The client who was taught not to need us, and stayed five years
Five years is a long time to work with one organisation.
It’s a particularly long time when the thing you keep telling them is that they shouldn’t need you.
Underpin has supported the Hertfordshire and West Essex VCFSE Alliance for five years. Amanda Wilson was the Director of Operations for most of that. She left in June 2026, and the work carried on without her. Hold that thought, because it’s the ending.
What they had, and what they didn’t
The Alliance is the connective tissue for the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector across Hertfordshire and West Essex. It sits between a lot of organisations that need to be heard and a lot of statutory bodies that need to hear them.
The temptation with an organisation like that is obvious. You’re a consultant, they have a gap, and gaps are billable. So the gap tends to stay open. That was the choice sitting in front of us in year one, the same as it is on any other job.
“You listened to what we needed”
Amanda’s first line sounds like the sort of thing every client says about every consultant, and mostly it is. What saves it is the last three words. Anyone can perform listening for an hour. “What we needed” means the brief changed afterwards.
Most consultancy runs the other way. You arrive with a product and you find the version of the client’s problem that your product solves. Nobody’s lying. The listening is just a formality, because the answer was in the van before you knocked.
“You don’t gatekeep”
This is the thing I’d put on the wall. I don’t want me to keep the knowledge.
Gatekeeping in this trade is rarely a decision anyone makes out loud. It accumulates. The logins stay with you. The document lives in your Drive. The reporting template makes sense to you and to nobody else. Six months later the client can’t change a phone number on their own website, and you’ve told yourself that’s just how these things go.
None of that is generosity. It’s a business decision with a cost, and the cost is that you can’t bill for what you’ve just given away.
“You helped us learn how to manage things ourselves”
Underpin’s own line for this is that we’re not the long-term solution. Support, don’t carry.
It reads well on a website. In practice it means sitting through the slower version of a job because the client is doing it and you’re watching, and you could have done it yourself in twenty minutes.
I’d love to say I enjoy that part. I find it hard to sit on my hands.
So why five years?
The arithmetic is supposed to break here. A consultant who keeps making himself unnecessary should have short relationships and trouble paying the bills.
What happened instead is that the work changed shape. The Alliance stopped needing help with the thing they first came about, and came back about something else. The relationship lasted because it was never a dependency, so neither side had to pretend it wasn’t one.
It’s a slow way to build a consultancy. Five years on, they still ring.
The part that proves it
Amanda left the Alliance in June 2026.
Under the usual model, that’s where the relationship ends. The champion goes, the new person has their own suppliers, and the work you did becomes something nobody left in the building understands.
The work continues with the Alliance, and it continues because the Alliance owns it. Not the file, the understanding. If the five years had been built to keep Underpin necessary, Amanda walking out of the door would have been the end of it.
“You listened to what we needed. You don’t gatekeep. You helped us learn how to manage things ourselves.”
Amanda Wilson, then Director of Operations, Hertfordshire and West Essex VCFSE Alliance
I’ve had longer testimonials. I’ve not had a better one, because all three sentences describe things a consultant is paid not to do.
