Going Solo Decoded: Understanding Its Meaning & Monetizing Your Corporate Experience

Brett Trainor (00:01.986)
Welcome back to another episode of the Corporate Escapee Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Trainer. And today we're going solo and it's kind of fitting because that's the topic that I want to talk about. Uh, you've heard me, if you follow this podcast or if you follow me on LinkedIn or any of my social channels, I talk a lot about escaping the corporate grind and going solo. But what does that transition really mean? And you know, for many Gen Xers.

corporate professionals, manager consultants who feel burned out, you know, or if you're laid off, you know, what does that really mean? So in this episode, I want to unpack what going solo, in my opinion, actually means. So let's get into it and also get into why I think this is a game changer and it's not a huge departure from maybe what you're doing in corporate in the sense of work related. You don't have to reinvent yourself. You're not opening up a

a flower shop or a cafe can if you want to, but it's not a requirement. So to get started, let's really understand what going solo means. And to me, it's all about leveraging your corporate experience, right? If we're talking Gen X, you've got probably 20 years, 30 years of corporate experience. And how do you use that expertise, that well-earned time, the skills that you've

right, or even if you're more of functional, a doer than a leader, you know, how do you leverage all that time and effort that you've already built? And the good thing is there is an absolute multiple ways that you can do this. And so when I'm talking about solo, this is what I'm talking about. You can, you can open up any kind of shop you want. You can build the next tech giant, Google, Facebook. But what I'm preaching is, you know, there's a simpler path.

to get started and that's just leveraging your experience. It could, like I said, it could be anything from sales, marketing, CRM, financial analyst, operations, you name it, specifically I'm mostly talking about B2B businesses, if you've been doing a job or a function, there's an opportunity for you to take that and use that skill set and go solo. So saying with that all being said, right.

Brett Trainor (02:21.358)
who's in how to do it, who's actually consuming this experience, right? So if you have these skills, I hear quite a bit, who's actually gonna hire me, I don't know how to sell. The good thing is you really don't have to. There's need and the need is growing by the day as more and more organizations are figuring out the power and the value of leveraging this experience that you do have. And...

Right now, the most common places I see this are small businesses, small and medium sized businesses, right under, you know, 500 million, but down to his 2 million in revenue, right, or 5 million up to 25 million. Historically, they have not been able to afford to hire people with extensive experience and the business may not be ready for them. But now they're starting to embrace and welcome, right, folks like you.

that have this experience into their organizations. I would also include startups in this mix, right? As they're growing, they may not have the budget or the need for somebody full-time. And consulting firms. I think I read somewhere that 20% of firms, both Boutique and the Big Four, leverage almost 20% fractional or freelance consultants.

as part of their practice. So if you don't want to sell them, it potentially can get hooked up with one of these firms that can leverage your expertise against engagements that they currently have. And with the state of all the layoffs and everywhere else, I think you're gonna see a bigger emphasis from these consulting firms to leverage folks more on a fractional basis so they don't have people sitting on the bench when they don't have engagement. So, sorry, a little bit of a tangent there, but I think, you know, just wanted to give you an idea of who is leveraging and using.

these skill sets, right? And so maybe that's a good transition into, what are the various paths that you can take and leverage your skills? So I'm gonna go through a few of these with the details. You may wanna jot this down, not necessarily you won't be tested, but as you start to talk to organizations about, using your skills, it's helpful to have kind of a different frame for each of them.

Brett Trainor (04:40.054)
First one, and I think the most popular, which makes the most sense is fractional leadership. Most of the time we talk about fractional leadership, but it could just be fractional. And this is really where you offer your expertise to a company on a part-time basis, but you're really a part of that team. This really started kind of with chief marketing officers or heads of marketing, but it's moved into sales, customer success, operations.

you name it, if you're a leader within your organization, there's businesses that need that. So the way I look at fractional leadership is, you're just, you're part of that management team, you're part of that organization, but just on a part-time business. And the way I sell it is you get the good parts of me and you don't get the inefficiencies, right? So you're hyper-focused on what's gonna help them move their business forward and not a lot of the unnecessary meetings, the unnecessary time working on

you know, projects or just busy activities that aren't pushing the business forward. So again, I think this is the backbone where we can leverage a lot of our experience, but it's not the only path. The second one would be consulting, which folks have been doing for a while, right? And consulting is just that this is more of a fixed time, fixed price. Hey, this organization's got this problem. We need to set up this structure. We need to implement this technology.

You can go in there as a consultant and provide that leadership or project management to help them deliver that. A third path is advising, right? So maybe one of these organizations is going through a growth mode. They're not ready to hire somebody either fractionally or full-time, but yet you can provide the advice because you've been through the battles for 20 years. You know what to expect and you can share what you've learned with these businesses.

