Ten years. That’s how long it had been since I’d talked to them. Then I started putting my actual thinking on LinkedIn, not the polished version, the real one, and one day a DM showed up: “Are you in my head??”
We’d known each other a decade earlier, lost touch the way people do, and then something I wrote landed hard enough that they reached out cold, after ten years of silence. I said yes to a call before I even knew what they needed. We got on a virtual meeting, then a few more, and somewhere in those conversations we figured out exactly what part of their business needed a consultant. Ninety days after that first “are you in my head??” message, we were in contract.
I want to be straight with you about that number, because it’s not typical. In AEC, going from zero relationship to signed contract usually looks more like two to three years, not ninety days. What made this one move faster is that it was never actually starting from zero. We’d had a real relationship a decade earlier, it had just gone quiet. Ninety days was how long it took to pick back up where we’d left off, not how long it took to build trust from nothing. If you’re starting cold, expect the real timeline, not this one. What doesn’t change is what fills the gap.
Everyone talks about the follow-up, or the DM, or the reply, like it’s the finish line. Send the right message, get the response, done. Except the reply isn’t the finish line. It’s the actual start line, and it’s also exactly where most relationships quietly die, because nobody has a plan for the space between “yes, let’s talk” and whatever comes next.
That space, in my case, was ninety days. And what filled it determined everything: whether I became someone they actually trusted enough to hire, or just another interesting conversation that faded back into the noise of their week.
I didn’t have a formal plan for that ninety days back then. I just followed one instinct that, looking back, turned out to be exactly right: I got in a room with them. Twice. Two in-person visits to their office, because there’s nothing that replaces sitting across from someone. I don’t want a client to know me as a service provider on a screen. I want them to know me as a person, and to actually see, not just hear about, what it would look like to work together. Since then I’ve turned that instinct into an actual system, because relying on it once isn’t the same as having something repeatable.
What actually works isn’t more follow-up messages after the DM. It’s a specific, three-phase cadence I now run for exactly ninety days after any reply lands, built around one rule that changes everything: never reach out without adding something. Here’s the whole system, phase by phase, including the exact kind of value to bring at each stage and the signal that tells you when it’s finally the right moment to make an actual ask, whatever that ask happens to be for you.
