About a year ago, I left behind my full time role leading a team and charted out on my own, both to restart my ops & analytics consultancy, and to make time for a new venture.

I’ve had a lot of great opportunity and experience in my FTE roles, and I’m thankful for that. But the last few years I grew weary of people management and the politics of senior leadership roles. I used to happily want to climb the career ladder. But once I reached director/senior director roles with multiple levels of reporting, it lost a lot of the appeal. I looked with apprehension at VP and higher roles. The level I was already at was pretty exhausting.

Part of the issue was the meetings. As someone who loves to build and solve problems – the crushing weight of a day packed with meetings got old – and it only looked worse the more senior the roles. I also didn’t always agree with the corporate direction & initiatives my team was tasked with, or the task of navigating politics as a full time job.

The other part was boredom with the problems themselves. I’ve been an ops guy for most of my career. I’m great at it, and I mostly found the work interesting. But the funny thing about ops is most companies have pretty darn similar problems, and solving them over and over gets a little stale.

I knew I needed to make a change, and consulting seemed a logical step to accomplish two goals: 1. To pick the jobs that interested or stretched me. 2. To make time for side projects. 

Now, a year later I have worked on some rad projects, and learned a ton. But the consulting space is a hell of a lot more crowded than it once was, so picking the ideal project isn’t always an option. Sometimes you just need a payday. Plus there’s all the other nonsense that comes with solo endeavors. Chasing down invoices. Resetting expectations with an unreasonable request. Learning what bad debts are when one of your clients suddenly goes bankrupt 😬. I’ve been fortunate to have a strong network to mostly fill my time with interesting work. I’m thankful for that, and I can’t imagine trying to do it without the network I’ve got.

Balancing my time has also been a mixed bag. I’ve made time to explore a wild art business idea that was surprisingly successful in its first year. But I now have effectively two jobs to juggle, and it’s a daily challenge to figure out how to balance them. Some days I’m literally hopping from writing SQL queries and client calls to troubleshooting a laser cutter and figuring out how to safely ship a delicate wood map.

Yet a year later, I’m happy with my decision. I’m more engaged by the work. I’m a hell of a lot less stressed. I certainly don’t have much desire to go back in-house, but maybe that will change someday. Right now I spend about half my time on consulting. The other on my small but growing maps business. We’ll see if that balance shifts in the future.