3 clients and a side hustle.

What do most independent businesses look like once they have traction?

It’s been over 2 years since Jason and I launched Voyageur U. In that time, we’ve had the privilege of helping shape dozens of independent careers into formidable businesses. Professionals from every discipline who were once stuck in their jobs, disillusioned, undervalued, furloughed, or laid off are now thriving independently. Many others who recently joined the Voyageur U community are well on their way. All of them now have the things they were so dearly missing in their jobs. Hope. Optimism. Time to think. Time to enjoy life. Time to exercise. Time with family. And a balanced business they can rely on for security, resting atop their own shoulders. As acting coaches, teachers, advocates, and guides for our members, we get the benefit of looking across our entire membership population and seeing common themes. With 140+ members, we can tell you what works, what doesn’t, and what has the greatest chance of success in the independent economy. You can read on, or join right now and get right to it.

Three clients and side hustle.

It is hard to picture what success looks like when you are just embarking on your independent career. Success hasn’t happened yet, so how is one to foresee what it looks like? If you are starting your independent career now and using things like the Voyageur U community and coursework, you are in the thick of it. You are heads-down on building the pieces. Your pitch. Your sales process. Billing. Accounting. NDAs. Your sales pipeline. As time passes, the process will become more clear, organized, and take on momentum by utilizing resources like Voyageur U, but still, it is hard to see a few months down the road. Allow us to fill in the blanks. More often than not, the success that follows after pursuing your independent career looks like this: You will have three clients and a side hustle. This is true if you are a pro in IT, Operations, Sales, Finance, Marketing, or any other professional area. Three clients and a side hustle is the result of focused efforts into creating your own independent career. And it is beautiful.

It’s the math that makes it work.

Our viewpoint is limited to what we see in our membership. We do not claim to know the entirety of the independent economy.  That said, we get to see dozens and dozens of independent businesses at work in all stages of development, from fresh start-ups to mature businesses. In our world, we see members who have already been through our coursework and regularly take advantage of our membership meetings and connectivity. What we see as part of their success comes down to some pretty simple math. 3 clients and one side hustle is as much a math formula as it is a business portfolio. 

Three clients=300 leads. 

If you are an experienced professional, you have connections by the hundreds. Most seasoned professionals have collected at least 300 other professionals who can either hire them or refer work their way.  Have all professionals been actively networking? Are all of the contacts updated? Do they have a regular outreach to their professional connections? Probably not. The traditional full-time job doesn’t leave much time for that. In fact, it is usually suppressed by deadlines, impatient bosses, and too much work to do in a day. But they are there. In your LinkedIn group. In your contact database. In your industry associations. With a good effort, a 1% yield against that population is a reasonable expectation and attainable goal. See? Simple math.

Three clients= $15,000 per month.

As an independent, you will probably be hired more for your brain than your brawn. Professionals with a bit of gray hair have experience. Experience doesn’t typically monetize in hours delivered. It monetizes in value delivered. An IT pro can keep a business from making a million-dollar mistake on their tech stack. A marketing pro can see waste in the marketing budget and chop it out fast, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Experience in any function delivers value. Your failures and scars are your assets because they are lessons only you have learned.  If you work for a client for one hour and see a way to save them $100,000 based on your hard-earned experience, do you charge just $200 for that? Of course not. Once you are up and running, you will be filling a significant hole in a client’s org chart. You will be working adjacent to leadership month by month in order to see the big picture and affect change. That is where independents earn their way. Living and breathing a client’s business every 30 days gives you a viewpoint on how to make things go better. After all, what client wouldn’t pay $5,000 per month to save $100,000? To pay $5,000 per month for your brain (sometimes more, sometimes less but that’s definitely on the green) is a steal compared to paying 200K in salary plus benefits. They get all of the brainpower they need. You get revenue. Everyone wins.

Three clients= 30 hours. 

When you are working for a client as an independent you are free from the traditional time-sucks. No long commute. No office drama to get pulled into. No three-hour meetings for the sake of meetings. No two-hour lunches. Your focus is the work at hand. Waste just isn’t a thing. As a result, the quality of the time you work on your clients’ business goes way up, and so too does the efficiency. You might think ten hours in a week doesn’t seem like a lot. But extract the waste you used to experience in a corporate job and you soon see things differently. A dedicated and focused ten hours per week delivers far more value than a scattered, interrupted unfocused 40, 50, or 60 hour week. 

A life without road rage is a beautiful thing.

About the side hustle.

Life is full of surprises. We had no idea when we launched Voyageur U that everyone has a side hustle in mind. When we started Voyageur we thought our product would become the engine for independent business professionals to launch their practice, get 3-6 clients, serve them well, make a good living and get back to a balanced life. Little did we know waiting in the wings were hundreds of amazing ideas that just needed a little oxygen to get started. The side hustle has become the fourth dimension of a balanced career portfolio. Not only is it a means to earn extra income. It is also very often the 401k for independents. A side hustle is something to invest in for future growth. Typically side hustles don’t pay as much as client business in the early stages, but as time goes on side hustle pursuits become true assets to an independent business. They are by design created to grow, generate revenue, and be sold once they hit a level of earning and maturity. Of course, they can also become a larger portion of your business portfolio, say two clients and a BIG side hustle. The point is that ideas that were once latent find nourishment here. By mid-2020 there were 8x as many independent business filings in the USA as compared to the year before and the long term trend. 8x! Not only does the side hustle bolster independent businesses, its tentacles reach deeper into the US economy as each one needs vendors, suppliers, lawyers, shippers, manufacturing, employees and so much more.

The portfolio career in pictures. 

There is a simple graphic we use in our training to help members see their future business. (Image here) Imagine your independent business as a pie with four pieces. Each piece represents revenue. Some of that revenue is month to month. Some of it is future gains. Together, each piece represents a career that is balanced, healthy, and less susceptible to implosion than many full-time jobs, whose shelf life is now just 18 months for seasoned executives. 

That’s the view from the SS Voyageur U.

It has truly been a blessing to watch so many professionals who were once stuck in their careers to find meaning again. Two years in, we are so very inspired by what we get to see from where we stand. The energy and passion independent professionals put into their businesses have not only been missing from their careers, it has been absent in large swaths of the economy. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. We can only imagine, as time goes on, how much of a win the pursuit of an independent career will be for our entire economy. And we can’t wait to see it.

John Arms and Jason Voiovich are co-founders of Voyageur U, a community dedicated to career freedom. www.voyageuru.com.