I Billed 40 Hours for 60-Hour Weeks for Eight Years It Taught Me What Not to Build

Introduction

I spent eight years as a telecom consultant before Taliferro, and I'd do most of it again — the work was genuinely rewarding, and I liked the people. But there were specific patterns in that job that I only recognized as a problem once I'd left, and they're worth naming plainly instead of romanticizing, because they shaped how I think about client work now.

When the deeper issue is stalled execution, software development support shows how Taliferro turns execution work into working execution, and the momentum system keeps the work tied to outcomes instead of activity.

The Real Work Begins After the Sale

The sale isn't the finish line, it's the starting gun. Once a customer signs, they become someone you're responsible for keeping happy indefinitely — making sure they're actually getting value, catching problems before they notice them, and being the person who fixes it when the connection between their systems and yours breaks (which happens more often than the sales deck implies). None of that work is visible during the pitch. All of it determines whether the relationship survives past the first renewal.

"Always Be Selling" Is a Warning Sign, Not a Personality Trait

In telecom consulting, the only way to make money is to keep selling, which means the incentive is never really "what does this customer need" — it's "what can I get this customer to want next." A broadband upgrade, a bigger mobile plan, a switch to a different provider — the specific product doesn't matter as much as making sure the customer is always moving toward the next transaction. I don't think most of the people doing this were dishonest. I think the structure of the job quietly pushes good people toward recommending what serves the invoice a little more than what serves the client, and that's worth being honest about instead of dressing it up as hustle.

60-Hour Weeks, Billed as 40

Telecom consulting runs on meetings — I've sat through ones that ran six hours without anyone else in the room seeming to notice. And the actual weekly hours were routinely 50 to 60, while the number that showed up on the timesheet was 40, because that gap was just treated as part of the job rather than a problem with the job. It took me longer than it should have to notice that "the hours are long, that's consulting" was doing a lot of work to make an unsustainable pattern sound normal.

Conclusion

None of this means the job was bad, or that the people in it were doing something wrong — it means the structure rewarded things (constant upselling, invisible overtime) that had nothing to do with whether the client was actually better off. When I left to build Taliferro, those were the specific patterns I didn't want to carry forward: work that's visible and honest about its scope, and a relationship with a client that doesn't depend on always having something new to sell them.

Tyrone Showers