody shares that part with you when you leave.

The identity that came pre-installed with the job title goes when the job title goes. It was on lease. There’s no induction into whatever’s next. Just a run of drinks receptions and coffees and calls with old contacts who ask what you’re up to now, and you fumble through it while telling yourself this is the interesting bit, and probably the freedom you asked for. So suck it up and act like you’re free and happy.

Some of it is freedom and contentment. Some of it is standing between the bar and the rest of the room with a drink you don’t want, trying to describe yourself to someone who’s already looking past your shoulder.

What did you say the last time someone asked what you do?

This piece completes a three-part exploration of money. It began with what personal finance content structurally leaves out, then turned to the Diwali gold my mother placed in my hands the year I asked for a phone, and the two very different attitudes to money that coexisted around our family dinner table. It ends here: three generations, one family, and the shift from money as a conversation everyone joined to something you don't quite ask about anymore.

“Please gift the house. None of us brothers want to inherit it. I’ve asked them. Gift it to Aunty.”

That was my father’s request to my grandfather, sometime in the mid-1980s. My father’s aunt and her children had lived in the three-storey house for twenty years by then. It sat in the middle of my Grandfather’s home town, once grand, now crying out for work.

A few months later, we were at the family’s standing Saturday dinner. My father announced that Grandfather had sold the house to Aunty. Not gifted. Sold. My father was shaking his head, asking out loud why his father couldn’t just let it go. The three of us older cousins were listening in from the end of the table, grasping that it was somehow wrong of Grandfather to have sold this property.

My cousin, perhaps eight, asked why Grandfather hadn’t just given the house away. It wasn’t very nice, she said. And there were so many stairs to climb.

My father took the question. The sale, divided between all his siblings, would be small. They'd worked it out. It wouldn't be life-changing for any of them. It was also the right thing to do, he said.

At another Saturday dinner, my youngest uncle turned to my father.

“Can you ask Papa to give me £50,000? I want to buy a business. He’ll agree if you tell him I need it.”

“Tell me about the business,” my father said.

My accountant uncle cut in. “I want to review the accounts. I’ll be giving Papa my opinions.”

“Good business. Room for growth. I’ve met the current owners twice. Good people. Next town over.”

My cousin asked whether they’d need to move. The question was ignored. She turned to my aunt instead. “When will you move?”

“I don’t know, beta.”

Then it opened. What savings did he have. Where had he been spending money. Had he been frivolous. Another aunt cut in. She'd seen him and his wife out shopping the previous Thursday. Did he think he could take a day off if he was saving to buy a business.

He was answering. His wife added they'd need another car. My cousin asked what car. What colour. My youngest uncle looked at my father. "Will you lend me for the car? Papa won't give me money for both."

At the other end of the table, my second-oldest uncle was deep in an Indian newspaper, sharing small items from home to nobody in particular. His wife hadn’t said a word all evening. Another aunt kept asking about the food. Which one had the extra green chillies. Was this the daal made with the new batch of garam masala, it seemed spicier. Who’d made dessert.

The accountant uncle asked what the business cost. My father asked about the growth plan, what the area was like, whether they’d fit in or be singled out. Mid-sentence, my mother announced our business was up 27% this year, five years left on the loan. My aunt looked up. Her bosses had been so impressed with her figures they’d offered her a promotion.

Numbers came out. Nobody had asked.

My father turned to my youngest uncle. "I'll loan you the car money. Pay it back when you can. Not free, but not a bank. I'll call Papa."

At our end of the table, one cousin said she didn’t want to start a business. Nor did I. But we both wanted to be the boss. And eat out.

A few months later, my youngest uncle had bought the business. He also had a new car.

Days after that dinner, I picked up the extension by accident. My father was on to Grandfather about the ask. He'd told Grandfather he thought it was a good idea. My youngest uncle had been jumping between jobs for years. A business would give him stability. Accountability. Something to hold him. And it should be a gift, my father said, not a loan. His other brother had already been given a helping hand. A loan would read as transactional. Grandfather read figures back. My father disagreed on one. Neither noticed I was there.

Many years later, when my grandfather passed away, there was no question of gifting any of the properties.

If any of this sounds like a house you grew up in, I'd like to hear the version you got.

Last summer I drove one of my aunts, over from the US, to a cousin’s barbecue.

“How much did you pay for the house?”

My cousin was caught off guard. “£700K.”

“Achcha” (okay)

My cousin busied herself with other guests. I pulled my aunt’s arm as she moved past me and whispered. “You can’t ask things like that, Aunty.”

She huffed. In full volume: “Why not? I was just asking. Your other cousin spent £850K on his house and it’s not as big as this. But it’s in a nicer area.”

People were glancing over. Another aunt joined in. “Yes, I went to his house. Parking is terrible.”

My cousins and their friends were busying themselves with the kids, crowding into the kitchen, anything to avoid needing to contribute to the conversation. Someone opened the door to the garden and started talking loudly about the weather. Someone else was refilling drinks that didn’t need refilling.

My aunt had already moved on. She was asking another aunt about her granddaughter’s exam results. My cousin was back at the barbecue.

I was still standing where I’d whispered.

Years earlier, when we bought our first house, a cousin told me they’d maxed their credit cards. Found every savings account with money in it. Scraped the deposit together.

I said that sounded tough. I meant it. We’d put down a sizeable deposit ourselves. Being self-employed, lenders had been difficult.

Months later, a great aunt mentioned in passing that the cousin’s father had given him and his sister the deposit.

It wasn’t the help. It was the small suggestion, in that first conversation, that we were starting from the same place. That we’d both scraped. A small edit to make the story match. Small enough to almost let go of. But it came at a time when the maths in our house was whether to keep the kids’ extra swimming class this term or hold something back for the bills.

The great aunt had known. My generation didn’t.

That same summer, one of my uncles passed away. He'd built property, businesses, investments across decades. In his lifetime he'd shared what each brought in. His peers knew. His siblings knew. When it passed to his children, the sharing stopped. No conversation about how the businesses were doing. Whether anything was being sold. How the inheritance tax would be paid inside the window HMRC allows. His children didn't have the full picture. They pieced it together. Mostly on their own.

My parents came round for chai. Four o’clock, as it has always been. A ritual that has somehow survived three continents and always sits at 4pm.

My father asked how the consulting work was going. I told him. Steady enough, the recession had touched some sectors more than others. He nodded. Had I made any investments this year. I told him.

Then. Was I thinking about expanding the property side. Had I finalised moving money to the other higher-interest account.

I rolled my eyes at the ceiling as I answered. I know what I’m doing. I don’t need to play it back.

My eldest came in and asked for a new cricket bat. Before I could answer he said he’d already put money aside from this month’s savings, he could cover part of it himself. He was asking me but I could feel my father listening. My father nodded.

My youngest sat down with her notebook. She was buying two more stocks this week. She named them. She told us why. She was telling me. My father nodded again.

The six of us at the table. My parents. My children. Me somewhere in between.

A quick note before we start. Last week I wrote about what personal finance content leaves off the page - the structural advantages that made the wealth possible, edited out of the story being sold as advice. This piece is about the household I actually grew up in. I learned to think about money inside a house where two people had arrived at very different answers to the same question, and the question got raised at the table pretty much every week. Next week I want to widen the frame across three generations. This is the step in between.

I was nineteen. It was Diwali. The box was red velvet with gold trim, and I opened it hoping for a phone. Inside was a 22-carat gold set, necklace and earrings, with emeralds. My sister opened hers, the same box, and inside was the same set in rubies. We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything. The boxes went into the safe within the hour, not to come out again until a wedding.

This was the pattern. Every Diwali, most Christmases, matched sets in matched weights, near-identical in design so that no argument between us could ever start over who got the better one. My sister and I rarely wore any of them. Neither of us had ever been the dressing-up type. The gifts were not really for the two teenagers opening the boxes. They were for a future version of us my mother was already heading off at the pass, twenty years before the argument might have happened.

My father, separately, would ask what I planned to do with whatever cash I had been given. He had been suggesting I invest it since I was small enough that half of every birthday envelope went into a National Savings account before I had time to think too much about it. Two versions of what to do with a gift, sitting in the same house, from parents who had arrived in this country together but not from the same place.

My mother’s family had built wealth, lost it, rebuilt it, and lost it again over three generations. She grew up hearing the story told and retold, the way some children grow up with folk tales. My father’s family had built wealth in East Africa and held onto it. He grew up in relative comfort, and as the eldest son he spent years as his own father’s right hand, overseeing assets and property before he ever thought about building anything of his own. When he arrived in the UK he arrived with almost nothing. He had done the work of building before. He also knew it could be taken.

What their generation built here I only understood the shape of later. The corner shop with the flat above was the starting structure for a lot of families I grew up around, and the reason was practical. It was a business and a home in the same purchase. Childcare was the mother behind the till. The children learned about the business by working in the business. There was no watching. Children were handed a job and they did it. Once the first foundation was stable, families diversified. A second shop. Properties. Different business verticals. Sometimes one family member took an office job to create stability against the ups and downs of running businesses. The point was never the shop. The point was a foundation the next generation could build from without starting from zero.

The extended network around all of it operated on assumptions that never had to be stated. Some years before my grandmother died, an uncle and aunt of mine lost their own shop to a fire. At the time they lived nearby. They arrived at our house that evening with one suitcase between them and stayed for three months. There had been no phone call to ask if they could come. There was no conversation about how long they would stay. They came for dinner with a suitcase, and they stayed.

Years later, when my grandmother passed away in India and my parents needed to fly out, the same uncle and aunt phoned the day before. They said they would be at the house in the morning. Their suitcase was already packed. The uncle would run the shop for two weeks. The aunt would cover the staff lunches and keep the house going. Other uncles and aunts would support on rotation, bringing dinner, making the calls that needed making, running admin and childcare. Nobody had asked. That was not how it worked.

Same generation, same journey, and two different investment philosophies inside their marriage. My mother's discipline was gold. She checks the gold price every morning. She checks the currency the same way somebody else checks their portfolio. She does not look at stocks. She has never looked at stocks. She trades a physical asset she can hold, weigh, and read the market on, and she is unsentimental about doing it. The women of her generation understood that trade in a way that has mostly disappeared from the version of investing that gets written about, and my mother is fluent in it in a way I am not.

She also wanted the affluent lifestyle, the flashier car, the bigger house. Both things are true. The gold in the safe was one discipline. The bigger lifestyle was another instinct, running in parallel. Wealth in a form she could hold, and wealth in a form other people could see. What she inherited from her family's rags-to-riches-to-rags story was not one lesson. It was that both types of visibility mattered, because both had been lost before.

My father's version ran differently. Consider the decision. Avoid the big expenses. Buy the one good thing rather than three that are almost right. Do not walk into a deal in a hurry. If something did not feel right, he would walk away, and this was not theoretical. Once, we were close to completing on a business. It had been a lengthy purchase, and at the final stage the seller said he could not settle on the agreed date because it was Friday the 13th. My father walked away from the deal. Partly in pride, partly in frustration, and partly because he assumed there would be more bumps before completion.

Last summer I had borrowed their car, and a tractor took the front of it off as I pulled out of the drive. Nobody was hurt. The car was a write-off. The insurance paid out. My father spent three months choosing the replacement. My mother wanted to go to the Mercedes showroom and buy another one that week. Neither of them uses the car often. They live in the city and take public transport. The argument was never really about the car.

