Major transaction

Well, I've made it through another quarter-end. When you support sales at a public corporation, the quarterly ebb and flow is huge, and our quarter just ended. Every quarter, I worry that I'll get down to the last week or two and have a huge deal pending, and that's just what happened this time. We had very high-level executive involvement, a high deal value, and a very complicated agreement all coming to a head with just days left in the quarter. In fact, this thing went down to the very last day before it got signed and we got a purchase order. I don't want to be a tipster in violation of insider trading laws, so I don't want to talk about the deal specifics, but it was a big deal for me. It's probably not material to the company, since the revenue is mostly deferred, but it was very strategic and should really raise my profile here. It's also a good argument to my manager that the time is right to promote me from my current band to the next band, which would be the highest level I could go in the organization without having a director- or assistant GC-level title (essentially the top of the "staff" ranks).

I was discussing my deal with a colleague the other day, and we agreed that it's good to work on some--but not too many--of these deals. If there were never high-visibility, high-pressure deals, my job could get old after a while, and we would feel unfulfilled and leave. On the other hand, this has been draining, and I've had some tense late evening and early morning meetings. If I had to do this every quarter, I would probably get burned out and leave--or at least, it would take a lot more money to make me do this all the time.