Writing that starts
with something real.

You mention wanting to leave your job. Someone immediately reminds you how lucky you are. The salary. The flexibility. The title. The fact that other people would love that opportunity. You know. You’ve made the same list yourself. Usually on Sunday evening, while trying to talk yourself into another week. A good job can be remarkably difficult to leave because you feel obliged to produce a sufficiently serious complaint. A terrible manager would help. So would an obvious injustice. Something you could explain over dinner without sounding ungrateful. Instead, you have a collection of smaller things. You’re interested in very little of the work. You’ve stopped wanting the next promotion. When someone describes where the department is heading, you calculate how old you’ll be when it gets there. None of this automatically means you should resign. You may need a different role, a proper break, a conversation you’ve been avoiding, or a clearer picture of what you’d actually move towards. But you need room to investigate those possibilities without cross-examining yourself for having them. Try setting the gratitude list aside for a moment. If nobody else had an opinion about this job, what would you want to understand about your next move? You can appreciate what a role has given you and still ask whether you want another five years of it.

Being the person everyone relies on can become a very effective way to stay in the same job. You take the difficult account because you can handle it. You cover the vacancy because you know the work. You keep the project that should have moved to someone else because explaining it would take longer than doing it. Your manager is grateful. Your colleagues trust you. Your workload keeps growing. Then a bigger role opens up, and moving you creates a problem. Who will take your accounts? Who will train your replacement? How will the team cope during the transition? Somehow, all the reasons you were valuable become reasons you need to wait. This is worth discussing well before a promotion decision. Ask your manager: “Which responsibilities am I taking on that demonstrate readiness for the next role?” “And which ones am I holding because we haven’t found another owner?” Those questions can produce very different lists. The first deserves clear expectations and recognition. The second needs a handover plan, with time allocated for someone else to learn. If you manage a dependable person, look at those lists yourself. It’s easy to keep giving work to the person who makes you least anxious. It takes more effort to develop the rest of the team so that person can move. They shouldn’t have to become less helpful to make progression possible.

Before you plan to double the business, look at the week you’re about to double. The sales calls you keep postponing. The delivery work that follows you into Saturday. The launch cycle you spend weeks recovering from before starting the next one. Growth tends to get discussed as though it will eventually buy you a different working life. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it gives the existing one a larger audience. I’d want to understand which version I was building. Take a business that depends on the founder selling every engagement and reviewing every deliverable. More demand could support a team, better processes, and a narrower role for the founder. It could also produce more calls, more reviews, and several employees waiting for decisions. The revenue forecast alone won’t tell you which outcome is coming. You have to design the work. What will stop needing your approval? Which customers can you serve well through a team? What are you willing to remove from the offer, even if people currently pay for it? That last question can be awkward. An offer can be profitable and still ask too much of the person delivering it. Changing it may mean accepting a slower quarter while you build something you can sustain. I think that deserves a place in a growth plan. Write down the working week you want alongside the revenue target. Include the calls, the delivery responsibilities, the hours, and the decisions you still want to own. Then check whether the plan gets you closer to it.

“Can you do the same thing for 30% less?” I’d want to keep that conversation going. The buyer may have a genuine budget ceiling. They may also be asking for the only adjustment they know how to request. Suppose the proposal includes interviews across five departments, a workshop, recommendations, and implementation support. There are several possible conversations hiding inside that price objection: “We need a decision before the next budget meeting.” “We mostly need the leadership team to agree.” “We already have people who could handle implementation.” “We want everything, but we’re comparing your fee with a much lighter piece of work.” Each answer changes what you should propose. So I’d ask: “Which decision do you most need this work to help you make?” Then I’d revisit the scope around that answer. Perhaps the first engagement can cover one division. Perhaps the client can collect some of the inputs. Perhaps implementation support can wait until there’s an approved direction to implement. Be explicit about the consequences. Fewer interviews means less coverage. A shorter engagement means some questions remain unanswered. The buyer should understand what they’re choosing. And if you decide to offer a discount on the full scope, name it as a discount. There’s room for commercial judgment here. There’s also room to say that a particular fee won’t support the work. The useful part of the conversation is finding out whether you’re negotiating over the right assignment.

Your buyer may love the presentation and still have nothing useful to take to their finance director. They’ve seen the vision. They understand where the product is going. They can imagine the benefits. Now they have to explain the purchase to someone who wasn’t in the room. That person has a different set of questions. What will the team be able to do when this is implemented? How much work will adoption require? Which benefits depend on capabilities that haven’t shipped yet? What happens if those capabilities arrive later than expected? A persuasive presentation can leave all four unanswered. Imagine selling an analytics platform with an ambitious automation roadmap. The sponsor is excited about reducing manual reporting. But the current product still requires their team to clean the data and interpret the results. They need to be able to separate the improvement available now from the improvement they’re hoping to get later. Help them make that distinction. Show the current workflow. Explain the work their team will still own. Identify the assumptions behind the financial case. Give them evidence they can forward without needing to recreate your entire presentation. You’re equipping someone to put their judgment behind a purchase. I’d rather a sponsor leave with a modest case they can defend than a magnificent story that falls apart under the first practical question.

“Are you happy with your current agency?” That’s a surprisingly demanding question to ask someone who didn’t expect your call. To answer properly, they may need to explain their targets, the relationship, what’s working, what isn’t, and why they haven’t changed anything. You haven’t given them much reason to do that work yet. Compare it with an opening like this: “Your ad offers a same-day response, but the enquiry form asks people to allow three working days. Is that intentional?” Use that only if you’ve actually checked and found the mismatch. It gives the buyer a small, specific question they can answer. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. There may be something worth investigating. Either way, you’ve brought something to the conversation. I’d be careful about turning this into a hunt for mistakes. Nobody enjoys a stranger arriving with a list of everything they’re doing badly. Look for something relevant to the result they’re trying to achieve. Describe it plainly. Leave room for context you don’t have. Then see whether they want to talk. A prospect who can recognise the relevance of your first question has a much better reason to answer the second.