The Portfolio Executives

After a family bereavement in 2022 I decided to step out of my corporate role. I subsequently concluded that after 25 years working for businesses large and small in the UK and overseas, I needed a change. Focusing on my core skills to help a portfolio of clients with specific problems (that I had solved myself) felt like a natural and healthy progression. I set up a limited company and a website and began to build out an offering to test. Having been overseas for a number of years I also needed to work on rebuilding a UK network. So I became active on LinkedIn, ran streaming events, started a blog and joined networking groups. My initial early successes came via existing business contacts who were in the process of setting up new companies. However as time has gone on it has become necessary for me to find new clients and foster new connections in the open market with businesses I’ve had no prior dealings with. I’ve learned along the way that working for yourself provides enormous freedom to quickly make decisions and implement them. However, the flipside is that resources are more limited than in a bigger organisation! Leveraging technology and being very deliberate and selective with how one invests ones time is enormously important. The balance of family life and work would be very hard to replicate in a traditional salaried arrangement at an executive level. My style of work doesn’t yet afford me the ability to work less, but it does allow me to design my weeks with total freedom to balance all my commitments and interests inside and outside of work. I hope to reach a point where I can take a mix of clients with different challenges and requirements that gives me the variety and interest I seek. I also plan to leverage technologies and types of service delivery that allow me to do more with less and provide me more security and time freedom.