Early Exit #48: Finding Your Next Act

While also staying true to your north star in the process.

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

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Consulting wasn’t supposed to be a long-term thing for me.

It was supposed to sustain me in the short-term while I built something else. Except the short term was more like 18 months and counting.

This is ok!

Throughout that time one principle has always guided my decision making. It’s a strong conviction about what I didn’t want to do.

I did not (and still don’t) want to manage full-time employees.

That statement is a north star for my business. If I stay true to that then I know I’ll be in a good place.

But it’s so tempting to break from that north star. The amount of potential clients I’ve said no to because I didn’t have capacity means I left 30-50% more revenue growth on the table last year.

So today I wanted to talk about finding your north star and provide a framework for how I think about finding your next act.

My framework for finding your next act

The below graphic is from one of my earliest newsletters about building your exit plan. I wrote this 2 months after quitting my job when I wasn’t even making enough money to cover my living expenses.

Even back then I knew that I had to stay true to my north star.

This is a deceptively hard thing to narrow in on. It’s a combination of:

• What makes you truly happy? What gives you energy?

• What do you absolutely hate doing? What drains your energy?

• What does your life look like if you’re following your north star?

Here’s how that looked for me:

• I love running paid ads and having autonomy in my job.

• I hate endless meetings, corporate politics and structure, and directly managing people (I mean, who doesn’t?)

• I want to own my day, never wake up to an alarm clock, and live wherever I want.

While those seem obvious now, it wasn't always easy to see them in the moment. Our brains are good at deceiving us, convincing us to take that one client that doesn't quite fit into our best fit criteria.

Finding Your Next Act

Where are you now? Where do you want to be?

I know freelancers who just took a full-time job again because they wanted stability.

I know full-timers who flirt with the idea of freelance only to take another full-time gig. I've taken coffee calls with many of you over the last year 😉

And I know people who have been happily freelancing for 10 years.

You can't map out your next steps if you're not honest about where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

Here are some options for your next move.

Services-based

Freelancer

• Best for: Anyone not currently freelancing who wants to stay close to the work and have more control over their time and income.

• Stakes: Relatively low. You're only supporting for yourself (and your family), not other employees who depend on you. If you land multiple clients you instantly have more income diversity than full-timers.

• Startup costs: Low. You sell the thing your best and most experienced at. You don’t need to build something else to sell (e.g. coaching, products, software)

• Who does the work? You! You'll be in every client call and submitting every invoice.

• Who do you sell to? Other businesses. Average order values are higher if you do it right (and avoid the trap of hourly billing)

Agency Owner

• Best for: Freelancers who want to keep growing their business and who want to move away from the work over time.

• Stakes: High! You'll need to hire or at least sub contract out, which can be a plus if you find the right person. Then you’re on the hook for financially supporting them (and all the people management that comes with it)

• Startup costs: Starts small but grows over time. The time commitment, software, and focus areas start to change. You start to have opinions on which HR tools like Gusto or Rippling are better.

• Who does the work? Not you over time, if you do it right. You will slowly need to delegate and step away from parts of your business.

• Who do you sell to? Other businesses. Average order values are high.

Early Exit #33: Building an 18-person Marketing Agency

Many of the agency owners I know, including the one I interviewed last year in the above newsletter, didn't go from 0 to 18 people over night. It slowly evolves over years until suddenly you're in a zoom call with 10 other people.

Coaching & Communities

• Best for: Anyone not interested typical consulting work but who wants to share their experience with other people instead of businesses.

• Stakes: High! You’ll need to sell a lot more $25-$50 products to make a decent earning.

• Startup costs: Low on financial costs, high on your time. Making a course, class, or product takes time even before you start marketing it.

• Who does the work? Not you over time, if you do it right. You will slowly need to delegate and step away from parts of your business.

• Who do you sell to? Other people. Average order value is low.

Two of my dear friends run very successful paid communities as part of their solopreneur business.

Tamara Grominski runs PMM Camp — a community for(and by) product marketing leaders with hundreds of highly engaged paying members. This is where she spends the bulk of her time and she’s done a great job of nurturing the community and building up her free newsletter to support it. She also consults for about 1 business at a time and has done 1:1 coaching in the past.

She also just re-positioned her community (literally a few weeks prior to me writing this) and her insights here are worth reading for anyone who is interested in starting their own community.

Rachel Meltzer runs Pop Club — a community for current and aspiring freelance writers. She also runs amazing free programs to help you find more clients and get your money right.

She was one of the freelance writers I hired at Loom when I ran their SEO content program (and she’s fantastic, you should hire her too)

Start A Different Business

Hey, it’s me. I’ll continue writing more about my journey as I transition into a software founder, but it’s a huge time commitment. I put hundreds of hours into my startup Adacadabra before I launched into beta. It could be years before I see any meaningful return.

Do All Of The Above

The beauty of this is that you don’t have to pick just one. There’s a growing trend of solopreneur’s building a portfolio career where you have multiple income streams.

Anyone curious about this should look into The Portfolio Collective.

Trust Your Instincts

Whatever your choice, there's no wrong answer. It's ok to fail. Failure is growth. Startups pivot all the time when their first ideas don't work out.

But I firmly believe that doing nothing, taking no risks at all, is the worst choice of all.

I'm in the middle of trying something new. It's scary as hell and I have no idea if it'll work out.

But I got this far by trusting myself. And even if it doesn't workout, what got me here can also get me there. The skills I'm learning (so much about AI coding tools) will help propel me into the next thing.

As long as I stay true to my north star.

See you all in 2 weeks,

Nick

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