Growing up in that house meant learning to hold two coherent positions at once and not being asked to pick. The accumulation mindset was shared. The reflex that things can be taken away was shared. What the accumulation was for, and which form it should take, was not. My mother's answer and my father's answer were both rational given what each of them had watched their families do. My generation, the ones building something of our own here, mostly inherited the argument rather than the answer.

My father has mellowed. He tells my children now to spend money on the things that make life easier and more enjoyable. He tells them to do work they like rather than work that only pays well. When they show him what they are saving for, he tells them that if they need the thing, they should buy the thing, and not walk around ten shops looking for a version that is almost as good. He is the same person. The position has softened with age and with the knowledge that the money did not run out. My mother, offered the same conversation, would tell them to wait for the sale and buy five pairs of shoes with the budget for one, because if the same money stretches to five, why would you not.

I have been stepping back from the larger contracts. There is a number where it is enough. I have been working with the question of what happens after that number, what changes. Time is the scarcer asset. Waiting until retirement to take the trips and do the things is its own kind of risk, and it is not the safer one, whatever the arithmetic looks like from the outside.

I am not the only one navigating this. Close cousins of mine are asking similar questions in their own shapes. One works a four-day week and spends the fifth taking his son to swim class and taking time for himself. The cost of the locum covering the fifth day is beside the point. Another retired from the civil service at 52, and when I asked him recently what he does with his days he said, whatever I feel like. Two others left corporate roles we had all been told were the goal, and are running things of their own now.

None of this would be possible without the foundation the previous generation built. Assets, businesses, the discipline that produced them. What we are doing with it is not what they built it for. That doesn't mean we're wrong. It means the question has changed.

I've stayed away from writing about money for a long time. Most of what gets published in this space doesn't match what I've seen, and the gap between the content and the actual rooms has been wide enough that I haven't found a way in. Two recent examples have changed that. Both are people I have some connection to, both produce content I've otherwise found useful, and both demonstrate something I want to name.

We were both speaking at a business innovation and funding event, and had met online a few times before. He’s a personal finance guru, the kind regularly featured on the BBC, and I like how he explains personal finance to people early in their journey.

We were doing the small talk you do before these things start. I asked him, casually, how he navigated the investments he recommends, given his dual citizenship. A long list of the vehicles he routinely talks about aren’t available to him. I was curious about the workaround.

He made an excuse and left the conversation.

I’ve thought about that moment more than I expected to. Not because he owed me an answer. He didn’t. But because the discomfort itself was the answer. The gap between what he sells and what he can personally do is the kind of thing this space cannot accommodate, and the only available response, when someone asks directly, is to leave the room.

The second example is a couple I’ve only ever spoken to online. They retired before forty and built a following around showing how they did it. The trades, the screen shots, the weekends away, the days out with the kids and countless days on the beach. The texture of a life that looks like the destination of every personal finance newsletter on the platform.

I’ve tried, more than once, to move our conversations off the comment threads. A call. A coffee if either of us is in the other’s city. They’re polite about it and always busy, which is a curious thing to be in retirement, and I noticed eventually that the only people they meet in person are people who have paid to be in their community.

What they don't lead with in the content is that they were both civil servants for the full stretch of their working lives. Housing covered. School fees covered. Two final salary pensions accruing in the background, which is a different instrument from the pensions most of their audience will ever have access to. Once you take out what their employer was already covering, the 10-year runway to early retirement is a much smaller number than it looks. Almost anyone investing aggressively from inside that structure would have reached a similar point. The skill being sold is the part that didn't actually do the work.

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Both omissions, the educator and the couple, run on the same logic. The content requires the structural conditions to stay out of the frame, because if those conditions were visible, the content wouldn’t work. The reader is buying expertise. If the expertise turns out to be a tax residency, or a final salary pension, or parents who covered the deposit, the expertise has nothing left to sell.

It isn’t that the people producing this content are dishonest. The educator is a competent communicator. The couple appear to be decent people who built a following doing something that’s hard to do. What I’d say instead is that the writing in this space is performative in a way the writers themselves may not fully see. The performance is the product. The structural conditions that produced the wealth get edited out, not always consciously, because the shape of the content depends on their absence.

What bothers me about this isn’t the editing itself. Most writing involves selection. What bothers me is that the structural conditions are the thing the reader most needs to know in order to assess whether any of the advice applies to them. The reader reaches for this kind of content precisely because they don’t have those conditions. They are looking for a way in. And the content is shaped, carefully and sometimes unconsciously, to never quite tell them that the way in was a closed door before they started reading.

Next: what money conversation sounds like when it isn’t taboo. Notes from inside a family that talked about it openly across three generations.

Thursday morning. I’m working through emails over breakfast.

Jill (9.17am): One of your speakers haven’t arrived yet

Me: Nicole’s booked for tomorrow

Me: I’m calling you now

Twenty minutes later we’d worked it out. The booking error was on the client’s side. They hadn’t checked the detail properly when they confirmed. Jill was apologetic, offered to remedy it financially, they couldn’t make tomorrow work, they’d reschedule for next semester. It’s a school, I gave them grace. The speaker had done a session for them once before. They were good, which is why they got rebooked.

I called the speaker. Understandably annoyed at first, then immediately followed up with an upsell to the end client.

An upsell makes sense when there’s a relationship underneath it and the timing reads right. You’ve worked together, or you’ve pitched something that wasn’t quite right and you’re offering a different shape: different price, different focus, different time. That’s a move. An upsell off the back of a logistical error the client has just apologised for, before the dust has settled, isn’t a move. It’s a reach. The relationship existing makes it worse, not better, they should have known how to read the room.

The client came back the next morning anyway. Could the speaker fit a shorter session in the coming weeks. 72 hours later, no acknowledgment from the speaker.

The week before that. One of my clients had a smaller advisor piece, still seven figures, but they asked if I could recommend a consultancy that might bring the fee down. I reached out to a small one with sector experience. The kind of firm where one client of this size keeps the lights on for a year. They responded quickly. Then nothing. No follow-up, no proposal, no questions. The kind of silence that tells you they don’t quite understand what’s been put in front of them. Silence past a week or two reads as either no interest or no capacity. From the other side, both look the same.

Three weeks back now. A friend posted in a group chat asking if anyone knew someone at a particular company. I replied asking if the intro I’d made to Lincoln two months ago hadn’t worked out. She said no, she hadn’t connected with him yet, she was going to do it now because she was interested in a role at that company.

Two months. Enough time to make the connection, have a conversation, follow up, and then make the sideways ask. Who’s the hiring manager. What does the process look like from the inside. Is there anything worth knowing before the application goes in. You can’t make that ask when you’re connecting and asking in the same breath. The first conversation can’t carry that weight.

Three opportunities, three weeks, all missed. Different surfaces, same underneath.

The speaker pitched an upsell when the move was to take the rebook and wait. The consultancy went quiet on a piece of work that could have kept the lights on for a year. My friend reached for a new introduction before using the one she already had. All three responded fast. None of them paused long enough to see what was actually being offered.

In the moment, none of these read as much. A busy week for the speaker, an overloaded inbox at the consultancy, a slow reply from a friend. Each one alone earns the benefit of the doubt. The pattern only shows up when you stop reading them alone.

The shift on my side wasn’t immediate. Making connections is ingrained, I haven’t stopped doing it. What I’ve stopped doing is chasing. If an introduction isn’t taken up, I don’t as a matter of course follow up to move the process along. The time just goes elsewhere. The people who respond, who do the thing, who treat a small opportunity with the same care as a large one, get more from me. The people who treat my time as elastic get less.

All three are probably trying to grow. Chasing the next booking, the next pitch, the next role. The effort is real. To anyone watching, it reads as a tick-box exercise rather than the work of converting an opportunity in front of them. The follow-on engagement, the second piece of work, the deeper introduction. None of that is available when the first interaction was the hurdle.

What ties them together is that none of them think they did anything wrong. They responded. They tried. They moved fast. On their side of it, it looks like they showed up.

A fast response isn’t the same as showing up. It’s the bit that comes after, the part nobody sees, where the work actually happens. The people missing this don’t know they’re missing it. That’s what makes it hard to fix. They’re not waiting for feedback. They think they’re already in the conversation.

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The office in Brighton was the size of a meeting room. Two desks, one window onto a side street, the kettle on a shelf above a printer. We’d filmed an investment series together in a studio the week before, and Amir had invited me down to keep talking. The contrast with the offices I’d worked out of for most of the previous decade, all glass and coffee bars and breakout rooms in branded colours, was the kind of thing you notice and then stop noticing within ten minutes.

He and his co-founder Dan were building a consumer gifting app. Mobile-first, brand partnerships baked in, the kind of business where the unit economics depend on getting recipients to download something they didn’t ask for so they can open the thing someone else sent them. Amir was front of house. Dan had taken the back, the build, the operations. They’d divided it deliberately, the way co-founders do once they realise both jobs need a primary owner and you can’t both be doing the part with the camera on. I’d done the same with my own co-founders in a speaker agency we’d built together. It works because someone has to be the one who says no to the meeting and stays at the desk.

They’d been bootstrapped from the start. Friends and family money, a small seed round, what came in from early users. They’d also spent two years in conversation with a globally known VC. Every meeting ended the same way. Come back when there’s more traction. Come back when the metrics are stronger. Come back when you’ve shown another six months of growth. They kept coming back. Nothing closed.

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Amir and Dan weren’t unusual. Every accelerator I’ve worked with as a mentor has the same gravitational pull toward the term sheet as the measure of finishing. A founder I mentored emailed me the day after his pitch night to say he’d secured his first £20k of investment using the sixty-second pitch we’d worked on together. A good outcome, and the outcome the programme was built to produce. Twelve weeks of work pointing at pitch night, investors in the room, money committed, founder validated.

Most of the founders I’ve mentored aren’t going to raise. Some couldn’t if they wanted to. Others could and shouldn’t. A few will, and for them it’s the right call. The pitch training is useful for all of them. The narrowing of the goal to a single outcome isn’t.

The narrowing isn’t accidental. Most of what shows up in a feed about startups is about raises. The headlines are the rounds and the unicorn valuations. The vocabulary of success in this space has been set by what makes the news, and what makes the news is the cheque. The founders I’ve worked with don’t always arrive realising that what they’re being shown is one path out of several, and a statistically unusual one at that. Raise, scale, exit reads like the path. It’s one of them.

What also gets lost in that narrowing is what the founders actually want from the business they’re building. A lot of them have left corporate roles that weren’t working. They’re trying to build something that doesn’t recreate what they walked out of. Control over the day. Who they work with. Whether they can step back for a quiet month when they need one.

The path that doesn’t end in the expected term sheet has a name. Bootstrapping. Building a company from personal savings, what comes in from your first paying customers, and whatever small non-institutional money you can get in the door. No venture round. No growth schedule imposed from outside. The business grows on its own revenue or it doesn’t grow.

If bootstrapping sounds marginal, the names suggest otherwise. Ben Francis was nineteen, studying at Aston University, delivering pizzas at night to fund a side project. He bought a sewing machine for a thousand pounds and started making gym wear in his parents’ garage in Bromsgrove. Eight years later, Gymshark was the first UK direct-to-consumer business to reach unicorn status without outside money. Guy Mucklow built PCA Predict, a British address-verification business, to $20 million in revenue without ever raising. He turned down a $100 million acquisition offer because the terms didn’t suit him. He could afford to wait because nobody else had a say in whether he held out.

What those two years of VC conversations had actually produced was something Amir talked about with me a lot. You could hear it in the way he described the meetings. Frustration that they kept ending the same way. Hope that the next one would be different. Anticipation underneath both, because tech is expensive and they knew what they couldn't do without the cheque. They weren't building for a unicorn exit, then or now. Not the funding itself, which never came. The thing the funding conversations made possible while they weren't yet converting.

