Career Path Decision. The wrong path doesn't announce itself. It just quietly costs you money for years.

Nothing's on fire. The job is fine, the pay is fine, the team is fine. And you have a nagging sense that you're optimising a path you never really chose: wrong role, wrong company stage, or a level you quietly got stuck at three years ago. You keep not deciding, because deciding feels dramatic and staying feels safe.

Staying isn't safe. It's slow, and slow doesn't trigger anything in you the way a crisis would. That's the entire reason this situation survives in capable people for years at a time.

The arithmetic most people never run: A year on the wrong path isn't a flat loss of one year. Your next raise is calculated from your current base, and so is the one after that, and so is the offer somebody makes you in four years. A wrong-path year resets the number that every future increase compounds from. Three of them isn't three years behind, it's a permanently lower curve.

So we run the diagnostic properly, and separately: right role, right company size, right level, right moment to move. People usually have one of those four wrong and assume all four are. Then we put a real number on what your current path costs over three years, which is generally the point at which the decision stops feeling dramatic and starts feeling overdue.

You leave with a verdict, that number in writing, and one decision made rather than deferred again. Sometimes the verdict is stay, and that counts as a result: it kills the background hum that's been quietly eating your attention for a year.

The market for your role sits 30 to 40% above what you're on. HR says budgets are tight. Your manager says next cycle. You'd take a partial fix at this point, and every time you open the negotiation doc you close it again, because you don't have a number you could defend if somebody pushed back on it.

It goes badly because you're arguing from fairness and the person opposite you is working from budget. Those are two different conversations and only one of them has a lever in it.

We build the packet: comp data from real offers rather than aggregate sites, your impact log for the last twelve months, and a specific number with a floor underneath it. Then we rehearse the conversation, and agree in advance what you do if the answer is still no by a date you choose, so that a no doesn't leave you improvising in the room. Four weeks to the conversation delivered. If the money is the whole reason you're reading this, the deeper version of that work has its own page.

Mortgage, family, reputation. The current job is a stable six out of ten. Interviewing is a second job stacked on top of the one you're already behind on. Your CV hasn't been touched in three years, and every recruiter DM feels like a coin flip you didn't ask to play.

Broad searches fail at your level for a mechanical reason rather than a motivational one. Senior roles get filled off a shortlist before the posting goes up, so volume applications arrive after the decision has effectively been made. Eight to fifteen well-chosen companies beats two hundred applications and costs you fewer evenings.

So we build the targeted sixty-day search: which companies genuinely fit, which relationships to warm first, and what your story has to look like for those particular seats. Then interview rehearsal, then the negotiation when an offer lands. Sixty days out you should be holding three to five real conversations and something live to negotiate against.

Head of Engineering at a Series B. Or VPE at a scale-up, or a fractional gig with a portco. These loops look nothing like the interviews you last sat, and the walk me through a hard decision question is going to find you out, because you haven't had to frame your own decisions as a narrative in years.

That question is the interview, incidentally. Most of the rest is formality with a scorecard attached. What they're testing is whether you can hold a decision that went badly without either defending it or falling apart about it, because that's what they'll need from you in month four.

So we do dry runs and I play the people you'll face: the CEO who wants to see confidence, the board member who wants numbers, the CTO peer working out whether you're technical enough to be worth arguing with. We write narratives for five stories and rehearse them aloud until they stop sounding rehearsed, which takes longer than anybody expects and is the whole point of doing it.

Before the loop: three dry runs behind you, five stories written, and one hard-decision walk-through you own rather than survive.

They micromanage, or they ghost, or they take the credit, or they contradict you in the meeting where it costs most. Every 1:1 makes it fractionally worse. Skip-level is complicated for reasons you could explain for ten minutes. And you've been half-looking externally for four months without committing to either thing.

The half-looking is the real damage. It costs you the whole emotional load of leaving with none of the benefit, and left alone it can run for years.

So we turn it into a decision with a date attached. First we name the pattern, because control, avoidance, credit-taking and undermining want different responses and people routinely misdiagnose which one they're standing in. Then a sixty-day attempt to fix it from inside: one specific behaviour, one specific ask, and escalation criteria you set now, while you're calm, rather than in the week you finally snap. If nothing has moved by day sixty, we run the exit properly, on your timing, relationship civil and reputation intact.

Day 60 you have either measurable change or an offer. What you no longer have is another four months of half-looking.