I think this is a big opportunity again. I don't think we need to structure everything in a box that says This is the way we do it X Y and Z You can tailor these offerings to what the business needs and what you want, right? A lot of this comes down to how much effort you want to put into it you know how much time you want to work how much money you want to make and Where is the business that you're working with where they add and what do they need? So?

Brett Trainor (07:02.882)
Get creative, think outside of the box, you can structure different relationships. The last one I wanna talk about is kind of skills as a service. This one I still think is very underappreciated and has an opportunity to grow. And this is where you package what your expertise is. Again, I'll use, typically we've done design or marketing where on a monthly retainer, basically.

you provide your service to these organizations, in most cases, multiple organizations, and you can diversify your portfolio or work with different companies for a fixed fee. But there's no reason why this can't apply against anything. Again, back to project management, back to process, back to technology, back to sales, back to marketing. Anything that you can package as a service that somebody's gonna use on a monthly basis, you can put a fee around it.

and basically charge you think of all the subscriptions you have but just now apply your services to it. This one is still developing but again think outside the box you have the opportunity and again these companies are hungry for your skill sets. So what is the potential for success when I talk about going solo? I think on the upper end of the scale right now right you can you see seven figure businesses the one that's

in public is Design Joy, right? He was a graphic designer, charged a monthly retainer for his services, built the business to seven figures with just him, solo business. I don't think he was using any bookkeepers or anything else, he was doing it all himself, he was doing all the designs. Now there's no reason why you can't bring somebody in to help you in some of those areas that maybe you don't like to do or you wanna expand. And on the flip side of it, maybe you don't wanna.

Build a seven-figure business. You'd rather work two days a week and You know just replace your income from what you have. So I think that's the beauty from a financial side that's where the The opportunity lies right is that the freedom the flexibility financial control And maybe just to touch a little bit where you know, you can think about the fractional is probably the most defined of it And when I talk about fractional

Brett Trainor (09:26.03)
Typically, it's a day per week per month. And most of the time, it's not a dedicated day per week. It's just time spent over a week adds up to about a day. So if you can pick up a couple of clients, right? That's two days per week. The more efficient you get, the more organized you get with your work. You can be, you know, kind of hyper-focused with that. And what I'm seeing in ranges for that monthly fractional.

is anywhere between, you know, seven and 11 or $12,000 per month, depending on again, how much experience you have, the size of the company that you're going to be working with, their needs, et cetera. I've seen it higher than that. I've seen it lower than that. But I think as you're thinking about what does my business model look like, you know, that's seven to 10, seven to 11 is a pretty common rate that, that we see. And this is across the board, right? Chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer.

They may not call it that. You could be their head of sales, their head of marketing, their head of go to market, HR, I mean, you name it, there's an opportunity within these companies. So I just want to give you a little bit of a baseline of what you could be thinking about. And again, I think the skills as a service, you probably three, four, five K per month per client. And that's probably not even a full day's work per week. It's probably a half a day's work. Again, these are just guidelines for you to think about as you go into these, these organizations, these companies.

but it shows you what the potential is to go solo. Does it have its own challenges? Absolutely that the biggest one I think is the time management aspect, right? Coming from corporate, your days are kind of structured with meetings, deliverables, right? It's somebody else's deliverables, it's somebody else's timeline. All of a sudden you own the timeline, you own the deliverables, you own the prioritization.

and a common trap a lot of folks fall into of, hey, I've got eight hours a day and it's taking me eight hours to do this. You got to get yourself really focused to give yourself more free time. It may sound counterintuitive, but the more organized you get with your work, self-imposed deadlines, or however there's some different tricks and philosophies that you can use to manage your day, but it's gonna give you more flexibility. The one thing that I try to do is

Brett Trainor (11:51.17)
Block off, I love my early mornings, you know, from that, you know, 5.30, 6 o'clock till 10. I really try to keep that as my focused work time. If it's deliverables, content, whatever that I need to move my business forward, that's when I focus. Use the rest of the day for, you know, the other necessary stuff. Follow up with email, some outreach. I'll record and schedule meetings for those times.

