Three women told me almost the exact same sentence this month. Different industries, different ages, same line – “I thought the payout would last longer than this.”
I’m watching brilliant women, genuinely brilliant at what they do, get made redundant right now. If you’re one of them, you already know exactly what that feels like.
This moment might be the biggest opportunity you ever get.
When you leave a long corporate career, there’s often a payout. A buffer that makes the hard decisions feel a little less hard, the risk feel a little less risky. Sometimes there’s consulting work from your old company too, wrapping up projects only you understand.
It feels like the moment you’ve been waiting for.
Clients who know your name start reaching out. People you’ve worked with before ask where you’ve gone and if you can help them. You say yes to everything. You price by the hour, based on the salary you used to earn, not what the work – or your two decades of experience – is actually worth.
You set the goal to replace your salary. But the costs of running a business are nothing like the costs of running a career.
It’s almost accidental, the way a business starts building itself around you like that.
Until it isn’t.
Enquiries slow. You sit back one day and realise something uncomfortable – the people you worked with have quietly built the business they wanted. Not the one you wanted.
This is the pattern I keep seeing. Not a failure of talent – these are some of the sharpest minds I know. It’s a business built without a foundation underneath the momentum.
If any part of that sounds familiar, here’s the good news. It’s not too late to build the business you actually want – one aligned to the life and the work you want to be doing from here.
You already have the hardest part – the expertise. Here’s where I’d start:
1. Get clear on how you actually want to work. It feels good to be needed. Early on, you don’t want to say no to anything. But having the long, honest conversation with yourself now – about what kind of work you want to be doing, who you want to work with now and into the future, and who’s actually in a position to pay for the value you bring – will save you a lifetime of headache.
2. Stop offering everything to everyone. Think about the work you do that genuinely changes someone’s experience of the world around them. What’s the most effective way for you to deliver that? 1:1, one-to-many, short-term, long-term – I don’t mind which. What matters is that it gets you and your clients the best result, and that you’re charging what two decades of experience is actually worth.
3. Stop being the best-kept secret in your industry. Your name and reputation might be well known among the people you’ve already worked with. But what about everyone who isn’t aware you exist yet? There’s an entire ocean of the right people you’ll only reach once you put yourself out there properly.
If you’re in the middle of negotiating a redundancy right now, just starting out or any of the above resonates and don’t want to waste the next two years figuring this out the hard way, reach out. Hit reply. Even one word works – “me” is enough. I’ll take it from there.
Janine x