**SEO Title:** My Husband Said I Was Unemployed. His Company Hired Me to Speak.
**Meta Description:** My husband told his family I wasn’t working for eighteen months. Then his company booked me through a professional directory to lead their internal training day. He was in the room.
**Slug:** husband-said-unemployed-company-hired-me-speak
## The Professional Life Daniel’s Family Didn’t Know About
I want to walk through some of what the eighteen months actually looked like, because I think the context matters.
In the first month of the consultancy, I had four clients. Two were from referrals at Forrest — a former colleague had moved to a regional property management company and asked if I would look at their work order fulfillment process, and a vendor I had worked with closely asked if I could help them think through a billing dispute that was actually, on inspection, a workflow problem. The other two were from the Midwest Operations Alliance’s referral pool, which I had accessed through Julia Reyes after attending one of their quarterly events as a speaker candidate.
The billing in the first month was modest. I had expected that. Setting up a consultancy means spending time on infrastructure that does not immediately generate revenue: building the website, establishing a business account, registering with the appropriate professional networks, developing the basic documentation I needed for client engagements. I spent six to eight hours a day working. The kitchen table was my primary workspace. The second bedroom, which we had set up as an office before I left Forrest, was where I took calls and did my focus work.