The first thing anyone paid me to build

It was small. It solved one problem for one team. I have never been more frightened of sending an invoice.

The fear was not that it would not work. It was that they would ask me a technical question I could not answer, and the whole thing would come apart — that they would realise I was a coach who had learned some things rather than whatever they thought they had hired.

What actually happened

They did ask questions. None of them were the ones I had been dreading. They asked what happens when someone leaves the company. They asked who to ring if it stopped working on a Friday. They asked whether the person who does this job on Tuesdays would still have a job.

Every single question was about people and continuity. Not one was about the technology.

The lesson I have never unlearned

Clients do not buy software. They buy the confidence that Monday will go better than last Monday, and that nothing will blow up while they are not looking.

Technical credibility matters far less than I feared. What matters is whether you tell them the truth about what could go wrong, and whether you are still there when it does.

I was terrified of being found out. What I actually needed to worry about was whether I would answer the phone.