Every meeting where they didn’t get the cheque ended with an introduction. A partnership lead at a brand. A media person who might be useful. Another founder a year ahead of them on the same path. The VC partners weren’t being especially kind. They were doing what’s easier than ghosting a team they wouldn’t write a cheque for yet but didn’t want to lose contact with. It’s cheaper to make an introduction than to take another meeting.

Over two years, the introductions stacked. They built partnerships with brands you’d recognise. They got covered by publications that mattered. They grew from a few hundred users to tens of thousands. None of it was funded. All of it came out of a process whose stated purpose was funding. They also still owned every decision about how the business ran. What hours they worked and who they worked with. Which conversations they took next, and which they passed on. Equity hadn’t changed hands and neither had any of the rest of it.

The version told later, after a business reaches a certain size, goes: they bootstrapped, they grew on their own, they built it from the kitchen table. The version while it’s happening is messier. Introductions accumulate from meetings that didn’t convert. Allies show up out of conversations that went nowhere on the funding question. The relationships doing the most work aren’t always the ones with capital attached.

The turning point for Amir and Dan came when they agreed to go on Dragons’ Den. They’d been doubtful about it, doubtful enough that they’d originally turned the show down. When they changed their minds and went on, they secured £90,000 from three of the Dragons for 12.5% equity. As venture raises go, the cheque is small. 12.5% for £90,000 is a price most founders at that traction wouldn't pay for the cash alone. The thing they were really buying was the three names attached to it, the kind of access those names provide. The networks each Dragon brings, which compound when there are three of them in.

After the broadcast, app downloads and signups spiked by something over four thousand percent within hours. Customer acquisition stayed elevated. Partnerships with brands they hadn’t previously been able to reach started coming through. The deal worked, but not because of the money.

I ran into Amir at an alumni event a few months later. Funnier still, he was at the same event playing in the alumni football game, on the same team as my son. They’d done ten minutes of introductions and warm-ups before they worked out the connection through me. My son followed up the day after with detailed feedback on the app, which turned into a warm connection of his own. A proud mum moment.

When Amir and I got to talk, he said the television appearance had shifted things in a way he hadn’t expected. They could increase hiring. They were assembling a board. They were in the position to do the structural things they’d been putting off for years because they couldn’t afford to. The business looked, suddenly, like a business with the next stage funded.

The structure Amir and Dan are putting in place now looks more like what they would have signed up to four years ago if the round had closed. The board. The hires. The shape a business takes once it has the money to fund the next phase of itself. They’re getting there with the majority of the equity and all of the decision rights, on a timeline that didn’t depend on someone else’s approval. The destination has familiar features.

I never asked Amir whether the bootstrap route was chosen or imposed. The honest answer is probably both, and probably also neither. By the time anyone tells the story later, the difference between those two reasons usually stops mattering.

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A few weeks ago asked me how I keep up with relationships. Three things hold it together. The standard for all three came from an executive coach.

Nine years ago I had a discovery call with him. He emailed afterwards to follow up. I didn’t reply for weeks. When he came back to me, he was firm. He’d expected a response. Even a no would have closed the loop. He wasn’t a coach trying to recover a prospect. He was a peer setting a standard. I have no idea why he agreed to a second conversation. He did. We worked together. The engagement ended years ago. The birthday emails still arrive. He checked in over Zoom after the work was done, not because there was anything to discuss but because there wasn’t. Nine years in, we’re still in touch.

What he taught me in that email was that I’d thought I was too busy to be polite. I wasn’t. Nobody is.

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The first is what I track.

When I headed up an investment syndicate I used HubSpot. Last conversation, scheduled follow-up, prompt for the next touchpoint. It was the right tool for that environment: structured process, deal flow, pipeline. When I stepped away I didn’t want any of it to come with me. I wanted something that didn’t feel like pipeline management dressed up as friendship.

I started with a spreadsheet and a notebook. The spreadsheet has names. Against each name, the things that make someone feel seen: the holiday they’re taking, their kids’ names, the big move, the graduation, the parent who’s not well. The spreadsheet doesn’t hold what was said in the last conversation, or when I’m due to follow up next. The HubSpot version tracked the relationship as record. This one tracks it as care.

A few weeks ago Rose had to cancel our monthly call because she was ill. I texted her at the weekend to ask how she was. No system told me to. The spreadsheet held that she’d resigned as COO earlier in the year and recently been to Spain with her husband. The text wrote itself.

The second is how I show up.

The clearest lesson I’ve had on this was watching a CEO in an M&A process, building a relationship with the CEO of the company being acquired. “Let’s get a coffee” was literally a coffee, to get to know the other person. No agenda, nothing else expected. A meeting at the acquirer’s office had the texture of inviting someone over for Sunday lunch. The PA was greeted the same way as the CFO. Everyone was a somebody. Rapport ran through the building, not down it.

The opposite shape is the call from Jack the same Jack I’ve written about in How Is He Still There. He reached out a few months after I left a client we’d both worked at, looking for a role. Three calls a week, messages, asks for introductions. When he eventually landed somewhere adjacent to an MBB I asked him for one introduction back. He made a half-hearted attempt. We’ve worked together once in the three years since. He’ll surface when he needs something else.

Helping people takes energy. If something is easy, I’ll do it. The transactional version of any of this doesn’t get my attention, because it can’t. There’s only so much of me to go around.

The third is which rooms I show up in.

Before Covid I could get to one London event in an evening if I was lucky. Online changed that completely. I’ve met more people in the years since than I did in the decade before, and most of my current clients came through introductions or events that happened on a screen. I’m rarely in their office, or any office.

That means being intentional about which events to bother with, and what to do when I’m there. The in-person version used to frustrate me. Half the time I was being pitched at from the moment I arrived. It felt transactional before anyone had said anything beyond hello. The other half was the same exchange: “Hi Jane, how have you been?” “Great, how about you Neema, how’s business?” “Going well, ups and downs you know, how about you?” “Yeah, mine too, going well.” Then off we both went to work the room. I’d shake fifteen hands and remember none of them.

What works for me now is going in expecting to meet one or two people properly, and following up afterwards. Some of those follow-ups have become clients. More have become introductions I didn’t ask for, which is my name being mentioned in rooms I’m not in. That’s the part worth playing for. The single opportunity in the room is less interesting than the conversations happening elsewhere about you.

Before events I usually reach out to whoever’s hosting. I tell them who I’m hoping to meet and ask if they can introduce me. If I can help with a connection of my own, I offer. If I know someone else is going, I send them a note saying I’m looking forward to catching up at the event. It changes the shape of the evening.

The rest is what surrounds it

As you meet more people you’ll find yourself in a position to make introductions of your own. If you can see two people who’d be useful to each other, introduce them. It costs you almost nothing. It doesn’t make you a super-connector either, a term I hear a lot from people who do nothing of the sort. You don’t need to make a song and dance of it. You just send the email.

None of this is networking. People have kept track of each other for centuries. Who’d died, whose daughter was being married, who’d come back from a journey, whose family needed work. This is what villages did. It’s what letters carried between people who’d never meet again. The apparatus around it now is what’s modern: the CRM, the conference circuit, the LinkedIn message. The thing itself is old and human.

The bit none of this captures is that it’s ongoing. New people keep arriving, and there’s only so much room to remember what someone’s child is doing. Pretending to is worse than not knowing. Some relationships move from monthly to quarterly to once a year, because that’s what life does. With the ones that matter, the conversation picks up where it stopped. Six months later the texture is the same. With others the gap grows and then becomes the relationship.

The cadence moves the other way too. A headhunter I’ve worked with for nearly fifteen years, who I wrote about in The Long Game, usually surfaces in my diary at most quarterly. When there’s a specific role she’s working on that might fit, that becomes monthly, sometimes biweekly, until it’s run its course. Same pattern with a prospective client who’s mentioned an assignment. The art is being flexible without tipping into showing up only when you need something. You’re still in the same relationship. The cadence is just doing more work for a while.

Amelia and I have had a monthly 8am call running for four years. We met on a team call when I started a new role. She DM’d me during the meeting asking if I’d like a virtual coffee. The call has survived two of her promotions, her move to another country, my move from startups back to corporate consulting, a pandemic, holidays, and at least one mid-life recalibration. I look forward to it every month. Nothing on a spreadsheet would have produced that.

The executive coach still sends me a birthday email. It still feels good.

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My son has wanted to be a pilot since he could talk. A Saturday at the local airfield watching planes wasn’t a trip out, it was a complete day. His research now runs the same way, airline programs, cadet routes, the difference between flying regional and getting to the long-haul operators. His heart is set. On the days the studying gets heavy he tells me degrees are a waste of time.

Most days he agrees it makes sense to have one anyway.

What I’m buying him with a university education is not an education. It’s the option to change his mind. A piece of paper that says he spent six figures on something, which in ten years might be what gets him in front of a hiring manager for an entry-level grad job if the pilot path doesn’t work out or he decides to pivot. The credential as insurance rather than investment. Nobody giving him advice about university will frame it that way.

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I have a friend in the same position with her son. She’s already had a sharper version of the conversation. Her son got a choice, not both options on the table.

Which brings me to Ket. He’s not close enough to call a friend but not enough of a stranger to be an acquaintance. He was offered a job as a pilot in the Middle East when he was single, everything covered - accommodation, food, travel - and it made sense to take it. Then he got married, his wife joined him, and they have two daughters now. School fees covered, household staff, and each time the family grew the package expanded around them.

His daughters are getting older and starting to have opinions about their futures, which if you grew up in the West and your parents did too, eventually becomes a conversation about university somewhere that looks familiar. UK or otherwise, none of those options are cheap on the other side of the subsidies ending. The accommodation is the employer’s. The school fees are the employer’s. What looked like a good deal is, underneath it, tenancy with generous terms.

Ket’s brother in law, Bhav, didn’t go to university. Circumstances took him into the family business instead. He grew it, added revenue streams, became the person in our circle you call when you need anything - a car, a builder, a good FX rate. He inherited the bulk of the family assets. His businesses run largely without him now, management in the right places, and he dips in and out, drops everything when there’s a holiday or his wife needs him to take point on something.

From the outside, Ket and Bhav’s lives don’t look obviously different. Expensive cars re-leased every few years, four to six overseas holidays, the kind of experiences that get mentioned at dinner - private safaris, weekend trips for other people’s birthdays, chocolate making in Switzerland. Homes updated regularly, extensions, new furniture, re-landscaping. The look of ease, even if underneath that isn’t always the case.

The difference is structural. Ket’s life is priced in benefits that belong to someone else. Bhav’s compounds. His network built through being present and useful over years, through being the person everyone calls first. You can’t tell any of that from the cars.

Growing up first generation, the message was clear: education is the only route to success. And if you’re a woman, marriage. My mother held both as equally important and found them genuinely difficult to rank. When I was considering a PhD she looked torn, not between supporting me or not, but between two versions of what a good outcome for her daughter looked like. A PhD meant more education but a delayed marriage. A marriage meant her version of completion but interrupted study. I didn’t do the PhD in the end, not because she resolved the dilemma but because a good career opportunity came calling, and once you’re in motion it’s harder to stop than it looks from the outside. The opportunity cost of more years inside an institution starts to compete with what’s visible just beyond it.

