The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon. Subject line: "Pausing the engagement." I read it three times before the words actually registered. Twelve thousand pounds. Six-month retainer. Gone. Three weeks into the contract. The client wasn't angry. That was almost worse. They were just... done. "We don't feel like this is working out," the email said. "We'd like to wind things down at the end of the month." I sat there staring at my laptop, and I knew — before I even started drafting a reply — exactly what had happened. We hadn't lost the client because of the work. We hadn't even started the real work yet. We'd lost them in onboarding. The Client I'll call them Hartwell & Co. A mid-sized SaaS company in the legal-tech space. Their head of marketing — let's call her Priya — had found us through a referral. We'd done two discovery calls, a proposal, a pricing negotiation, and signed contracts. Everything textbook. The retainer was £2,000 a month for six months.…