By month four I had seven active clients. By month eight I had a waiting list for the first time, which meant I needed to get better at saying no to projects that were outside my core expertise. Julia had referred me to two companies that turned out to be poor fits — one needed a full IT overhaul rather than process improvement, and one’s problems were fundamentally management issues rather than workflow issues, and I do not do management consulting — and I had to decline both. This felt significant at the time. Saying no to paid work when you are newly independent requires a confidence in your own model that is sometimes hard to sustain.
I sustained it. The clients I kept were good matches. The referrals accelerated. By month twelve I was billing at a rate that was within ten percent of my former Forrest salary, and the trajectory suggested it would exceed that in the following year.
Daniel had access to all of this information. Not in a surveillance way, in a marriage way: we shared a bank account, we talked about our work at dinner, he occasionally asked how specific projects were going and I told him. He was genuinely interested in the stories I brought home from client sites — the strange dysfunction of one company’s approval process, the facilities coordinator at another company who had been trying to fix a particular problem for three years and had never had anyone listen to her diagnosis before. He asked good questions. He was supportive.