I did an MBA. It opened rooms. Though I’ve learned to distinguish between the rooms that opened because of what the credential signals and the ones where I was let through because I completed someone’s diversity metric for the year. Both are real and I’ve sat in both. The MBA made me the kind of candidate worth considering. Whether I’d have been considered without it is a question I’ve stopped trying to answer cleanly.

A few years ago I was hired to write content for an online MBA, more accessible, significantly cheaper. I understood the intention and felt something about it I couldn’t quite dismiss. The price was the selling point, but what the lower price removed wasn’t just prestige, it was the room. An MBA is partly brutal because of who you’re in it with: people from different industries, different countries, different ways of thinking about the same problem. I don’t see my cohort regularly, but I can pick up the phone or send an email with an ask twenty years later and it means something a cold message wouldn’t. That’s not transferable to a Zoom cohort. And the institution itself carries weight the content alone can’t replicate, an MBA from LSE opens something a lesser-named programme doesn’t, even if that programme recruited its board from Stanford.

The rooms my MBA opened are not all rooms. There are roles where the question isn’t whether you have an MBA but where you got it and who recruited on campus there. McKinsey doesn’t advertise. It goes to the Ivy Leagues, to a small set of European schools, and the network closes around those entry points before most people know the door exists. That ceiling is not about aptitude. It’s about which institution decided you were worth selecting at twenty-one.

So when my son tells me degrees are a waste of money, I don’t exactly disagree. I also don’t think that’s the right question. Education and money together give you room to move. Have one without the other and you’re leaning harder on the people you know to cover the gap, who’ll vouch for you, who can put a word in and have it mean something. That network compounds when you’re present, when you’re in the same rooms over years. Less so when you’re 3,000 miles away and making it back for Christmas.

What I’m buying my son is options. Not a career, not a salary, not the version of success my mother was tracking. The ability to change his mind without the door already being closed.

Most days he agrees it makes sense.

Which of the three do you have most of and which one are you leaning on hardest right now?

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For the ambitious and restless. Working out what's next

It was 9:15pm when my mum called. The early hours of the morning for her in India. I felt the dread before I picked up.

She doesn’t get to the point fast. In the thirty seconds before I stopped her, she was trying to tell me that she had been so scared she’d been screaming from the apartment, calling out before the neighbours came. I stopped her and asked what had happened. My dad had had a stroke. He was at an international hospital. She was waiting.

I asked if she had the medical records with her, the folder they always travelled with, and whether she had the insurance papers. She’d left in a hurry. She had no idea where any of it was in the apartment. She’d also left with no money and no keys.

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In India, a crisis doesn’t happen to you alone. My mum had barely called out from the front door before neighbours appeared. Someone called an ambulance, and several of them followed my parents to the hospital, not because they were asked to but because that’s what you do. Within the hour there was chai and an assortment of Indian snacks that my mum almost certainly had no appetite for. Food is how Indians show up. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a wedding or a stroke, someone will arrive with something warm and something to eat, and the fact of it matters more than whether anyone can stomach it. She wasn’t alone in a hospital corridor in the middle of the night.

My parents also had friends and relatives in India at the time, which will make sense to anyone who knows the diaspora. Late autumn through to spring is NRI season, the months when people who built their working lives elsewhere come back, some for a few weeks, some until the heat arrives and sends them home again.

My uncle was among them that autumn, which mattered more than anything else. My mum would listen to him in a way she couldn’t listen to me in that state. While she sat with the neighbours in the hospital waiting room, I could talk to him clearly and he could translate it back to her. What the doctors were actually saying about the options ahead. Which medical records were needed and where they might be. Which forms and insurance documents had to be located, scanned, emailed. He handled all of it on the ground, the decisions that needed someone present and coherent, so I didn’t have to be there to do it myself.

I spent an hour trying to access my dad’s email to find the insurance documents before giving up. Then I drove to their house at 2am, my son with me in the passenger seat. I let myself in and stood in their hallway and tried to think like my dad, where would he have put this, what counts as important enough to file. I went through drawers and folders and stacks of paper. Nothing.

My dad was in hospital for several days before we knew clearly which way it was going. Those days have a particular quality. You're functional, you're making calls, you're managing other people's anxiety as well as your own, and underneath all of it is something you keep not looking at directly. When he came home he didn't talk much about what those days had felt like. What he did instead was go back through everything they already had in place, reviewing it, filling the gaps, and pulling it together into a box. Physical, somewhere in their apartment, with instructions for what happens when he goes first. Every account, every policy, every asset, every number someone would need.

He's not an eccentric man. He's a man of his generation, and specifically of his culture. In Indian families money tends to stay opaque, deliberately so, because full transparency has a way of becoming the first act of a Bollywood plot. Who knew what, who got what, who was told first. Keeping financial information close is a form of protection as much as privacy.

My mum's world has always been cash and gold. Tangible, holdable, things you can see and count. What sits beyond that, the pension, the investment accounts, the policies operating quietly in the background, has always been his territory. She understands the things she can put her hands on. Everything else has simply never needed to be hers to understand.

My mum, when we talked about this recently, protests that she’s in the dark. And she is. But I think the more honest version is that she doesn’t want the light turned on. She’s never had to navigate any of this. The pension provider, the investment accounts, what renews when and what needs a decision. She’s had a full life without touching any of it. The prospect of starting now isn’t just daunting. It’s a world she has no map for and no particular desire to enter.

I watched all of this and told myself I had a different version.

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My husband was away on a business trip. The first morning, the car displayed low pressure on both front tyres. I didn’t know how to pump them. My son drove with me to the local garage and showed me how. It took ten minutes. It was a small thing, completely manageable, not a crisis by any measure. But I sat in the car afterwards and thought about how many small things like that were his ‘job’. Not because we’d decided it. Just because they were.

We'd had a financial advisor earlier on, felt we were in a position to manage independently with advice sought as needed, and had been doing so. What I hadn't fully examined was what that actually meant if one of us was no longer there to hold their half of the picture.

It started one Sunday over a cup of tea. We do a quarterly review, not of what we have but of how everything is performing, the portfolio, the assets, the investments across jurisdictions, anything we want to consolidate or reconsider. This one we decided to begin differently. Before the performance conversation, we’d write down what we each thought we held across everything. Properties, investment accounts, brokerage accounts, pension provisions, business interests, smaller accounts and holdings scattered in places we hadn’t actively thought about in years. It took weeks. Not because we were being thorough from the start but because the picture kept expanding every time we came back to it. There were more accounts and assets than my husband had realised, more structures than I’d been closely tracking.

What had looked like a shared overview turned out to be two partial views that didn’t fully overlap.

At some point during those weeks I asked him: “If something happened to you, who should I call?” I was assuming there was another advisor somewhere, someone else in the loop I hadn’t met. He was matter of fact about it.

“No-one. You’d have to manage this yourself.”

I think he assumed that was obvious. What it made obvious to me was that our quarterly review, the thing we’d been doing for years and thought of as sufficient, was nowhere near enough. We’d been tracking what we had. We hadn’t mapped what would happen to it without one of us.

That was where it started.

I think he assumed that was obvious. What it made obvious to me was that our quarterly review, the thing we’d been doing for years and thought of as sufficient, was nowhere near enough. We’d been tracking what we had. We hadn’t mapped what would happen to it without one of us.

That was where it started.

The question isn’t whether the money is there. For most people at this stage of life, with the properties, the businesses, the investment portfolios, the assets accumulated across twenty years and multiple jurisdictions, the money is there. The question is whether it moves. The business covers what it needs to cover. Everything else is drawn as needed, managed as a whole, two people who between them hold the full picture. What I kept thinking about was the version where one person is gone and the other is trying to work out, while also grieving, which lever to pull first.

My parents lived the same way. It wasn’t a problem until it nearly was.

What we built isn’t a file of documents. Documents are necessary but they’re not the point. When you are in the early days of grief you are not a person who can read a folder and work out what it means. You are a person who needs to be told what to do next, in order, without having to generate the question yourself.

The playbook is a sequence. Day one, do this. Week one, call this number. These are the monthly commitments that need to be covered and this is where that money sits. This is the order in which to draw from investments and the reason for that order. This is what renews when. This is what needs a decision and what can wait.

All the documents are there, all the passkeys, all the account and asset details. But the job the playbook is actually doing is removing the cognitive load from the worst possible moment to have any. You shouldn’t have to work out what you need. You should be told.

We’re building a version for the kids as well. We talk to them about money, more than most parents probably do, but knowing that conversations have happened is not the same as knowing what to do. If neither of us were there they would have lawyers who could handle the baseline. What they wouldn’t have, without the playbook, is any way to understand the structure of what we’ve built, the logic behind it, the shape of how it works. That’s not something you can hand to someone else to explain on your behalf. It has to be written down while you’re still there to write it.

The deathtech sector has been quietly building products for exactly this problem for the last several years. Almost every founder I’ve spoken to started from their own version of the same experience. My dad suggested I look at it as an investment opportunity over a decade ago. There’s a gap there, he said. He wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t expect to arrive at it from this direction.

We’re still testing this ourselves. The playbook exists, the structure is in place, but I want to know it works before I hand it to anyone else as a model.

If any of this has landed somewhere familiar, you probably already know you need one too.

When we’re satisfied it does, I’ll share it. If you’d like a copy, let me know.

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For consultants and independents building outside the org chart.

This is Part Two of a series on ethics in the messy middle, the calls you make when there is no escalation path, no compliance function, and no one else's name on the work. Part One followed a consulting engagement inside a large institution whose entire purpose, on paper, was professional standards. If you haven't read it, it's worth starting there. This piece stands alone but speaks louder if you've read what came before.

I was on a Teams call when Liz rang the first time.

Then a second time. By the fourth missed call I knew something had happened. She left a voice note before I could get back to her. Short, slightly breathless, like she was walking up a hill. Call me when you can.

I called her as soon as I was off the call. We did most of our work that way, the three of us. Phone calls, voice notes, WhatsApp, the occasional Zoom. It suited us. We had come together through overlapping circles rather than any formal process, and the business had taken shape in much the same way. I had met Liz at an online event, stayed in touch, started meeting up regularly, and one evening at a friend’s wedding she had floated the idea that eventually became the business. Tam I had known of through mutual friends for years without ever actually meeting. She and Liz had found each other the same way. One introduction, then another, then suddenly we were building something together.

It worked in a specific way that complementary partnerships rarely do. Liz handled relationships. She was the one people trusted instinctively, who stayed in contact without it feeling like maintenance, who moved through conversations easily and remembered everything. I ran operations and finance, the machinery that kept things moving. Tam brought the legal function.

Nobody stretched beyond what they were actually good at. That is rarer than it sounds.

The business was a speaker agency and events company. Early stage, still finding its shape, but with enough momentum that when Joel came to us it felt like the right kind of opportunity.

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Joel was known in the impact and sustainability space. Green retreats, mindfulness, the kind of work that sits at the intersection of business and conscience. He had appeared at COP, been published, built a reputation that preceded him into every room. If you know me you will know this world was never quite mine. I dealt with him in writing, mostly. Short emails that were always answered with long, warm replies asking how I was. He was charming in the specific way that functions as a professional tool rather than a personal quality. Calm, polite, never reactive. The kind of person who makes you feel slightly ungracious for being direct.

Liz knew him differently. She had been to his meditation circles, considered him a friend, trusted him in the way you trust someone you have spent real time with.

What we understood later was what he was doing with that trust. He moved into communities carefully and deliberately. Created spaces where people felt safe being open. Learned what they were afraid of, what they owed, what they hoped for. Then he used it. He had done this across several businesses, co-investing, building credibility, and then quietly bleeding the company before moving on. He had a persuasive personality, and somehow that always seemed to be enough.

