Anyone moving from corporate management into self-employment usually starts planning straight away:
• Which service or product will I offer?
• How will I price it?
• What will the website look like?
• How do I win my first clients?
When I went independent more than 20 years ago after my corporate career, I made exactly the same mistakes at first. It took a couple of trial runs before I realised:
I had started in completely the wrong place. I was no longer 20, and I became aware that what I set up now, and how, would shape the second half of my life.
The very first question isn’t what you sell.
The very first question is: what exactly do you want your life to look like in five years?
Skip that question and you may build a financially successful business, only to find in the end that it has given you completely the wrong life.
The good news: if you start a business after years of corporate experience, you aren’t starting from zero. You bring a lot with you:
• Deep industry expertise and substance
• An established network
• Strong personal credibility
• And knowledge of real problems the market will pay to solve
That experience sets the boundaries of what you can credibly build.
But the business you shape from it should depend entirely on the life you want:
Two executives with identical experience often need two completely different paths:
• One wants a specialist consultancy with a large team, built to grow and scale
• The other wants a handful of excellent assignments, maximum independence and the freedom to work from anywhere.
Both can be extremely successful. But they need two completely different business models.
When I faced that decision, I asked myself exactly this question.
The answer was clear: I wanted complete freedom to make my own decisions and the freedom to work from anywhere, without being tied to a fixed office or rigid corporate structures.
At the same time, I wanted to make executive search more sustainable, more personal and more candidate-centred than anything I had experienced myself, on either the company or the candidate side.
It was out of exactly this vision of life and work that I built TALENTspy Executive Search more than 20 years ago.
Plan your life first. Then build the business that makes that life possible.
