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Ever reach the end of your workday and wonder what happened in the business world while you were busy running yours? Max’s CEO Report catches you up on the biggest business, tech, and AI stories in just a few minutes.
Each edition gives you the news and context worth knowing, so you can stay informed, spot new opportunities, and sound suspiciously well-read in your next meeting.
This week's observation
Every mechanic in this month's issues works alone. The pricing floor works. The one-paragraph offer works. The three-sentence message works. The follow-up works. What none of them tell you is how they fit together into an actual month.
Fifteen managers who used all four in sequence averaged twenty-six days from the first name on their list to a signed first engagement. Not fast. Not slow. A month, roughly, done deliberately instead of accidentally.
The deep dive
Week 1: the list. Fifteen to twenty names. Former colleagues, former clients, former vendors, people who have already seen you work. Not strangers. Not LinkedIn cold contacts. The list takes an evening, not a month.
One clarification worth stating plainly: the list is former colleagues and former clients, not current ones. Reaching out to people at your current employer to sell them, or their contacts, outside services creates a real conflict of interest, and depending on your employment agreement, it could put your job at risk. If most of the names on your list still work where you work, that's worth pausing on before you send anything.
Week 2: the offer. One problem, one deliverable, one price, one paragraph. Written once, reused for every name on the list. This is the step most people skip by convincing themselves they need a website first. They do not.
Week 3: five messages. Three sentences each. A specific reference, a specific problem, a low-friction ask. Five messages sent across the week, not five sent in one afternoon and then abandoned.
Week 4: one follow-up. Twelve to fourteen days after the first message, to whichever names went quiet. One sentence. The offer, still available. No apology, no re-pitch.
Stephanie N., an HR Director, ran this exact sequence. Her list took one evening. Her offer took longer to write than she expected, three drafts before it felt right. Messages three and four got replies in the same week. The fifth got nothing until the follow-up, sent on day fifteen, which turned into her first signed engagement on day twenty-six.
"I kept waiting to feel ready," she said afterward. "The list didn't require ready. It required a Tuesday evening."
The weekend gameplan
Write your list this weekend. Fifteen to twenty names. Do not write the offer yet. Only the list. Leave the offer for your next working session. This weekend, the list is enough.
By the numbers
Average days to signed engagement
26
Among the 15 corporate professionals I've worked with directly who ran the full list, offer, five-message, follow-up sequence this month, that's the average time from the first name on the list to a signed first engagement.
This week's reading
A book I keep returning to, not because it's about consulting, it isn't, but because it makes the clearest case available for why a business is a small number of decisions repeated, not a large number of decisions made once. That's the whole argument behind running the same four weeks in order instead of improvising a new approach each time.
One more thing
The four weeks are not about speed. They are about sequence. Most people already have the list of names, the sense of what they're good at, and something like an offer sitting somewhere in their head. What they don't have is the order. List, then offer, then messages, then follow-up. Reversing any of those steps is what turns thirty days into six months.
P.S. If you write your list this weekend, hit reply and tell me how many names you got to. I read every reply, and I'll tell you honestly whether fifteen is enough or you're underselling your own network.
How I can help
A few things I've built, if any of them are useful this week.
The Corporate Superpowers Assessment - free, about 7 minutes. Shows which of your skills are already worth $100-150 an hour to someone outside your building.
The Freedom Number Calculator - free. Runs your retirement math with income as a variable, not just savings.
The Encore Income Playbook - 75 ways corporate professionals turn existing skills into paid work, organized by function and effort level.
AI Survival Guides - function-specific guides (finance, HR, operations, and about twenty more) on where AI is actually changing the job and what to do about it, plus a few planning spreadsheets.
No pressure on any of it. Take what's useful, skip the rest.
This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Any figures, projections, or outcomes mentioned are examples based on individual circumstances, not guarantees, your results will vary. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making retirement or income decisions.
Affiliate disclosure: Encore Income Insider may include affiliate links, including Amazon Associates, in book or resource recommendations such as This Week's Reading. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.