When Liz called me back that afternoon she sounded distressed.

A small investor had started talking. He had lost significant money on a deal with Joel and wanted people to know. Whatever Liz had heard had landed hard enough that she wasn’t dismissing it, even though part of her clearly wanted to. She told me what she had heard. And then we sat with it.

By that point we were already midway through a lucrative engagement with Joel. Six months of runway at minimum, which for a young business is not an abstract number. Tam had already invested significant hours negotiating his contracts and preparing the groundwork for upcoming work. Time that could not be recovered regardless of what we decided.

Liz had a close connection to a journalist at a national paper. She asked her to use her resources and tools to look properly.

The journalist found enough to build a picture. There was an ex-wife who declined to go on record, afraid of what it would mean for her and her child and the financial arrangement she depended on. Nobody willing to be named. Enough to know, not enough to publish.

While this was happening the work we had arranged was complete and we sent the final invoice. The end client responded to say Joel had submitted a revised contract with different payment terms and had the money directed to a separate account. I still do not fully understand how he did it. We were a young business in a space relatively new to us, and he had read that accurately.

What followed were months of exchanges bouncing between us, the end client, and Joel. The end client said they had settled. Joel was never rude when he told us he would get the money to us. Always polite, always calm, always with a simple explanation. Issues with his company. The tax office. Other partners. A clean story told without any visible effort, delivered with the same warmth he brought to everything else.

Tam took on the recovery. Carefully worded messages, the reasonable approach and then the firmer one. We could not afford to make it a legal matter and he likely knew that. We retrieved most of the money eventually. The rest we absorbed as the cost of the lesson.

Further work came in through his COP appearance and the published interview. We turned it down and removed him as a client.

Was it worth the stress? Honestly, no. But he had no limits, and the people around him extended grace he had learned precisely how to generate.

The question Liz and I had sat with from the beginning was the same one that had followed me out of the startup I left the year before, a story I am not ready to write yet. Credible information. No proof. A reputation at stake. Your business already committed. The decision cannot wait for certainty that is never going to arrive cleanly.

There was no HR department. No compliance function. No one else to hand it to. Just three people, a voice note sent walking up a hill, and what we were prepared to do with what we knew.

I took a business ethics module at university. I remember thinking it would be the straightforward one.

I wish I could retake that class. Maybe rewrite it for today’s world.

This is Part One of a two-part series. The Cost of Doing Business explores what happens when the ethical question lands in your lap and there is no HR department, no escalation path, and no one else's name on the work. Just you, a contract, and a calculation you have to make alone.

I was standing in Covent Garden not answering my phone.

The recruiter had called three times. I knew what he wanted. I knew the answer was probably yes. I was buying time, which is a strange thing to do when you’re not a window shopper and there was nothing in particular I wanted to buy.

Something had felt off in the final meeting. An SVP and VP who’d opened with a disclaimer: we won’t be able to give you much time, we’re in the middle of a workshop. I’d noted it and said nothing. If you’re in the middle of a workshop, why am I here? I picked up on the fourth call.

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The client set professional standards. That was their purpose, their public mandate, the thing that gave them their authority in the market. They were expanding into a new geography and needed someone on the ground to drive growth, quickly and at scale. It was a flagship project, backed personally by the CEO and CFO. On paper, it was exactly the kind of work I take on.

What I discovered in the first week was that I was consultant four. The company offered little by way of explanation for what had happened to the previous three. The only comment volunteered was about the last one, that she hadn’t understood the cultural nuances of the deal. I noted that too and said nothing. I built rapport with the teams quickly, which wasn’t difficult. They were good people placed in a situation that had already made certain choices for them, though I didn’t know that yet.

The Head of Partnerships had served out his notice. They’d run two full rounds of three-stage interviews, seen six candidates over three months, and rejected every one of them. The search had stalled. At the start of week two, Maria, the SVP for Relationships and Market Development, asked if I’d step in as Head of Partnerships alongside my existing role while they continued looking. I said yes.

I have a clear statement of work in my contracts now. Being flexible is valued at surface level and often quietly forgotten when it matters most.

Reporting lines sat in two places. My fees fell under the transformation team's budget and updates went through them. The market development team was where the actual work lived. The two operated as though they were at different companies. The transformation team was methodical, process-driven, and not especially interested in adapting to what the work required. When I flagged that a technical adjustment was needed to make the growth projections work and that manual processes couldn't handle the numbers we were targeting, they responded as though I'd asked them to move a wall. Requesting a change to an eighteen-month roadmap in month three is not popular. The market development team defended me publicly, went head to head with the transformation SVP when my renewal came around, and gave me what I needed to do the job. As a consultant without an annual review or development plan, that kind of backing means something it wouldn't mean if you were permanent.

A colleague, Emily, asked me one day if I knew the backstory to the in-country partnership. We were in the office together, one of the few days either of us went in, and she’d taken me to lunch. I didn’t know the backstory. Apparently the company had worked with this partner years before and terminated the relationship after several individuals within the partner organisation had been arrested. The allegations ranged from extortion to human trafficking. The CEO had been implicated. Nothing had touched him.

I called Maria that afternoon. She was based on the other side of the world for half the year but ran on five hours sleep and always picked up. She wasn’t surprised by what I was telling her. She didn’t pause. She said this was the cost of doing business if we wanted to succeed in this market, and that my job was to find a way to get the teams cooperating.

The animosity I’d noticed from the start and couldn’t account for now had a shape. Good people, when they’ve been put in an impossible position by a decision made above them, tend not to revolt. They do the minimum and stay polite. Some refused to discuss the partnership at all, showed up to calls and meetings, but gave nothing beyond what was required. Others, including Maria and several heads of department, had a closer relationship with the partner’s CEO than I’d realised. Three of them had flown to his wedding.

I kept working. The question I couldn’t put down was whether the end justified the means.

But underneath that was another question I found harder to hold: these were allegations. Unproven. The kind that, depending on which direction you looked, could mean everything or nothing. At what point do you make a decision on that basis? And if the answer is that you don’t, that you wait for proof, what exactly are you waiting for?

The reason I stayed was that the end was genuinely significant. The work was giving access to something people in that market would otherwise never have had. Young women in particular. The kind of access that creates economic mobility, that changes the ceiling on what’s possible. That’s not nothing. That’s not easy to walk away from.

They eventually hired a Head of Partnerships. His name was Ven. He’d looked strong on paper and was easy to work with in the sense that he never questioned anything. I understood later why so many candidates had been rejected across two full rounds of interviews. They’d been looking for someone who would stay in his lane. Ven flew to Asia every two weeks, came back full of praise for the partner, and produced nothing that moved the work forward. When new allegations surfaced he played them down. When I asked why one of the partner’s individuals had been absent for several days and whether the rumours about another arrest were true, Ven had heard enough of my questions.

He used the existing friction with the transformation team to make the case for ending my contract. The Finance MD, in Dublin, told me they needed someone who could be in the office to work with him three days a week. It wasn’t a reason I could easily challenge without it looking like the challenge itself. I knew what it meant. He was less uncomfortable with the ethical question I was having trouble with.

I’d managed to get the partner and the internal teams into a room together at one point and it had gone well. Everyone played nice, progress was made, and for a moment I’d wondered whether I was reading too much into everything. That room was probably what kept me there as long as it did.

We hit the target. Overshot it by fifteen percent. That’s when the people who’d been watching from the sidelines got interested, started wanting to be part of it, and began making the case for my role.

A woman took over from me. She was warm and capable and bought me a large vase of flowers and a card on my last day. The following week she sent me a text. Maria was asking her to do Ven’s business cases and reports as well as her own work.

She’d been there a week.

Part Two is coming

In the meantime, have you ever been the person in the room who couldn't quite let it go? I'd like to know what you did with it.

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Yang offered to get me in. A purpose-driven role, her next chapter, she'd make the introductions. We've met in person maybe four times. I've known her for a couple of years, most of it on status calls and in the background of a programme none of us particularly wanted to be on. What we actually have, the trust, the shorthand, the coffee we had as she stepped into whatever comes next, came from a bathroom in late summer, two minutes at the sinks, and a question neither of us had said out loud until she did.

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Near the end of that coffee she asked how he was still there. She'd done what I hadn't. She'd asked around, talked to people who'd worked with Jack on other programmes, looked for the pattern. What she found was a decade of carefully placed relationships, mostly with men, mostly at director level and above. He moved between roles. He tended to land where he had a close relationship with whoever was running things. He was known as someone good to have around.

Ten years is a long time to build an alliance. Long enough that by the time you're attaching yourself to projects where you have no real experience - acquisition work, AI - the organisation already has a version of you it believes in. When you spin something that doesn't hold up, the people who might push back are the same people who've sat across a dinner table from you. They believe you because they know you. Or they think they do.

Jack’s pattern, as best as Yang and I can reconstruct it, was this. Join a programme. Talk a lot. Miss enough status meetings to stay above the detail. Produce nothing in writing. When things slipped, point to dependencies elsewhere, other workstreams, other teams, structural reasons outside his control. And then, somewhere before the end, move on. Land somewhere new before the reckoning.

I was pulled in six weeks before rolling off to help make his workstream presentable. He’d been on the programme for a year. There were no plans, no strategy documents, nothing auditable. I held a workshop and insisted everyone show up in person. He dialled in.

A couple of hours in I called a break. Yang, Claire and I ended up at the bathroom sinks at the same time. We’d been on the same calls for months without quite trusting each other enough to say what we were looking at. Yang got there first. This is a freaking mess, isn’t it? We’re starting from the beginning. He’s done nothing.

Claire and I exhaled.

This was after Day 100. The review had already happened. The slides had shown mostly green, benefits landing, cost savings delivered, people embedded. In the room were senior people reporting into the COO, a few advisors and consultants. Everyone who needed the programme to close sat in that room. The year-end was coming. A programme close to $1B needed to land. Those things have a way of finding each other.

The programme leader was retiring. She had built her team carefully, surrounded herself with people who knew what they were doing, who would cover the gaps and deliver. She had a lot of respect for Jack’s boss and never said anything directly. But on a one-to-one call once, she said something about Jack, the tone more than the words. She knew. She needed the success too much to pull the thread.

Jack’s boss eventually took the heat. Someone who’d come from a tier one M&A firm, who’d built relationships of his own, who had on another occasion thrown someone under the bus without hesitation. With Jack he was always light touch. When the business turned, Jack’s boss was shown the door. Jack remained.

Yang still has an ear in the company. Between us, we still can’t work it out.

There’s a version of this conversation that happens quietly, between people who’ve made serious choices about how to work and are far enough along to be honest about what those choices actually cost.

Between us, we have over three decades of making those choices and living inside the consequences. Kristian has spent the better part of twenty years with one employer, building depth, navigating identity, sitting with what it means to stay. I move on every six to twelve months, planning the next runway before the current one ends, learning to live with a different kind of uncertainty.

Somewhere along the way the questions started to sound the same.

What has your way of working actually cost you? And was it worth it?

We didn’t compare notes before writing. These are two honest answers to one prompt.

NEEMA

My father never took a holiday. The business was the sun and we all revolved around it. Weekends, late nights, conversations at the dinner table about cashflow and where we’d need to cut back that month. I watched it growing up and decided, with complete certainty, that I wanted something different. A salary, a title, a life that belonged to me rather than to something we all had to feed.

What I didn’t see coming was that I’d end up building my own version of it anyway.

