What Comes
After
Everything.
Margaret Chen retired as CFO of a Fortune 500 company on a Thursday. By Sunday she was checking her inbox before dawn, her hands reaching for a phone that no longer held anything urgent.
Eighteen months later, she runs a ceramics studio two mornings a week, sits on two boards of her choosing, and hasn't set an alarm in six months. The distance between those two Sundays is the work Encore does.
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Three case studies
One practice. Thirty years of next.
Her hands were covered in clay when she realized she hadn't thought about the stock price in three weeks.
Margaret Chen spent thirty-one years as the financial conscience of a company that employed forty-two thousand people. She knew the quarterly numbers before the analysts did. She knew which divisions were lying in their projections. She knew, to the decimal, what the company was worth on any given Tuesday.
What she didn't know — what no one had prepared her to know — was what she was worth on a Tuesday when no one needed her answer.
The insomnia started in week two. Not the anxious kind — the purposeless kind. She would lie awake not worrying about anything, which was, she would later say, somehow worse.
"I had built my identity so completely around being useful to others that when the usefulness ended, I genuinely didn't know who was left."
Before Encore
After 12 Months
The Arc
Final board meeting. Thirty-one years, one company.
Inbox checked forty-three times before 8 AM.
First Encore session. Sat in silence for eleven minutes.
Ceramics studio. First piece. Crooked, unremarkable, hers.
Board advisory role — two companies, her terms.
Six months without an alarm. Marriage, rebuilt.
"The ceramics studio isn't the point. The point is that I chose it. For the first time in thirty years, I built something that was entirely, exclusively mine."
They had been married thirty-four years. They had never spent a Tuesday together.
Robert Okafor retired from his position as Managing Partner at a Chicago law firm in March. His wife, Patricia, had retired two years earlier from hospital administration. They loved each other. They had built a life together. They had absolutely no idea how to be in the same house on a Tuesday afternoon.
The irritability came first. Then the silence that wasn't peaceful. Then the conversation they'd been avoiding for two years: what did they actually want, individually and together, from the years ahead?
"We had optimized our entire marriage around our careers. Encore helped us ask the question we'd been too busy to ask: what are we optimizing for now?"
The Work
Individual audits. What each person needs, separately, to feel purposeful.
Shared vision mapping. Where individual needs overlap, diverge, and coexist.
Structure design. Calendars, rhythms, and the architecture of a shared life.
Quarterly reviews. Adjustments as the design meets reality.
If this resonates —
Request Your Retirement Blueprint →A complimentary 60-minute session to map your next chapter.
He sold the company at forty-seven. He had no idea what to do with the next forty years.
James Whitfield built a logistics software company from his garage over sixteen years and sold it for enough money that he would never need to work again. The wire transfer cleared on a Wednesday. By Friday, he was sitting in his kitchen, staring at the espresso machine, wondering if this was what winning was supposed to feel like.
"Everyone congratulated me. No one asked how I was. I think I was the last person to notice that I wasn't okay — and the first to admit it was because I didn't know what 'okay' meant outside of a quarterly target."
The challenge for early retirees is different from the executive who retires at sixty-five. James had decades ahead, full health, financial security — and no narrative for any of it. The culture offered him philanthropy, golf, and a vague concept of "giving back." He wanted something more structurally honest than that.
What Encore Built With James
Not "what do you want to do" but "what kind of person are you building, and what does that person do on a Tuesday?"
Two angel investments, chosen for alignment with values rather than return. One failed. He considers it the best education of his post-exit life.
Mornings for creative work. Afternoons for physical movement. One day per week, entirely unscheduled — a practice he calls "productive wandering."
The ability to say "I don't know what I want yet" without it feeling like failure. The ability to stay in that space long enough for something real to emerge.
"I used to think retirement was the reward at the end of the story. Encore helped me understand it's the beginning of the only story that was ever really mine."
Request Your Retirement Blueprint.
The Blueprint session is a sixty-minute conversation — not a sales call. We'll map the contours of your next chapter, identify where the friction lives, and determine whether Encore is the right fit for your work.
There is no obligation. There is, however, a question we ask every prospective client before we begin — and it's the same one you'll find at the bottom of this form.
Not ready to speak with someone?
The First 90 Days: A Structured Guide to Post-Career Life.
Forty-two pages. No motivational language. A practical framework for the first three months after your last day — covering identity, structure, partnership, and the particular silence of a Tuesday with nowhere to be.
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The First 90 Days — PDF, 42 pages