Is my Portfolio Executive Workstyle Making my Future Work?

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Your Portfolio Executive Workstyle needs to be sustainable, rewarding, and enjoyable. It’s not enough, in my view, for it to just keep you busier and busier. You don’t want to move from being enslaved by a corporate workstyle to becoming enslaved by your portfolio executive workstyle.

There are three key disciplines that I would suggest you need to implement to ensure that your Portfolio Executive Workstyle is Making Your Future Work:

Keep a Balance

The first thing is to balance fee-earning activity and spare time. I strongly recommend that you keep your fee-earning activity down to twelve days a month, and the most you ever do for any one client in a month is one day a week while you’re onboarding them. Once they are onboardonboard, bring your commitment down over time to two or three days a month.

With twelve fee-earning days a month, the pressure is on you to ensure it is rewarding. Too many portfolio executives I have started working with are pitching day rates of ￡500-￡600 a day. If you’re working 100 fee-earning days a year, that could be as little as ￡60,000 a year. This may not give you the financial flexibility you want. The temptation is to increase your fee-earning days to 150 days a year but keep the rate too low. This gives you two problems. Firstly, you will get dragged into doing activities which less experienced, lower cost individuals better do. Secondly, you risk doing too many days for any one client because they see you as indispensable.

A simple tactic for managing the number of days you do for any one client is to continually move your fee rates upwards. The initial target rate I set for all the people I work with is to get to ￡1,000 a day. Then, I encourage them to increase this over time. If you are not achieving a threshold of ￡1,000 per day, then, in my view, it’s no longer sufficiently rewarding or sustainable. Remember, that ￡1,000 per day for 2 or 3 days a month only costs your client ￡24k-￡36k per year – the equivalent of a junior administrator in London.

Making the Most of Your Spare Time

The second thing is what you do with your spare time. The temptation is that your spare time, the eight days a month you’ve left, becomes endless business development time. You use it to build more content, get out and do more networking, and go on more and more training. You have returned to full-time work even if you only earn part-time fees.

I appreciate that you will want to work hard to break into the market and build up your portfolio when you start. But the temptation is to carry on with a five or six-day-a-week workstyle. This is not the promise of freedom and long-term sustainability you made yourself when you started the Portfolio Executive Workstyle. I strongly recommend you block out one day a week as ‘not working’; Fridays work very well for many people. It’s often the client's work-from-home day. It’s often the day of the week when people avoid having meetings. So, pencilling into your diary ‘unavailable on Friday’ is a good discipline.

Building the Future

The final thing is building that future. You’ve got this spare time, but are you making the most of it? Are you using it to do things that matter to you? Are you using it to spend more time with family, to do those projects you’ve always wanted to do, to develop that new skill you’ve always wanted to develop, to do more sailing, to play more golf, to do more volunteering, or just sit and fish? You’re not planning to retire anytime soon but get used to the idea that you have more time to do the stuff you enjoy and rebuild those important relationships that may have suffered at the peak of your corporate career. Ultimately, your long-term freedom and joy will depend on how much you can build relationships where you are loving and feel loved: family, friends, neighbours, and others to whom you can offer care.

Making Your Future Work

The promise of the Portfolio Executive Workstyle will only be realized if you limit the number of fee-earning days, ensure you achieve a day rate that demonstrates sustainable value, commit to freeing up spare time, and use that spare time to do the things that matter to you. If you commit to these principles, you will have the freedom, joy, and opportunity to offer and receive the love that will make your second half career truly the best half career.