I started independent consulting in my twenties. No dependents beyond a mortgage and living costs, good fees, interesting work, big name brands that built my portfolio fast. Most engagements ran six months with an option to extend, which meant by month three I was already quietly working the next move, building relationships inside the client, scanning laterally, keeping business development running alongside the day job. It had a rhythm to it. For a long time that rhythm felt like freedom.

The real cost arrived in stages, and each one recalibrated what I understood the arrangement to actually be. Every pregnancy meant no maternity leave, no pay, no pension contributions, time off the career clock with nothing accumulating on the other side. Then I lost my client engagement the first week of December, six months pregnant. My husband was laid off a week later. We went into the new year with no income between us and a baby arriving in spring.

We went through the financial spreadsheet more than was healthy. Both natural savers, both completely unsettled by the absence of a regular paycheck in a way that surprised us. The stress was such that I couldn’t use the time for what it actually was. That was the moment I understood what I’d signed up for. Not freedom exactly. A different kind of exposure.

Years later, during Covid and the long months of online school, something shifted with my daughter. She’d been quietly underconfident for a while, I hadn’t been around for the after-school playdates or the mothers’ coffee mornings, and something got lost in those early friendships that spilled onto the playground in ways I noticed but couldn’t easily fix. The online environment changed the playing field. She taught herself to work in it, built decks, learned to code, and then did something smarter still. She took what she was learning and turned it into presentations to teach the class. She became known for it. Becoming known for one particular thing was exactly the mechanism that had set me apart in mid-management, and I recognised it immediately because I’d made the same move myself. I hadn’t taught her that. She’d worked it out alone.

That tension between what you gain structurally and what quietly slips past you in the meantime is something I’ve turned over for years. Someone who brings it into sharper focus than most is a friend whose children are in the same year groups as mine.

We were often on the same train home when they were small. I can still picture her standing at the front of the carriage, right by the doors, positioned to run from the platform down the stairs and into the car park to drive through town and to the nursery before the overtime clock started. Every evening, that particular kind of precision. During that same period I’d gone back to consulting and my husband had taken on a new business venture and handled all the school and nursery runs. I was luckier in that specific, structural way, and I was grateful for it.

She made partner at a consulting firm this year. From the outside she’s made it. I am genuinely happy for her and I mean that plainly. But I’ve watched what it costs up close for a long time. My husband and I were tiger parents on the sporting front, training most evenings, club trials, specialist coaching, the travel that comes with competing seriously. Her kids didn’t get that. Not because she didn’t want it for them, but because there was nobody to take them. The moment that has stayed with me is when they pulled their youngest from private school. Two serious careers, salaries that from the outside should have made it comfortable, and the numbers still didn’t work. I don’t say that to judge it. I say it because it’s the part that doesn’t make it into the partner announcement.

The return is harder to summarise than the cost. The breadth of work, the ability to choose what comes next rather than wait to be chosen, watching my children move through opportunities I didn’t have access to growing up. None of that is small. I’d make the same choices again for those things alone.

What I didn’t account for was getting here and realising I’d never really stopped to build a life alongside the work. Decades of building, planning the next runway, betting on myself, and now, for the first time, not knowing exactly what I’m moving toward. That part I’m still inside.

KRIS

The Cost

I’ve spent my entire career at one company. I still remember how it started.

During my final year of college, I was sitting in an Electrical Engineering class when a hiring manager walked in to give a presentation.

He paused.

“Oh! This isn’t the Computer Science class?”

A quick glance around the room.

“My mistake. Well, you’ve heard the pitch. You can apply anyway.”

He smiled and added something almost in passing.

“The benefits here are amazing. When people discover this place, they don’t really leave. They end up retiring here.”

At the time, it felt like a line. Something you say to fill the room. Looking back though, he wasn’t wrong.

Staying at a company for such a long time has real, tangible benefits. I am genuinely grateful for my time.

My decision to stay has not been perfect. And like any decision, it comes with a cost. One of the biggest challenges I have faced has been the feeling of being stuck. While I have had endless opportunities and a few promotions, upward growth has been limited.

When attrition is low, opportunities are scarce. And when one does open up, there are dozens of applicants ready for it.

Despite many attempts, the door has closed just as often.

“You were the runner up”

“We went with someone who had more experience”

“You lack the depth needed for the role.”

For someone who pays attention, who reflects, who tries to grow, that pattern can start to wear on you.

The questions come quickly, and they don’t stay quiet:

“Am I enough?”
“Why does it feel like I’m not?”

Another layer to this has been comparison. Watching the steady stream of promotions on LinkedIn. Seeing old friends become VPs or Directors.

It’s hard not to measure yourself against it. And hard not to wonder where you stand in that same timeline. And over time, if you’re not careful, it can quietly shift how you see yourself. Not just what you’ve done, but what you think you’re worth.

As you spend more time at a single company, especially over 20 years, a picture of you starts to form. People come to know your strengths, your patterns, and the roles you have played over time. While those things are not fixed, they can shape how you are seen in ways that are slow to change. I experienced that firsthand. About eight years ago, I was encouraged to become more technical in my role. At the time, I did not disagree, so I leaned in. I invested the time, built the skill set, and took on work that pushed me in that direction.

And I did grow. But what I came to understand is that growth and perception do not always move at the same pace. Over time, a narrative forms about what you are known for and what you are not, and even as you evolve, it can take time for that story to catch up.

I have had conversations with friends who have moved companies every few years, and one of the biggest themes I hear is the opportunity to start fresh and reintroduce themselves. When someone new, especially someone who is highly sought after, joins an organization, there is a natural tendency to see potential first, without full visibility into the path it took to get there.

And still, that’s only part of the story. Because staying didn’t just shape my career, it shaped my life. The return hasn’t only been in roles or opportunities, but in the people, the stability, and the moments that happened along the way.

The Return

In my experience, it’s been an incredibly strong place to build a career. My decision to stay and spend my career there has yielded many benefits.

First, and most importantly, it is where I met my wife, April. She has also spent her entire career there. The fact that I not only met her there, but that we both work there carries a lot of meaning. When she runs into challenges or just wants to vent, I can meet her in it. And the same goes for me. It helps that we both understand how things work there: the culture, the processes, and the people. There’s no translation needed.

There’s also the practical side of things such as benefits, compensation, and stability. The company covered a majority of our in vitro costs over 14 years ago. After multiple miscarriages, that support led to us having twins. They made something that once felt out of reach, possible. And over time, that same stability has shown up in quieter ways such as a predictable rhythm, the ability to plan, to take family vacations, to think about the future with a bit more certainty. These are the kind of things you don’t fully appreciate early on, but grow into over time.

Additionally, I have developed so many meaningful relationships with colleagues. Many colleagues I call genuine friends. The kind of friends who will drop their plans on a dime to attend my father’s recent funeral. Also, the kind of friends and colleagues who will hold you accountable because they know what you’re capable of. That kind of trust doesn’t build overnight. It builds over time. By being in the trenches together.

Over time, I’ve learned what makes people tick, especially how they think, and what they value. And when you understand that, work becomes less about roles and more about the people.

There’s also something to be said about alignment. Over time, I’ve had the opportunity to stretch into different roles and experiences. Some of them fit. Some of them didn’t. And in going through that, I’ve come to better understand who I am, and what actually matters to me. The company gave me the space to figure that out. And I’m excited about the future ahead.

My decision to stay hasn’t been perfect. But it’s been a decision I can live with.

And that, more than anything, is what I was looking for.

Conclusion

Our paths look different, and the trade-offs are real on both sides. What we gain in one place, we give up in another. Over time, that becomes the real question. Not which path is better, but whether it’s one we can live with.

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I am terrible with names. Genuinely, embarrassingly bad. I will have met you twice, enjoyed both conversations, and still pause slightly when I see you walking towards me. What I don’t forget is the story. The detail you mentioned in passing. The thing you were worried about. The trip you were planning. So over time I stopped trying to remember names and started remembering moments instead. That became my system. And it turns out to be a better one than most of the advice I have been given.

The advice focuses on volume. More contacts, more events, more touchpoints. What it rarely addresses is the economics underneath. Which relationships actually produce work. Which ones compound quietly over years without looking like anything from the outside. Which ones cost more than they return. And what, practically, separates one from the other.

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Michael had recently left a senior international CMO role and was building an executive coaching practice from scratch. He was aggressive about building it but you would never have known that from talking to him. The hustle was real and entirely invisible in conversation, which is itself a skill worth noting.

We had crossed paths on various projects and accelerators over the years. Calm, smart, with genuine warmth. Our conversations wandered well beyond work, travel, personal growth, the occasional observation about business development. At some point he mentioned, without any particular agenda, that he kept a one-page bio and had a calendar reminder to update it monthly. He also had a line he used when asking for introductions: if you can make the intro, I will do the rest of the work.

That combination stayed with me. When I was building a leadership team for a client and the regional CFO suggested bringing in an executive coach for a new hire, I knew immediately who to call. Michael’s one-pager was already in my inbox. I knew exactly what he did, for whom, the clients he had worked with and the results he delivered. I could share it immediately and speak to it with confidence.

A referral is your reputation transferred to someone else. You only make them when you are certain. Michael had removed every obstacle between someone thinking of him and someone acting on it. He had also removed the friction from the introduction itself. Most people wait to be referred and wonder why it doesn’t happen. The answer is usually that they have made it harder than it needs to be.

He introduced me to his wife at some point, who works in a similar space to me, often in the same male-dominated industries. We catch up less frequently but it never feels transactional when either of us reaches out. That relationship has its own quality entirely. One introduction extended into something neither of us planned for.

Around the same time I had a standing introduction between two people I knew well. My headhunter, someone I had known since I was an analyst, and Dave, a procurement director I had worked alongside on a previous project. Different industries, different stakeholder expectations on the same programme, which had made our relationship more useful not less. When Dave’s team was scoping global recruitment suppliers I made the introduction. Dave took it seriously because we had built something real. Her firm put real time and effort into the RFP process and didn’t win it. That never once changed anything between us. She was grateful I thought of her, the same way I am grateful when she thinks of me. Neither of us keeps score on the outcomes. Only on the intention behind them.

Neither of them had asked me for anything. I made the introduction because it was obvious and I could. That is the whole principle, and I understood it instinctively long before I had language for it.

Maya Angelou said people will never forget how you made them feel. That is the operating principle. Not strategy. Not visibility. The quality of attention you bring to a relationship, and whether the other person leaves the conversation feeling like someone genuinely listened, is what determines whether it compounds.

I didn’t fully understand the scale of what that could produce until I worked with the CEO.

He was deeply experienced, one of the most genuinely connected people I have encountered professionally. Not connected in the sense of a large following or a busy events calendar. Connected in the sense that relationships he had built over decades were still fully operational and producing results in real time.

I was a highly experienced consultant and I felt like an intern watching how it worked. Not just with me or inside the company, but with lawyers, brokers, advisors, industry experts, competitors. We were working on an acquisition and had a weekly call with the seller, the CEO and CFO on both sides and me, while the advisors got caught in the detail we talked strategy, the future, the weekend football, how the home renovation was going. The relationships were doing work the formal process couldn’t.

He told me early on how he had ended up in the role. He had left a previous CEO position and met the chairman for drinks, pondering what to do next. The chairman said he knew the exact role for him. He had invested in a startup and they needed someone to step in as CEO. That conversation wasn’t a job application or a pitch. It was two people who had built a relationship over years, in no particular direction, and that relationship had produced something neither of them had planned.

He made introductions for me during that assignment. Not random ones. Meaningful ones. And he always introduced me as a peer or a right hand on the deal. Never as a consultant he had hired.

