Tuesday night, 8:58, my Atlanta apartment. The headphones are the wireless ones Marcus bought me when I left LA — fresh ears for the new start, he said, which is one of those things Marcus say that sound like nothing but stay with you for two years.
The Zoom kickoff is at 9. Sterling wanted to be considerate of my time zone. Sterling is in New York and I'm an hour behind, so they bumped the call to 9 their time, 8 mine — except I been ready since 7, sitting at this desk with the spreadsheet open and the project brief annotated and the second cup of coffee that I should not be drinking at this hour and that I am drinking anyway.
Two years and four months since the LAX drive. Two years and four months since Marcus put me in his car at six in the morning and told me to rebuild — don't let her be the last chapter. I have eleven clients now. I have a website I built myself. I have a methodology document I rewrote three times. I have an Atlanta apartment that is half-furnished because every dollar that come in goes back into the business before it goes into a couch.
The Sterling engagement is the biggest contract I been in since Montgomery+Williams. Six months minimum. Two hundred hours billable. Leadership consult for a mid-cap manufacturer on Long Island. They picked me on a referral from a Howard alum who's a partner at Sterling — that's a piece of luck I'm not unpacking yet. I'm just taking the win.
The link opens. The waiting room.
I press join.
Sterling's conference room first. Camera centered on a long table. Two partners I recognize from their LinkedIn. A junior on a laptop. Beige walls. Manhattan light through the windows behind them — I can tell it's Manhattan light because Manhattan has a particular evening quality, slightly hard, slightly metallic, that no other city has.
Then she come on. Bottom-right tile.
Sybrina Hart. VP, Strategy & Transformation.
The headshot Sterling sent in the deck was the polished kind — hair up, dark suit, the corporate face every senior consultant grow into eventually. The live face is different. She's at home. Bookshelves behind her, slightly out of focus. Hair down. A mug in her hand that's probably tea because nobody drink coffee at 9 PM in Manhattan unless they want to be up at 3.
She say hi everyone, thanks for joining late, I appreciate the flexibility on the time zone. Her voice has a quality I wasn't ready for. Not soft. Precise. Each word doing the work it has to do and no more. The voice of someone who write the way she write — I read three of her white papers Sterling sent over in the brief packet, and the writing match the voice exactly, which almost never happen.
I introduce myself. I do the version I do for first calls — Howard, ten years consulting, recent move to Atlanta to start my own practice, prior work in leadership transformation for mid-caps and one Fortune 500. Clean. Practiced. Edges sanded down so no one have to ask follow-up questions about gaps.
She listen with her head slightly tilted. I notice that. The tilt is a tell. People who tilt are listening past the words to the structure underneath. Most people don't tilt.
She say welcome aboard, and then she ask a question — the first real question — about the engagement scope. The question is precise. The question does work the partners haven't done in their own brief. I answer it precisely back, and she nod once, and we move on.
The call run an hour. Most of it is logistics — timelines, deliverables, who owns what. The partners do most of the talking. Sybrina speak twice more. Both times I notice she doesn't waste a syllable.
By the time I close the laptop it's 10 PM Atlanta time. The apartment is dark except for the desk lamp. I take the headphones off. My ears feel hot.
I been on first Zoom calls before. I have done maybe fifty of them since LA. I have heard a lot of voices.
I am not going to make more of this than it is.
The voice was a good voice. The questions were good questions. That happen sometimes. I been a consultant long enough to know that a sharp VP at the client side make the whole engagement easier, not harder. A precise listener is a gift. You build deliverables around someone like that and the deck almost write itself because you know which sentences they're going to read carefully and which ones they're going to skip.
I get up. Walk to the kitchen. Pour out the cold coffee. Stand at the counter for a minute looking at the dishwasher light blinking the way it have been blinking since I moved in.
The thing about being two years and four months into a rebuild is that you don't get to want anything anymore. You don't get to fall fast. You don't get to mistake good calibration for chemistry. You don't get to project. You don't get to assume a tilt is anything other than a person tilting.
I learned that one. I learned it on a LAX run with Marcus at six in the morning and four years of clients I built from nothing and Victor Reyes's name on a contract that wasn't mine anymore.
I'm not making more of this than it is.
I rinse the mug. I leave it in the rack. I go to bed.
Tomorrow I'll send the partners a thank-you email and the project plan revisions and a quick note to the junior who didn't talk much. I won't address Sybrina directly because nothing on the call require it.
The next Zoom is in ten days.
I am — already — counting.