But if I don't get anything done afternoon, I still feel like I've had a productive day. And there's probably a whole episode on how to structure your day. But just wanted to give you an idea. Some of the challenges, I think the other thing you need to think about is in corporate, you have a floor of what you're going to make from a financial standpoint. You know the revenue. You know what your paycheck is. You know how much the company's paying for your benefits or your premiums.

those have been decreasing over time, you're probably playing a larger chunk for it, but you're capped, right? Unless you're in sales with an unlimited commission plan or super senior executive that's tied to stock options and bonuses, right? You know what you're capped at and how much money you're gonna make in a given year. So I think having your own flexibility in controlling your destiny with financial is huge. It's uncapped, right? I talked about the million dollars is...

is more than reasonable. You have to work hard and put probably almost a full-time effort into it. But there's no reason you can't. But on the flip side, you got to be comfortable that, you know, the floor is and could be zero. If you don't do anything, you don't work to get clients, then, right, then you're not going to have revenue coming in. But from my experience, what I've seen, if you were successful in corporate for even 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you have what it takes to manage this. You may just not have the

the confidence yet in this, you're super confident in what you do on the corporate side, but you may not have the confidence in executing on a solo business. But I can tell you, not just with my own experience, but with hundreds of other people I've either worked with or talked to or networked with, it's more than doable. And like I said, if you've been successful in your corporate career, you can absolutely make the transition. But that being said, it is not for everybody. And if that floor really, really bothers you.

Brett Trainor (14:12.994)
then or you don't want to prioritize your days and manage your time, then the corporate structure probably is more beneficial. But like I said, the folks that want to do it and test it, they may not have thought it was for them, but they find out that it could be. And I say all this, that there's really low risk in doing this. You can do this if you're currently working to start testing it, you can build.

everything that we've talked about and start networking and just start asking. There's so few people that actually ask or try that the opportunities are there for the folks that do. And you know what, if you do it for two months, I encourage you to go all in on it to make sure you're doing everything to give it a chance. But if you just don't like it, it's not for you. You can always go back to corporate. There's nothing keeping you from doing that. So.

So I think it's a high opportunity with low risk that you can test, right? You may find that you just like your structured corporate life and absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the folks I talked to, they're looking for something more. They want ownership, they're burned out, they're frustrated. And a lot of the times I hear from people, it's...

I'm just happy that somebody's willing to listen or wants to hear what I have to say again and I'm getting guessed that's going to resonate with some of you that's been in corporate for a while that your opinion just doesn't matter like it used to or maybe it didn't or maybe it does and kudos to you. The other piece I think advice I would share and what I hear frequently with folks I work with is I found a couple, I wasn't sure I wanted to go fractional.

But by having the conversations, I found a couple of customers almost by accident. It wasn't by accident, but I wasn't looking for them. So again, I don't want to minimize that you have to put the effort in, but I think once people see this world, right, not just from LinkedIn or reading about it, but actually have the conversations and see what the opportunity is here and why we are so well positioned to take advantage of this, it's just mind blowing.

Brett Trainor (16:25.566)
slight exaggeration, but I've had folks that said that, right? I just had no idea how much opportunity that there is out there. So again, I'm looking at this as part two, phase two of what I wanna do within my life. It's set up really well for us. I just did a post on Fractional and why that's starting to take off. And maybe I'll close on this piece is, right? Five years ago, or I should take a step back, I was meeting with an author.

wrote an article in Forbes about why every corporation, you know, big or small, needs to have a freelance strategy. And I've always understood the benefit, right, to companies to use fractional and freelance. And, but hearing why it's growing from the business side was, as he told me, you know, five years ago, we didn't have people like you available for fractional work or freelance work.

All of a sudden there's people with experience from big brands that have been doing this. It doesn't have to be a big brand, but you've got the experience that we'll just weren't doing this. Right. The start of the freelance movement was a lot of design, right? This is going to be much more of strategy implementation that these companies just didn't have access to that all of a sudden they've got the talent. So definitely think there's a first mover advantage for folks that embrace this now.

The beauty is we don't need a ton of clients to make the money that you want to make. Like I said, on average, I think if you get two fractional clients, you're going to make back what you were making in corporate and be comfortable, work a couple of days, but then you can expand it. So it's not like you have to set up this full marketing engine in order to drive and grow your business. You really just need a few customers. And if you leverage your network for this.

there's going to be a whole lot more opportunity than you think. And I think there's also a future opportunity for a lot of us to partner together and collaborate on deals and go in on package deals together where we can provide values and service. I think that's a whole nother episode. Um, I just wanted to hit you with, with this quick one. Like I said, I do get the question is what does solo mean? And so I just wanted to clarify this is, this is my, my approach. This is my philosophy with solo. Just because we've had.

Brett Trainor (18:46.762)
you know, so much experience that we can now leverage and make money off of, right? But do we get our terms versus somebody else's terms? So love to hear from you. If you've got questions, if there's other thoughts on topics that you'd like to see discussed, just drop me an email and or hit me up on LinkedIn and I'll take a look. Appreciate it.