She Skipped One Step for 12 Months. It Cost Her $15,000.

Alzay CalhounCoveted Consultant · 5 min read

The Situation

Elon Lindsay was running a successful experiential marketing agency serving major consumer brands. She led a team of five, including an account manager, event producer, director of operations, and personal assistant, delivering high-profile brand experiences that put her business on track for seven figures.

Despite all of that, something critical wasn't getting done.

The events were executing well. Clients were satisfied with the experiences her team produced. The problem wasn't in what she was delivering. It was in what she was skipping after delivery was complete.

For twelve months, Elon had been systematically avoiding project recaps. She was contractually obligated to provide them. She knew they mattered. But every time a project wrapped, she moved on to the next one without documenting what had just happened: the results, the photos, the data points, the proof that the work was excellent.

She described it as running her business "like a garage sale." She had proof scattered everywhere, pictures, results, satisfied clients, but none of it was organized. None of it was succinct. None of it was something she could quickly walk someone through. Successful executions with nothing captured afterward to show for them.

What Was Actually Going On

The surface problem looked like procrastination. A CEO who just needed to sit down and do the administrative work. But the real cost of this pattern was far deeper than missed paperwork.

During a group coaching session, the scope of the problem became visible. Elon had already made a strategic decision based on her goals: she wanted to pivot away from her largest corporate client. Not because the work was bad or the money wasn't good, but because the way she wanted to operate didn't align with corporate bureaucracy. The pivot was already decided. It was sitting in her goals, waiting to be executed.

But she couldn't execute it. And she couldn't see why.

To pivot to a new client segment, Elon needed to demonstrate proven expertise to that new audience. She needed documented case studies, success stories, proof of what her agency could deliver. And all of that proof was trapped in twelve months of undocumented projects, excellent work that nobody outside her current clients could see.

Her recap avoidance wasn't just an administrative gap. It was the hidden bottleneck blocking the business transition she'd already committed to making.

Then her largest client made the cost concrete. They mandated a recap and Elon delayed delivery. The result: her scope was amended by $15,000. One task. One hour of actual work if she'd just done it. Fifteen thousand dollars lost because she didn't.

As she put it: "It cost me not doing a recap for one of my clients, my scope was amended by 15K because I did not deliver a recap to them. Something that could have, if I was not hemming and hawing about it, probably I could have knocked out in an hour."

What Happened

The breakthrough came in an 81-minute group coaching session, and it wasn't one realization. It was three, interconnected.

The self-awareness. Elon recognized the pattern clearly for the first time. "For 12 months, I have been going through boxes one through six and then skipping box seven and going to box eight, nine, ten." She wasn't occasionally forgetting to do recaps. She was systematically avoiding them. And more importantly, she accepted that she simply wasn't going to do this work herself. It wasn't aligned with her strengths or her interests. Willpower wasn't the solution because willpower had failed for a full year.

The strategic clarity. She named out loud what she'd already decided internally, that she wanted to release her primary corporate client and pivot toward a different segment that matched how she wanted to operate. This wasn't a new idea born from the coaching session. It was a decision that already existed in her goals. The session gave her space to say it plainly.

The connection. This was the turning point. Elon saw that these two things, her recap avoidance and her desired pivot, were the same problem. Without documented proof of her current work, she had no case studies to show her next clients. Without case studies, she couldn't market to a new segment. Without marketing to a new segment, she couldn't leave her largest client. The recap she kept skipping was the key that unlocked everything she actually wanted.

As she said: the recap box "is the most succinct documentation of every other box in motion." It wasn't paperwork. It was the bridge between the business she had and the business she wanted.

The solution matched the self-awareness. Instead of forcing herself to do work she'd proven for twelve months she wouldn't do, the session produced a three-step delegation system: gather all project elements, have a dedicated team member compile and assemble the documentation, then present organized deliverables for her final review.

She didn't need to become someone who does recaps. She needed a system that ensured recaps got done.

"It cost me $15,000 last month. Something I could have knocked out in an hour."

— Elon Lindsay

The Results

The 81-minute session created immediate strategic clarity. Elon went from scattered proof and a stalled pivot to someone who could name exactly which process was blocking her business goals and exactly how to fix it.

The quantified cost became a reference point: $15,000 lost on a one-hour task. That number made the abstract concrete. Avoidance had a price, and now she knew what it was.

More importantly, the session connected the operational fix to the strategic vision. Documenting her current successes wasn't just about fulfilling contracts. It was about building the proof she needed to attract her next clients. Every recap she'd skipped was a case study she couldn't use. Every case study she couldn't use was a conversation she couldn't have with the market she actually wanted to serve.

What This Demonstrates

Elon's expertise was never in question. Her delivery was excellent. Her team executed well. Her clients were satisfied. But none of that excellence was visible to anyone outside her current relationships because she never captured it. The proof existed in experience but not in documentation, and undocumented proof isn't proof at all when you're trying to attract new clients.

This is what makes recaps more than administrative work. A recap is where delivery becomes proof. It's where "we did great work" becomes "here's exactly what we did, here's what changed, and here's what it means for someone like you." Without it, every completed project is a closed loop, value delivered but never leveraged.

The tactic, outsourcing the recap work, is straightforward. What made it land was the shift in how Elon understood what recaps actually were. They weren't paperwork she was bad at. They were the bridge between her current business and the business she wanted to build. Once that connection was visible, the solution became obvious: stop trying to be someone who does recaps and start building a system that ensures they get done.

For consultants who finish engagements and move on without capturing what happened, knowing the proof is there but never organizing it, the pattern Elon broke is worth understanding fully

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