Me-As-A-Service
This post is a riff on what it’s been like to be a solo studio / service business over the last four years (what I often refer to as “me-as-a-service”). At the bottom, I ask some questions that I’d love to have answered by you, the reader.
In Yet Another Year in Review - Year 01, I wrote about being “Me-As-A-Service” saying:
The most important perspective shift I had to make in starting the Studio was recognizing that my business is effectively "Me-As-A-Service."...
The challenge for me was about converting [my] strengths and the things I wanted to offer into something that I could actually offer as a product/service - whether that's a talk, workshop, project, partnership or something else. Doing that required a lot more reflection and self awareness as I considered my own life rhythms, the ways I wanted to work with other people, the kinds of things I wanted to work on, and how I could talk about and sell that vision.
If you're considering an independent path, some of the questions I'd encourage you to reflect and write on are:1. What is something that only you can do (or that you are uniquely qualified to do)? With that in mind, who should hire you, and why? What would that work look like?
2. What kind of work do you not want to do?
3. What do you want your days/weeks/months to look like?
4. What activities do you need to make space for that will allow you to continue to do the work you're excited about and proud of?
I haven’t revisited this idea until recently, as more people I know start to explore an independent path. However, almost everyone I see who starts down this path immediately turns to contracting – trying to do the same activities they did as a full time employee, but on a part-time basis for other companies.
Thankfully, the world of being indie is far more expansive than that. I want to use this post to talk about some of the different ways of being I’ve come across and practiced and how I’ve seen them appear together. I’ll end with some questions I’m grappling with and would love your feedback on.
Different Ways of Being
As I reflect on the different ways I’ve partnered with and served clients over the past four years, two meaningful distinctions in my work are:
Whether I was in service of individual people or a team/organization
Whether I was evaluated on deliverables or not
Looking at the world this way, you end up with the classification I drew for a friend while on a Zoom call (please enjoy the Figjam screenshot in all its messy glory this updated diagram I included in Being Hired to Care). This classification highlighted a few different kinds of work:
Courses
Training
Contracting – “I’m told what work to do.”
Consulting – “We agree on what work I do.”
Fractional Leadership – “I’m hired to define the work to be done (and lead it).”
Coaching – Helping people on their journeys, often because of your capabilities. (Does not necessarily mean that you’ve been on that journey before, IMO.)
Advising – Helping companies on their journeys, likely because you’ve been on that journey (or a similar one) before. Unlike coaching, you're evaluated on organizational outcomes.
In any of these ways of being, you are monetizing your brain, ideas, and experiences, though often in different configurations.
Most People Start in the Top Right
As I mentioned at the beginning, I often see people move into independent work starting with contracting. This makes sense for many reasons – the work is familiar to you, acquiring customers is (likely) obvious to you, you are used to trading your time for money, etc. But this is also perhaps the lowest ROI place to play on this diagram – both from intellectual nourishment and financial perspectives. It’s also the one that is least competitively defensible (there are probably many people who can do those same activities, so what makes you special).
That said, not everyone starts there. People who are thoughtful about packaging up their skills (or even just a skill, practice, approach, etc), will often build trainings or courses. People who can find an audience that wants their guidance on journeys they are familiar with (especially organizations) may start their indie path by dipping into advising. I also see some people start with coaching, though I am usually skeptical of this because coaching is the most difficult of all these ways of being (and most rewarding), and what I often see people offer as “coaching” is really 1:1 training (where they are delivering a pre-set curriculum).
Experiments in Ways of Being
Over the last four years, I’ve experimented in every quadrant and with every offering except Fractional Leadership (at least in title). While each of the different ways of being is interesting, the blurring, blending, and boundaries of them are perhaps the most interesting to me (right now).
Some of the different blended configurations I’ve experienced:
Advising + Coaching
Advising + Training (and the reverse sequencing)
Training + Consulting
Consulting + Advising
Advising + Coaching
This pairing feels like a common progression for advisors I know who are also open to coaching. These relationships start when someone is hired to advise a company and evolve out of that configuration in parallel or when that agreement ends but the point of contact on the company side wants to keep working together.
In my experience, it’s often hard to be a successful advisor without some amount of coaching taking place. Organizations are made of people, and organizational changes involve people changing their perspectives or behaviors. In high trust situations, this kind of advising + coaching pairing feels inevitable (and good!).
Situations where this can get messy are when the person on the organization’s side wants to keep working with the advisor/coach, but cannot do so given their own budget constraints. As an advisor, you’re paid with the company’s bank account. As a coach, you’re often paid by individuals, even if those people get reimbursed by their company.
Advising + Training
Another common pairing is advising + training, which I’ve seen happen when the advising conversations identify an opportunity to develop or strengthen muscles within the organization through a structured training program (workshop, series, etc).
One of my biggest challenges with delivering effective training is having enough understanding of the organization to ensure that the ideas don’t just make sense, but can be effectively implemented. The advising + training pairing is a great way to mitigate that problem, since you’ve developed an awareness of what does and does not work within the organization and can curate your training appropriately.
The thing to be conscious of here is designing and delivering a training is its own activity. You want to make sure that you’re appropriately compensated for that kind of work (rather than it being rolled into the expectations of advising).
