The first phone call goes to the firm whose name everyone knows. The one with the office in three cities, the named partners who have written books, the receptionist who knows how to pronounce Hermès. This is correct. If you are about to spend a great deal of money on advice, you should begin with the firm that the rest of the room has heard of, because half the value of advice is the cover it provides if it turns out to be wrong.
I am the second phone call.
The second phone call comes about ten weeks later. The first firm has produced a beautiful document. The document is correct. It is also, somehow, beside the point. The CEO read it on a Sunday and felt, on closing it, slightly more alone than before opening it. They cannot say this in the Monday meeting, because the document cost three hundred thousand euros and four people in the room helped commission it. So instead, on Wednesday, they ask their assistant, quietly, whether anyone knows somebody quieter.
That is the call I get.
It is a small, specific vocation, and I think it deserves a name. The work of the second phone call is not to undo the first, or to disagree with it, or to do it again cheaper. The first firm was right, in the way that things tend to be right when they are produced by twelve people and approved by four. The second phone call is for the part of the question that twelve people cannot get to, because the part of the question that matters has only ever, in any company I have worked with, been answerable by one or two people who cannot say it out loud in front of the other ten.
The second phone call is private. It does not produce a document. It produces a sentence.
I have come to think that every important strategic question, in every company, eventually reduces to one sentence that one person in the building has been unable to say. Sometimes because they are not sure. Sometimes because they are sure, and they are afraid of the consequences of being right. Sometimes because they have said it once, in a meeting, and the meeting moved on, and they took the silence as a verdict.
The work, very often, is not to think of the sentence. The sentence is already there. The work is to sit in a room with the person who has the sentence and not leave the room until they have said it out loud, in their own voice, with the door closed, with no notes being taken. After that, the rest is administrative. Better people than me can do the administrative part.
I do not advertise. I do not publish. I send four letters a year and I answer everything myself. There are about nine of these calls a year that I take, and I take them because I have nothing else useful to offer. I am not faster, or cheaper, or more credentialled than the firm that came first. I am only the second phone call. That is the entire offer.
If you are reading this, and you are wondering whether you are about to become the kind of person who makes a second phone call: you probably already are. The decision was made on Sunday, with the document closed, in the kitchen, while you were waiting for the kettle.
You have my address.