Nobody follows a free plan.

In the autumn of 2024 a client of mine, who I had helped secure a mid-management role before, reached out again. He wanted to make a move of a different scale. Different country, bigger company, maybe a new industry. That kind of move usually takes a year when it works at all. I was running my group programme that same autumn and he joined it on a personal support tier.

He worked through the programme properly. We built his LinkedIn and CV, identified his target market and companies, and set a weekly plan to execute. Shortly after the main programme had finished, life arrived. Something personal, not my business and definitely not his fault, but he went quiet for a few months.

When he came back I told him I was happy to carry on anyway, at no charge. I had one condition and I remember writing it out. I help you build a plan, I equip you with tools, but it's your execution. You do what we plan and then iterate based on the market feedback.

It held for a while. He sent things, I read them, we adjusted. Then life came at him a second time, the structure stopped arriving, and nothing happened as a result. I checked in a few times, but he was still dealing with his own things.

Then he asked for a call a few months later.

I said sure, what's it about?

It started well. I asked how he was doing and whether he needed any help. He started explaining that he had tried everything and it just didn't work.

I got a bit anxious as he went on. He told me he had invested a lot of time and money into preparing for what turned out to be a fraud. I remember I was walking back home in the evening and I had to stop to concentrate. Why is that, I asked. His answer was simple: "I didn't get my offer... and I want my money back."

I said no. It got ugly enough afterwards that I have not told this story to anybody since.

It is probably one of the lowest points in my career advisory practice, and I started questioning myself after that.

The part I did not see for months is that I was not paying anything for this either. When I hand somebody free support after an engagement has ended, I have nothing riding on the result. If the plan stops moving I am not on the hook to bring a mitigation, because nobody is owed one. I do not have to have been right about whether this was the right person to take on. I was the one who set it up that way.

Free does not only mean unpaid. A plan is free when putting it down costs you nothing, and the plan I handed him was free in both senses at once. He had paid a year earlier, so that money was gone whatever he did next, and nothing in the arrangement made a Tuesday with the plan different from a Tuesday without it. When life came at him, and it came twice, this was the one thing in his week that could be dropped at no charge. The job and the thing that had gone wrong at home both billed him the same day.

He was half right, which is the part I have chewed on since. It did not work. It did not work because neither of us had arranged for stopping to be expensive. That is part of the reason I stopped selling short group programmes. Either we do a defined piece of work to get somebody ready for the market, with an end you can see from the start, or we work together long term against criteria we agree before anything begins. On a long engagement, if the results are not moving, I am the one who has to come back with a plan for it, and that makes me far more careful about who I say yes to in the first place. The client is paying with money and with their evenings, so the work competes with the rest of the week instead of waiting politely behind it.

I am not built differently. In August 2023, the week my daughter was born, I said out loud that we were moving to Europe and that I would have an offer inside 6 months. I said it to my wife, with a number in it, at the worst imaginable moment to be committing to anything like this. After that, dropping it would have meant going back and saying so. I applied on a Sunday to one of the leading industrial startups in the world, in Sweden, and signed an improved offer 18 days later. It worked because the plan had a price on it.

So if there is something you have been meaning to start for a few months, spend this week making it expensive to drop. Not necessarily by spending money, though it definitely helps. Tell one person who will actually ask you about it, give them a date, and choose somebody whose question you would find it awkward to dodge, your manager or the friend who remembers things. The date can be wrong and you can change it later. It needs a witness more than it needs to be right.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

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