What that assignment crystallised wasn’t a new behaviour. It gave me a framework for understanding what I had been doing instinctively all along, and showed me the full scale of what it could produce over time. I started being more deliberate about it. Showing up to conversations because they were interesting, not because there was anything in it for me. Making notes afterwards, not about the work but about the person. The holiday they mentioned. The renovation. The dog’s name. Because as Angelou understood, it is about how you make someone feel, and recalling those small details months later tells someone you were genuinely paying attention.

That assignment was also, as it turned out, the one and only role the headhunter has ever placed me in directly. The irony of that is not lost on me. A relationship built over years produced one fee and something considerably more durable than a fee. When I move to a new assignment, she doesn’t drop a like on LinkedIn, she calls. When I need to prep for an interview or want research pulled from systems I won;t have access to, she is there, no charge implied or offered. We meet regularly, made easier when we discovered we live several villages apart. When a client mentions a resourcing requirement she is the first name I give and I will go above and beyond to get her firm on the list.

One placement fee in twenty-five years. The economics of that relationship are not in the fee.

Not everyone operates this way. It is worth being honest about that.

A colleague described being on the receiving end of a series of calls, always scheduled for 5pm on a Friday, always framed around something urgent and burning. The urgent item would resolve within ten minutes. What followed, reliably, was forty minutes of questions about the roadmap, future projects, and who could make an introduction. A consultant who had managed to stay with a single client for over a decade would not end the call, my colleague told me, until someone had agreed to refer him or connect him to someone useful. A combination of obligation and exhaustion eventually produced results.

It worked. For ten years, it worked. I am not recommending it. I am noting that it represents one honest answer to how relationships produce work, at the furthest possible end of the spectrum from everything else in this piece.

I spent just over a year investing in a relationship I was certain would compound. I had worked hard to get into that company, built relationships carefully over months to earn a seat at the table, and taken on a broader remit quickly once I had proven myself. My boss had exited multiple businesses, invested in several more, and had a network that was genuinely deep. I was building in the startup space from almost nothing and I was hungry for introductions.

The dawning was slow. Events he was attending that never appeared in the work calendar, tickets quietly offered to the team when he couldn’t make it. Months on the leadership team together and not a single voluntary introduction. The relationships were clearly there. They simply weren’t being extended in my direction.

The only time he moved toward an introduction was after I had left, when he needed help pitching an idea for funding. In that meeting I saw a version of him I hadn’t seen before. The charm was fully operational and it was obvious those conversations had been happening for some time, just without me in the room.

I left on amicable terms. There have been exchanges since, when he has needed something. I give back at a level that doesn’t over-exert me. I rarely burn bridges. But I am clear about what that year cost in time, energy and opportunity, and I am considerably faster now at reading the pattern when I see it forming.

The relationships worth building are the ones where both people would notice if it went quiet. Not symmetrical, not transactional, not kept on a ledger. But mutual. The test is simple enough. Would they call to congratulate you, or drop a like? Would they think of you before you asked, or only after? Would they introduce you because it genuinely serves you, or only when it serves them?

The long game only pays out when both people are playing it.

This is the final part of a three-part series on relationships, access and how work actually comes to you. The first two parts are in the archive.

There's a Gujarati saying I grew up hearing. Aapde bija mate shu kaam ghasavu? Translated loosely it asks: why would you want to get bruised for someone else? It was deployed as caution, a warning against extending yourself beyond what would be returned. I heard it as a child and didn't think much of it. I hear it now every time someone tells me the first rule of networking is to give value before you ask for anything.

The advice has been around long enough to feel like wisdom. Give first. Follow up within 48 hours. Stay visible. Add value before you make a request. Every career book, every professional development workshop, every person who has ever been asked how they built their network will hand you some version of this list.

It isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just a solution to a problem that not everyone has equally.

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Consider what networking actually looks like when you don’t need to do it.

Henry went to boarding school, the kind with a waiting list and an alumni directory that nobody advertises and everyone uses. We moved in similar circles but not the same ones. He invited me to a garden party once. Casual, he said. Late afternoon, his parents' garden, nothing formal. What he meant by casual was a particular kind of ease I had to watch closely to understand. His parents moved through the garden the way people move through their own kitchen. Unhurried. Stopping to talk to whoever was nearby, not because they were working the room but because they were genuinely at home in it. His father knew everyone's father. His mother knew what everyone was doing next and who might be useful to whom. The introductions happened in the space between a drink being refilled and a conversation about something entirely unrelated.

I'd been trying to get in front of a particular PE partner for months. The usual routes, emails into the void, a LinkedIn connection request that went nowhere. I'd even gone sideways, through a colleague I knew who worked with him, which produced a polite acknowledgement and nothing more. What actually started the conversation was a casual exchange with Henry's mother, who had asked what I was working on with the particular interest of someone who listens properly. A few days later his father had apparently given someone called Leo a nudge. Leo called.

No follow-up window. No value exchange architecture. Just a mother asking her husband to make a call, and a call being made.

This is what the conventional advice misses. It assumes the starting positions are roughly equivalent, that everyone is walking into the same room with the same degree of strangeness. The give-first rule, the 48-hour window, the visibility strategy, these are all tools for building something from nothing. They have almost no relevance to people who are maintaining what already exists across generations. The advice and the reality are describing two entirely different activities and calling them by the same name.

Here’s what the advice also rarely mentions: the moment you walk into a room of strangers, your nervous system registers it as a threat. Heart rate up. Palms damp. A sudden interest in your phone that has nothing to do with your phone. This is biology, not weakness, wiring that was useful once and in a hotel function room at seven in the evening is mainly just inconvenient. Acting confident, the standard prescription, ignores the mechanism entirely. You cannot override the signal by performing its opposite.

What you can do is give yourself a different job to do in the room.

I was at a networking drinks event a few years ago when a woman walked in quickly, scanned the room, and approached the small group I was standing with. She told us her name, that she was looking to raise £1 million, and asked who she should speak to. No small talk. No reading of the room. Someone pointed her towards an investor and she was gone. I watched her move through the space in the same way, targeted, direct, visibly working through a list only she could see. She connected with me on LinkedIn afterwards. I watched from a distance as things unfolded over the next couple of years. She didn’t raise. The company closed. She’s back in corporate now, doing well.

I’m not saying she failed because of how she networked. I’m saying the approach revealed something. The room sensed the transaction before she’d finished her first sentence. The give-first rule exists because without it, that’s what you look like, someone who has already decided what this conversation is for.

Before an event, and when I was building my network from nothing I attended a lot of events I didn’t want to attend, I contact the host. Not to confirm attendance. To ask if I can help. Is there anything they need? Can I assist with introductions? What are they hoping people leave with? It sounds small. What it does is give you a function before you’ve walked in. You’re no longer a person hoping to make something happen. You’re a person who’s already useful.

Ask the host in advance to make two or three specific introductions. Be clear about what you’re looking for. Hosts almost always say yes, nobody has ever asked them this before, which makes you immediately more memorable than everyone else attending. You arrive knowing three conversations are already arranged. The room stops being a problem to solve.

None of this is giving value first. It's just having a reason to be there. The difference is the motivation. One is transactional. The other makes the whole thing slightly more bearable.

A few years ago I was at my son’s sports day. Out on the field, drifting between the afternoon tea area and the races, a couple in their seventies were making their way around the parents with the particular ease of people who have been doing this for a very long time. They knew some people. They met others. Within twenty minutes they were deep in conversation with strangers, laughing, exchanging details, making plans. Nobody had given them a framework. Nobody had told them to add value first.

At some point my son’s friend walked past me towards his family after the relay, slowing briefly. “Hello Neema, have you been enjoying the day?” Then he was gone.

What I was watching wasn’t natural charm. It was three generations of infrastructure, fully operational. The garden parties, the school networks, the calls that get returned because everyone’s father knows everyone’s father. By the time you’re in your seventies and your grandchildren are running races, the room has been warm for decades.

The conventional advice isn't useless. It's just written for people who are building from nothing, handed to everyone as if the starting point is the same. My grandmother knew. Why would you want to get bruised for someone else? Because sometimes there's no other way in.

Next week, the final part in this series: most relationship maintenance is performative. The LinkedIn birthday message, the quarterly coffee, the occasional restack. What actually keeps a professional relationship alive is quieter and less visible than any of that.

Kay and I met on the first day of university, same halls of residence, moving boxes in at the same time. Years later, when I was looking for my first graduate job, she was already an analyst on a transformation programme at a financial services firm.

She called me one afternoon. Her boss was hiring. She’d thought of me, she knew what I was looking for, and told me to send my CV. Not suggested it. Told me.

I sent it. She printed it, walked it to her boss’s desk, and stood there while he read it. Not hovered nearby. Stood there. He offered an interview before she left.

Then she prepped me. Not encouragement, the actual substance. The product knowledge he’d want to see. The soft skills that mattered to him specifically, the ones that don’t appear in any job description. What to say. What not to say.

I got the job. The side door into trading I’d been looking for.

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The word “networking” would ruin this story. Apply it to what Kay did and something curdles. She didn’t network. She helped. That distinction, between the real thing and its performed imitation, is what the entire industry of networking advice has managed to obscure.

Every careers department, every professional development book will tell you your network is your most valuable asset. They’re right. Then they’ll tell you how to build one: attend events, collect contacts, follow up within 48 hours, add value before you ask for anything. None of it is wrong, exactly. It’s just describing the mechanics. The visible surface of relationship-building, not the thing itself.

What it also doesn’t say: almost all of it points upward. Find sponsors. Get in front of decision-makers. Build relationships with people who can open doors. The implicit instruction is to direct your social energy at seniority. Which means most people spend their careers building relationships in one direction, and wondering why they feel thin.

The real thing starts with being genuinely curious about people. Not instrumentally. Actually interested. And it doesn’t particularly care about the org chart.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into most career advice: some of this is luck. Not luck instead of work, the work is real and it matters. But luck too.

A friend who attended an elite British boarding school gave me a glimpse into how that alumni network actually operates. Need an introduction? Make a call. Someone answers, with results, because you’re in the circle. No careful positioning required. No 48-hour follow-up window. The infrastructure is already built. You’re born into it or you’re not.

I saw a version of it in the startup world too. Where you went to university determined which investors took your meeting, which grant panels found you credible, which advisors returned the call. The network wasn’t something you built. It preceded you.

I came to this as a first-generation immigrant. No ready-made infrastructure. No one to call. The relationships I have now exist because I built them, one at a time, from nothing in particular. And I notice, with a clarity that has sharpened over the years, which circles matter for the generation coming up behind me. That’s not an abstract observation. It’s specific.

Hard work gets you somewhere. It got me here. But the starting positions weren’t equivalent, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

I think about all of this differently now, partly because fractional work has made certain things visible.

When you’re brought in independently, the clock starts immediately. Days, not weeks or months. You need to understand what’s actually happening, fast, who holds what, what’s been tried before, where the official narrative diverges from what’s real on the ground.

Senior stakeholder relationships are table stakes. You need to speak their language, understand their version of events. That part is obvious.

What’s less obvious is how incomplete that version tends to be.

I was hired onto a flagship market-entry project once. Plans delayed, budget in disarray, no cohesion. In meetings, people were present but not interested, the particular deadness of a room that has quietly given up on something. I couldn’t find the source of it from the top.

A mid-level manager met me for an informal coffee. Within twenty minutes I had the real answer. No amount of senior stakeholder time had surfaced it. The coffees with people who weren’t performing for me did.

