The Quick Chat Conundrum

A small change to how I am working.

Over the past 16 months since starting Decypher and going independent, I have taken more than 100 calls with people sharing what they are working on, asking for my perspective, and brainstorming around a technology, market, idea or problem they are trying to solve. I genuinely cherish that part of the work. Some of my most interesting conversations have started with nothing more than, “Can I get your thoughts on this?” They have introduced me to technologies I might otherwise never have come across, shown me much more directly what companies are actually struggling with, and occasionally turned into collaborations, projects or relationships I would never have planned for.

One of the things I have liked most about working independently is this openness. There is no real boundary around what I can look at. One week I might be digging into the economics of textile recycling, the next trying to understand whether a new dyeing technology would actually work inside an existing mill, and somewhere in between talking to somebody building a material that did not exist commercially a few years ago. A lot of what I have learned over the past year has come from keeping that door open, and I do not want to lose that.

The difficulty is that I also have a habit of saying yes to almost everything and figuring out the time later. A request for a quick chat sounds harmless enough when it lands in the inbox. Thirty minutes here, forty five minutes there. But the conversation itself is rarely the whole thing. I normally want to understand what somebody is building before we speak. I look at the technology, read whatever they send me, think about the market, remember something relevant I came across six months ago, and inevitably end up doing considerably more thinking than the calendar entry suggests.

And quite often, what begins as an informal conversation quickly becomes the sort of work clients normally hire me to do. Does this technology really have an advantage over what mills already use? Is the environmental claim meaningful once you compare the full process? Is the addressable market anywhere near as large as the pitch suggests? What would stop a factory from adopting it? How credible is the pathway to scale? What data would you need before making that decision? Those questions might come up casually in conversation, but answering them properly still means drawing on the research, industry knowledge and analysis that I would use on a client project.

That distinction has become more important as Decypher has grown. I also want a big part of what I do to remain public. I write because I enjoy it, because it forces me to work through ideas properly, and because I think the industry benefits from more analysis being available outside company walls. I have no interest in turning every conversation into something billable. At the same time, there is a point where sharing a perspective becomes working through somebody’s specific commercial or technical problem. The line is not always obvious when so much of the work is research, analysis and simply spending time thinking properly about someone else’s problem.

So I am making a small change. Rather than keeping my appointment link sitting out in the open for everyone to book directly, I have set up a Services page on LinkedIn where people can reach out with a little context about what they are working on and what they need help with. It means I can understand the question first and work out what kind of conversation actually makes sense, whether that is a short focused call or something that needs a more substantial piece of work.

I am still very much open to interesting conversations. In fact, I hope I continue having a lot of them. I just need to become a little more intentional about which conversations I take, how I prepare for them, and where a conversation ends and the work begins.

If you are working through something in textiles and think an independent pair of eyes could be useful, you can now reach out through the Services section on my LinkedIn profile.