The month the work dried up

Two deals slipped a month, a client paused a build, and an invoice I had counted on did not arrive.

None of these were disasters individually. Together, in the same three weeks, they were educational.

What I learned about my pipeline

I did not have one. I had a list of conversations I felt good about, which is a different thing.

A conversation is not pipeline unless it has a date attached and a defined next action. Everything else is optimism with a spreadsheet around it, and it will let you down at exactly the wrong moment.

What I actually changed

Every opportunity now has a next action with a date, or it is not in the pipeline. If I cannot name what happens next and when, it is a nice chat, and I stop counting it as revenue that has not arrived yet.

I also started tracking how many promises I had made and not yet kept — things I said I would send and had not. That number was much higher than I expected, and closing it turned out to be the cheapest source of new work available to me.

The uncomfortable realisation

A quiet month is usually created eight weeks earlier, during a busy one, when you stop doing the unglamorous work because delivery is loud and urgent.

The feast causes the famine. I know that now, and I still have to fight it.