That’s what building relationships below the waterline actually produces. Not background texture. The thing you need to know. The gap between the official story and what people will say when they’re not performing alignment.

The political landscape of an organisation isn’t just an obstacle to manage, it’s information. Who goes quiet when a particular name comes up. Who defers to whom in ways the org chart doesn’t show. Whose buy-in everyone claims to have and nobody has actually verified. You read those things by talking to people who have no reason to manage your impression of them. The analyst who actually runs the model. The operations lead who knows where every workaround lives. The manager who’s been there long enough to remember what was tried before and why it failed.

Building those relationships quickly, genuinely, without an obvious agenda, that’s the skill. It’s also the part nobody teaches.

Kay moved on eventually. When she was ready for her next role, I knew a headhunter I trusted, someone who would actually try to place her well, not fill a slot. I made the introduction.

No ledger involved. No favour being repaid at the correct interval. I knew someone who could help her, the same way she’d once known someone who could help me. It would have felt strange to treat it any other way.

That’s the whole model. The word “networking” just makes it sound like something else entirely.

Next in this series: the networking advice everyone still gives, why it's wrong, and the economics of what actually produces work.

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There’s a hotel brand I’ve stayed with for years. The service is not warm in a performative way, it’s warm in the way that competence often is. Consistent across cities, across properties, across years. They know what they’re doing and it shows. There’s a healthcare brand I’ve used just as long. Different sector, same instinct, the internal culture matched the external promise in ways that are rarer than they should be.

Both brands had built something real. Both were about to use the same language to dismantle part of it. The language arrived first. It always does.

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In the hotel business, it came through a branding campaign. Months of it, internal communications, refreshed values materials, a new visual language rolled out. By the time the phrase landed, it had been repeated often enough that questioning it felt like questioning the brand itself. Nobody interrogated it because it didn't look like a decision. It looked like a refresh.

That phrase was high performance culture. Three words that sound like aspiration and function as architecture. If you've heard them inside an organisation before, you know to watch what gets built next.

What got built was familiar. Competency frameworks, freshly designed, circulated for consultation. A values refresh. A training programme for managers on how to give constructive feedback. Scorecards. Structured one-to-ones with documentation requirements. The apparatus of performance management, assembled quickly and presented as investment in people’s development.

The culture it was being assembled inside had spent years doing the opposite. Generous bonuses paid reliably. Performance conversations measured in the soft metrics of attitude and effort rather than the harder ones of output and impact. Directness actively discouraged, not as policy, but as practice, accumulated quietly over years until it became the default. The people who delivered that exceptional guest experience had been well looked after. They’d also never been told, plainly, when something wasn’t working. The culture had decided that conversation was too contrary to the warmth the brand required.

You cannot train a decade of that out of a management layer in a quarter. The managers knew it. The HR team knew it. Most people sitting through the training sessions knew it. Nobody said it out loud in those rooms.

This is what someone said to me plainly, in the kind of conversation that only happens once the official version of events has been set aside. People will leave for three reasons.

• Some won’t like the new way, the directness, the scrutiny, the shift from generous to earned.

• Others will leave when the bonus doesn’t arrive, or arrives smaller than it ever has, and the thing that made the discomfort bearable disappears with it.

• And some will be shown clearly, for the first time, that they are not performing. Not by the previous standard, which was designed not to show them that. But byy this one.

The employees didn’t fail against a consistent standard. The standard changed once the exits had already been decided. The performance management infrastructure - the scorecards, the frameworks, the documented one-to-one’s, these didn’t exist to improve performance. It existed to make the exits defensible. To transfer the weight of a business decision onto an individual narrative. Not a restructure. Not a cost reduction. A cultural misalignment. The language converts one thing into another, thoroughly enough that the people it’s used on often can’t see the join.

The healthcare organisation didn’t bother with the language. They chose a faster instrument.

A team of consultants was commissioned to review every business unit - efficiency, structure, headcount, capability. The framing was organisational design. The outcome was not. Department after department was assessed, and then systematically removed. Not individuals managed out through a performance process. Whole teams. Gone inside a timeframe too short for individual grievances to gel into anything organised. The people inside started calling it a massacre. That’s a strong word. I think it was accurate.

The organisation had wanted new blood, new capabilities, a structure built for aggressive growth rather than the steady, coherent culture it had accumulated. What it produced, in the short term, was a workforce managing its own exposure. The people who survived the first wave didn’t perform better. They went quiet. Heads down, opinions withdrawn, very careful about visibility and what they said in rooms and to whom. Being noticed no longer felt safe.

This is what neither mechanism accounts for. The exits are visible. The behaviour of everyone watching the exits is not recorded anywhere, not measured in any scorecard, not discussed in any all-hands. It lands in the culture silently and stays there.

Two brands. Two instruments. One chose the slow route, the language of development wrapped around the architecture of removal, personal, documented, dressed as care. The other chose the fast route, consultants holding the decisions at arm’s length from leadership, structural, swift, dressed as design. Both arrived at the same destination. Reduced headcount. New capabilities. A workforce that understood, whatever had been announced, what had actually happened.

I stayed at the hotel last month. Different city, same experience. The check-in was easy. The room was right.

I stood at the window looking out at the view and thought about the people who had built that experience over years, and whether they were still there, and whether any of them were currently working through a performance improvement plan that would have surprised them twelve months ago.

The service was, as always, very good.

I’ve been fired four times. Each time, I knew what I should have done differently. That’s not the same as having done it.

The Friday afternoon calendar invite should have told me everything. Two names; heads who don’t usually find themselves in the same room, scheduled for 4pm. Twenty years in consulting means you know what a 4pm Friday with two principals means before you’ve opened the invite. I was the fourth consultant this client had brought onto a high-profile market entry initiative. I knew that going in. I took it anyway.

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By the time the call happened, I’d expanded into two roles, absorbed responsibilities that had nothing to do with my original scope, and this is the part worth sitting with; I’d recently pulled back to something closer to what I’d actually been contracted to deliver. The call lasted ten minutes. When you stop over-delivering, it registers as under-performance. Nobody puts this in the contract. They don’t need to.

There are three reasons a consulting engagement ends early, and none of them are straightforwardly about you.

The first: the client hired you because they believe they need help. What they actually want is validation. When you deliver something inconvenient instead, the engagement tends to conclude.

The second is structural. Scope is agreed at one point. You arrive at another. The role you were hired for no longer maps to the problem that exists. This isn’t anyone’s fault exactly, but it tends to get resolved at your expense.

The third is political, and it’s the one people discuss least because it’s the hardest to admit you walked into. You arrive to do the job. The job requires moving through an organisation where people have their own agendas, their own fears, their own read on what your presence means for them. In high-profile engagements especially, the threat isn’t abstract. You’re a senior resource in a room that already has senior people in it. The fight that ends the engagement is rarely the one you were hired to resolve.

What connects all three is that the ending says more about the situation than it does about you. Being fired is not the same as failing. This is genuinely true and also genuinely difficult to hold onto in the weeks after a 4pm Friday call.

The signals are familiar now. Same pattern, same quiet recognition that an engagement isn’t going to land where it was supposed to. The difference is what I did with that recognition.

I ended it. But differently to how it had been done to me. An open conversation. Direct, early enough to be useful. What wasn’t working, why it wasn’t, and what I’d do before leaving so they weren’t in the lurch. No ten-minute call. No Friday ambush. Just an honest account of where things were and a clean exit.

Whether that changed anything for them, I couldn’t tell you. What it changed for me is the more interesting question. There’s a difference between being let go and choosing to leave. Not a moral one. A practical one. When you understand clearly enough why something isn’t working, you don’t have to wait for someone else to act on it first.

The market entry engagement was the lesson. I just sat the exam a few more times first.

A brand launch that made the national press. An acquisition that opened a new market. A restructure that kept a business intact and most of its people in work. I was part of all of it. You won't find my name attached to any of it.

That’s not a complaint. It’s the model.

You come in, you do the hard part, you leave. The photograph belongs to the people staying.

What nobody tells you when you move into fractional or portfolio work is that the hardest thing to solve isn’t the work itself. It’s the question you get in the first five minutes of every new engagement, sometimes out loud, usually not.

Who is this person, what do they want, and where do they sit in the hierarchy? In a corporate setting, a job title answers all three at once. Strip it away and people don’t know how to orient around you, and that discomfort has consequences.

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Titles in organisations do more than describe a function. They signal level, they imply agenda, and they tell people whether you’re a threat or an ally. A Chief Transformation Officer carries weight and political baggage in equal measure. A Head of Strategy means something specific about where decisions get made and who gets to make them. When you arrive without a title that maps onto any of that, people fill the gap themselves, and not always in ways that help you do the work.

My contracts have a title in them. The statement of work will define something specific, tight, scoped. The org chart might carry something different again, usually whatever made the internal paperwork clean. None of them travel. None of them explain what I actually do or how I operate in a way that someone on the other side of the building could use. This is not a branding problem. It is a structural one, and it comes with the territory.

My LinkedIn title is bland. Deliberately so. Not because I haven’t thought about it, I have, at length. But because the honest version doesn’t exist as a searchable term. No large company CEO is on LinkedIn looking for someone to advise them quietly and deliver loudly. The closest approximation I can find is Chief of Staff, which misses the mark entirely for work that is temporary, advisory, and operating outside the permanent structure. So I optimise for searchability and accept the gap. Most of my engagements are under NDA. My CV moves slowly as a result. This is the reality of the model, and it’s worth naming it plainly rather than pretending there’s a clever solution to it.

The best thing a client ever did for me was say four sentences to his leadership team before I started. She is here to advise us and help us through this. She is your peer. Treat her like one.

That was it. No title. No org chart entry. Just a clear statement of where I sat and how I should be engaged. It worked immediately. People knew what I was there to do, understood I had no political stake in the internal dynamics, and treated me accordingly.

One sentence from a leader did what six months of personal branding couldn’t.

I thought about that moment this month, starting a new engagement. The usual orientation period — the slight caution, the testing, the quiet working out of where you fit and what you want. A few days in, someone sent me an IM with something pressing. At the end of it: are you the person I should bring this to? Are you leading this?

Genuine question, no agenda behind it. They just needed to know where I sat before they committed to the conversation. It resolves itself, it always does. But it resolves faster and more cleanly when the person who brought you in has done that work upfront. One well-placed introduction at the start saves weeks of careful positioning. That’s not a small thing when your engagement has a fixed timeline and results to deliver.

This is where the elevator pitch earns its place, and not in the way most people think about it.

The conventional version is for the person standing in front of you — thirty seconds, clear and confident, designed to make a good impression. That version is fine but it misses the more important function. In fractional and portfolio work, especially in M&A and restructuring where almost everything runs on referral, your elevator pitch is primarily for the person who isn’t in the room. The colleague your contact mentions you to over lunch. The CFO who asks at a conference if anyone knows someone who could help with something. The introduction that happens in your absence, in a conversation you will never hear, that either places you accurately or doesn’t.

The referral economy in this space is real and it is significant. Work finds you through people who have worked with you before, or who know someone who has. Which means the words someone else reaches for when they describe you matter as much as anything on your LinkedIn profile. You need to have given them something that travels — a clear, repeatable sentence that lands accurately in a room you’re not in. Not a job title. Something more useful than that.

The title problem doesn’t go away. You become a chameleon, switching into whatever makes sense for the engagement. Unlike a permanent employee, you don’t have the luxury of being known by one title long enough for it to stick. So the words you give people to describe you have to work harder than any title ever could.