Training + Consulting
Training + consulting often feels like a win, where you offer training and that relationship opens the door to future projects. While training can also lead into advising (where you’re often hired to help operationalize the ideas you trained people on), I find that the consulting pairing is a unique one because you’re being hired to do work, not just guide the work. I say this is successful because it means that you’ve shown a proficiency that is valued and are likely a person the organization would be excited to spend more time around. (I see this as an outcome when companies try to hire you for a full time role and you’re not looking for one, instead carving out specific projects that are intellectually stimulating and make sense for both parties financially.)
This pairing comes with some potential traps, because hanging around after you’ve done a training leaves you open to follow on conversations for those ideas (which you may or may not want to have and may or may not have carved out the time for). It feels important to figure out how you want to engage with the company at this point and what’s in/out of scope.
Consulting + Advising
Similar to the training + consulting pairing, the consulting + advising is often a progression that results from a successful project, but a need for less of you (or just enough of you on a consistent basis). This pairing feels quite common in situations where you delivered a substantial project and there’s high value in being around for a while to ensure the follow through. (I’ve been trying to plan more of a cool off/wind down period for any sort of substantial project I do with an organization, largely based on experiences in this pairing.)
The trap I’ve found myself falling into here is that I jump back into project-work very easily and can quickly start spending more hours than planned with a given client. I do know some folks who explicitly do “hands on advising” and plan for that kind of thing, but I find that I can be less good at the gear-shifting from deep project-based work to the lighter touch of advising.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
As much as I am putting shape to and labeling potential ways of being, my honest experience is that most of these ways of being are the front door to deep, meaningful partnerships with people which morph and co-occur over time. I believe there are reasonable downsides to sku-ifying yourself, especially if you’re like me and appreciate getting invited into the mess. In my experience, the more trust that you build, the more you get to do work that looks like coaching – boundless, vulnerable, and in close contact with people. This is where I thrive.
I often evaluate the success of any of my work by the degrees of freedom with which I’m given to engage with people besides my primary point of contact. The more that I’m trusted to do the work around the work without having to pre-define it, the more successful and impactful an engagement is.
That said, definitions and boundaries can help. I try my best to identify the different ways I can partner with and support a person or organization up front, and often start doing the work I think they need before we agree on the scope itself. I learned this from Casey Winters, who said he usually takes 2.5 meetings before he talks with a company about an advising agreement. This gives him time to see how they engage, how they react to feedback, how quickly they take action, and so on. I’ve found that not trying to sell a specific service up front, even if the client comes to me with a specific request, is the best way to be helpful over the long term (which is the time frame I care about most).
I ended Yet Another Year in Review - Year 03.5 with the following, which still rings true:
“The projects that I’ve shied away from are those where I’d be more of an extra set of hands, whereas the projects I’ve been excited about (and the ones I’m looking for) are where I get to be an extra brain alongside those hands. I can tell what’s going to be a potentially good project based on whether we’re talking about activities (bad) or outcomes (good). The best partners I’ve had trust me to shepherd them to a destination with less concern and oversight for the path that we take.
As I’ve looked ahead to 2024 and beyond, I still feel that I don’t want to do many consulting engagements, but that’s because I’ve realized I want to do more deep work — which often takes time. The work that I find myself drawn to is very much in the realm of helping people improve the way they work and work together – a unique blend of hospitality, service design, and organizational design that I love.
While I still believe that illegibility is an asset and am grateful that friends come to me with loosely defined “Behzod-shaped problems,” I do think I’ll more actively reflect on what (else) makes a good project and partnership for me in the coming year (for internal clarity, if nothing else).
Things I’m Thinking About
While I wrote a lot more than I thought I would here, there is still a lot to discuss. A big thank you to Tom Critchlow for poking and prodding at a very loose draft of this and being a great sounding board on my indie journey.
I also owe a huge thank you to Elena Verna, because our conversations and her writing over the past few years have been wildly helpful here. She has gone (much further) down a similar path and actively writes about being independent.
From her post “Is Solopreneurship Right For You?”
“Solopreneurship is about treating your brain as a product and building a one-person company with a predictable, sustainable, and competitively defensible growth model. This requires identifying the following:
1. Product-market fit for your brain on the market
2. Unique value positioning for your brain
3. Growth model to acquire, monetize, and retain customers
Sound familiar? Because it is - starting your solopreneur journey is like starting any other business. So, you can use the skills you learned at your job to help grow you.”
I think a lot about how many of these activities feed into each other (my advising gives me space to help companies implement ideas → which often become stable enough to become a part of specific training → which I can then operationalize into courses → which opens the door for more advising…) but I think I could be smarter about this.
I’d love to hear from you, the reader, so I’ll leave you with some questions:
What did I miss? How could I think about this differently? What other models are there? – Please push my thinking here.
I’ve left out newsletters and podcasts here, largely because I haven’t explored them. Where do they fit and why?
What configurations have you seen work well (or work poorly) in your own practice?
How do you think about portfolio construction across those activities given the different energy required for the different ways of being, the different audiences, and different rhythms?
What are the shifts necessary from one quadrant to another? I started doodling about this in the Figjam file, but figured I’d save it for another time.
For those of you curious about moving into independent work, regardless of the quadrant, what concerns do you have? How can I help get you started?