Your phone rings when somebody says your name.
Stay in the minds of the people who would say it, through the long silences between engagements, without a check-in email.
Six clients. Long silences. The next engagement is decided in one of them.
You do not have a funnel. You have a small number of intense relationships, and a phone that rings when a former client tells a peer to call you.
The CEO you finished with eighteen months ago has not heard from you since, because there has been no honest reason to be in touch and you are not going to invent one. That silence is where your next engagement is decided, and right now nothing of yours is in it.
"Jim was in the building for a year. Take that, his note is in the front."
Two CEOs at a board dinner. One says the operator he hired to fix the plant has made it worse and he is out of ideas.
The other says, "Jim was in the building for a year. Best thing we ever did. Take that, his note is in the front."
That is a different gesture from "just circling back," and it repeats four times a year without you having to think of anything to say. An issue on the desk of somebody who used to pay you a great deal of money, with your name inside and nothing asked of them.
Your name is inside, where it is found rather than shown.
One hundred and forty pages about a life of significance: remarkable people, places, and pursuits, made by professional writers and photographers, with no advertising anywhere in it. It arrives from you four times a year, and nothing in it is about you or about your work.
Your part is the gates, the panels tucked inside the covers beside a single gold rule: your photograph, your firm, your message, and your name. Our designers build them with you, once. The first issue is delivered in the LENS box with your announcement on top, and the cover carries only a photograph, the wordmark, and the issue number, so it goes on the table rather than in the recycling.
Nothing about strategy, business, or you.
Remarkable people, places, and pursuits. No frameworks, no thought leadership, no advertising. If it read like your own work it would go in the pile with everything else. The restraint is why it stays on the desk.
Sign up to become a member and choose as many clients as you like. Minimum of ten.
They build your gates and your announcement with you, once, from a short conversation. You approve them.
It arrives at the homes and offices in the LENS box with your announcement and your message on the gates inside.
Then decide who continues. Anyone you keep receives the next three issues. Anyone you do not is released, and the copy they already have was still a gift from you.
Is this thought leadership?
No, and that is the point. There is nothing in it about business, strategy, or your field.
I only have a dozen relationships that matter. Is that enough?
It is. Ten is the minimum, for a first issue or a subscription. Most people find the second twelve are the ones they wish they had stayed close to, so there is room to grow the list without starting over.
Can I send it to people I am still trying to win?
Yes. A gift that asks for nothing is one of the few things that still moves a relationship you have been patient with.