Maybe Is Not a Business Plan: Notes From Six Months in a Dream Client's Waiting Room

In February, an email landed in my inbox with a subject line so good I read it standing up. A brand I'd admired from across the room for years wanted to talk about a project. A big one. The kind you tell your mom about, carefully, like saying it out loud might jinx it.

I replied within the hour. They replied in three weeks. That ratio—my hour, their twenty-one days—turned out to be the whole story of the next six months of my life.

The Contract That Was Always 'Circulating'

If you've worked with large companies, you know the phrase. The contract is circulating. It's with legal. It's one signature away. It's a beautiful, frictionless sentence that means absolutely nothing and costs you everything, because as long as it's true-adjacent, you keep waiting.

And I waited. I turned down a mid-sized project in March because "the timing might collide with the big thing." I postponed a personal series in April. By May, I had mentally decorated a studio I hadn't rented, with money I hadn't earned, for a client who hadn't returned a phone call since the Carter administration, or at least it felt that way.

Here's the uncomfortable math: for six months, I gave a maybe the same authority I'd give a signed deal. I budgeted around it. I scheduled around it. I felt around it—every unanswered week produced its own little weather system of anxiety. Meanwhile, the actual work in front of me, the real paying clients with real deadlines, got the version of me that kept glancing at the door.

A Slow Yes and a Polite No Look Similar at First

Not all slow clients are dead ends. Some genuinely do move at the speed of procurement. So how do you tell the difference between a deal that's crawling toward yes and one that's politely dying?

After this experience—and a few unpaid consultations with friends who've been through it—I've landed on a rough field guide:

A slow yes has momentum. Even a glacial client moving toward a signature produces new information: a revised scope, a real question about deliverables, an intro to someone else on their team. A polite no produces only repetition. "Still circulating" six times in a row is not an update. It's a loop.

A slow yes respects your time eventually. When I finally asked, directly, "What date should I plan around?", a real yes would have given me a real answer. Mine gave me an exclamation point and another three weeks of silence. People who are actually about to hand you money are rarely vague about when.

A polite no has a signature scent: enthusiasm without specificity. "We LOVE this direction!" plus zero questions about budget, timeline, or process is not excitement. It's a nice card they send instead of a rejection letter.

The Gymnastics of Not Building Your Life Around Maybe

The hardest part wasn't the waiting. It was the rehearsing. I'd catch myself making decisions—pricing, availability, even what I'd say in the kickoff call—as if the deal were real. Psychologists call this counterfactual thinking. I call it moving furniture into a house you don't own.

What finally broke the spell was a line from a friend who does production work in Nashville: "If it's not on the calendar, it's not on the books." Brutal, obvious, effective. She treats every unsigned opportunity as a story she's heard about someone else's life.

So I made new rules, and I'm sharing them because somebody out there is currently on month three of a "quick call next week":

• Keep booking real work. If the dream client's timing collides with a signed project, that's their problem to solve, not yours. A company with budget can wait. A company without commitment can wait forever.
• Give maybes a deadline. Mine got until the end of the quarter. Not as a threat—as a personal policy. When the deadline passed with no signature, the spell broke and I felt, honestly, relief.
• Name the cost out loud. Write down what the waiting is costing you: the project you declined, the energy spent refreshing your inbox, the creative work gathering dust. A maybe that costs $8,000 in declined work isn't free.
• Follow up like a professional, not a fan. Two check-ins, spaced a few weeks apart, is persistence. A third becomes a hobby.

What Happened in the End

In August—six months after that first electric email—the deal quietly resolved. Not with a signature. With a note explaining that priorities had "shifted internally," and would I be open to something smaller next year?

Here's the thing nobody tells you: by August, I'd stopped needing it to land. I'd taken the March project I almost passed on. I'd finished the personal series. I'd rebuilt my pipeline with clients who answered emails in hours, not fiscal quarters. The dream client had become, without ceremony, just another contact in my CRM.

And when the smaller project offer came through, I looked at it with clear eyes and quoted a rate that reflected six months of lessons. They may even take it. Doesn't matter.

The dream was never the client. The dream was the version of my career I was willing to put on hold for them. I'd like it back now, please—and I'm no longer waiting for permission to use it.