How many income streams do you have?
I only realized some time after I started working on different income streams, that what I do is actually called "work portfolio". Work portfolios allow for flexibility and independence. But they are not for everyone nor for any life stage.
I recently spoke to Julie Fedele who has planned and worked for several years to make her work portfolio a reality. She now supports also others on their journey towards a rewarding, financially sustainable and customized work portfolio.
You can find out more through her newsletter "the Portfolio Careerist": https://juliefedele.substack.com/
Dear Jules, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. As a start, please tell me a bit about where you come from and how you've landed in your current role as an individual and group coach for portfolio career transitions.
I didn't start on this path of portfolio career until the end of 2019. Prior to that, I had quite a traditional corporate existence, I started my life in management consulting, and then went into the healthcare sector for many years. I worked for a global healthcare company called Bupa and I stayed there for 12 years. I did many roles, from corporate strategy to new product development. For instance, I redesigned their physical stores. Please note that in Australia, we sell health insurance directly to consumers. My role was to consolidate the stores from 100 to 80 and deliver a completely new experience. That was such a fantastic experience because I got to retrain 3000 people and move from a health insurer to a health and care partner. And we redesigned the stores with natural materials.
And that's when a passion and realization ignited in me that I was never happy in management consulting or corporate strategy type roles. That’s because I need to experiment a lot – I realized that one of my gifts is pioneering and experimenting. Being behind a desk and writing papers never suited me and I didn't like it. Once I got on the path of innovation roles within corporate, I realized I really enjoyed it.
After 10 years at Bupa, they sent me in 2017 to London to head up their customer strategy team called customer labs. The whole point of the customer labs was to launch new products. And that's where my journey started, there was a clear fork in the road. For my whole life, I had multiple jobs, since I could get a job at the age of 14. I had a very clear determined direction: I wanted to make a certain amount of money; I wanted to climb the corporate ladder and I wanted to have all of the material things I didn't have as a child. As I'm a child of Italian immigrants and my parents were blue collar workers, they didn't have much money. And I wanted all those things for myself and my family. I got to London after working for 15 years without any stop. And my new job gave me three months off, paid. I had never stopped working in my life before. And during that time when most people would be really happy with getting paid to do nothing than just get settled in a new country, I actually had a breakdown, a complete burnout. And that's when I realized that I hated what I was doing.
And so, from 2017 to 2019 I did a lot of soul searching in terms of what brings me joy, what do I care about, what lights me up, what work do I actually want to do. I loved personal development, and I loved helping people launch their businesses. I just didn't love doing that for a corporation. So that's when I started to thread all these pieces of my skill set, my background and my passion together.
And that’s also when I started to launch one of my first income streams, which was one-to-one coaching, helping women in career transitions. And from there, from around 2020 until this year, I slowly worked on firstly building multiple income streams. After my one-to-one coaching I launched a group mentoring program called the Portfolio Career Club.
I also started monetizing my speaking. I grew my personal brand as a future of work commentator and I got some speaking roles, which I was paid for. In a next step I moved into doing corporate workshops about how to create transitions, and how to think about life planning. Overall, it happened slowly. And then suddenly, all at once.
I only resigned from my executive role in February this year. I worked for four and a bit years on the side, building my pipeline of work before I switched to my one-person business.
Thanks a lot for sharing your story with us. It’s interesting to hear that you actually took four years for that transition until you could say “now I'm ready”. Could you reduce your corporate workload during that transition time?
For the last four years of my time in London from 2020 to this year, I was working for a private equity firm launching new ventures for them. I was fully transparent and informed them about my different income streams because I wanted to ensure I was not in breach of my employment contract. They were OK as long as I wasn't working for corporations. Because it was individual mentoring, and because I could keep up my executive role and deliverables, it was fine. However, they wouldn't reduce my time. I had an intense schedule, but I was very passionate about this. I would get up at four twenty every morning and I worked for two and a half hours on my business five days a week. And I would work most weekends. But I was lit up. I always follow my joy and where my energy force takes me. I loved what I was doing. And I also had a vision of where I wanted to be.
And I never wanted to be in a position where I didn't have any core income. Some people out there say “quit your job and then jump into this portfolio career structure”. My advice is: don't do that. Make sure you have a sustainable pipeline of work and only then step into a portfolio career. Because it can be really destabilizing if financial income is important to you. While some people don’t need it, if that's important to you, you need to step into it slowly so for it to become sustainable.
Interesting. This speaks also to my experience where I already knew we had the hotel work and its related income stream when I quit my former job. And only then did I start building out the rest of my portfolio career. And what have you learned from your group coaching program so far?
What I'm clear on are the people that I'm helping. There are mostly two profiles of women working with me. The first type of women is interested in monetizing their skill set but has never heard of portfolio careers and doesn’t understand the concept. However, she is interested in developing a future plan.
And the second type of women I mostly work with, is someone in a career transition. For instance, they've had 10 to 15 years of their corporate experience or some other professional experiences. They may have been made redundant, or they're looking to move out of their executive role, and they are very clear on what skills they want to monetize. And I help them build that product offering.
My own experience with participating in professional development or career coaching showed me that usually these programs or offers don’t consider your life vision, or what you want from life and how your career fits into that. What I do and what I've learned is a key pillar of the work that I do is I help the women I support understand themselves from the inside out. I understand their life vision, their finance vision, what lights them up, what's their perfect day. All of these things that sometimes we think are a bit fluffy and not important, but actually they hold the keys for a lot of how they design their life.
I've learned that a lot of my time is spent helping them understand and connect with themselves.
And only in a second step you work then on the technical parts with them?
Correct, because one of the things that we often do is that we build on shaky foundations. And what I mean by that is sometimes when I have people approach me to work with me, they don't want any of the inner work. I usually work with three pillars in my framework. It's inner work, the strategy work and the execution work. And some people come to me and say, I've done the inner work. I just want you to help me launch my portfolio career. And I've tried that a few times. What I've realized is that while some people have done the inner work it hasn’t been applied to building their career and this means they need to build a new foundation. That means that they're building the same type of machine which just looks different. And then in two years, they're again unhappy with their portfolio career. That’s why I am a strong advocate of taking your time, building new foundations, really understanding yourself what you want and build from there.
Great, thanks for sharing that. Jules, we've talked a lot about portfolio career. How would you define it? And what are in your view key types of portfolio careers?
Everyone has their own definition of what a portfolio career is. Mine is more of a holistic definition. In terms of the features, you'll see a person who has multiple income streams. That is one feature of a portfolio career, diversifying your income and having optionality is a key component. For example, I have around four income streams. Some are my primary income streams; some are secondary or tertiary.
To add to that, I feel that for me personally, it's more of a lifestyle. What I have in my portfolio career is flexibility of my time. I can drop my son off and pick him up from school. I can choose the hours I work. I can choose the people and on what projects I work with, work on. And I can demand my own rates because I know that I have 20 plus years of corporate experience. I know the value I have within the market. And I have the ability to work less and earn a similar capacity because of my skills.
I also think that your portfolio career helps you reconnect with your hobbies. What you like, what you don't like, really understanding your lifestyle and then how those different income streams fit into that. Because some things I do, I do for free. The reason why I charge premiums for my one-to-one work is it’s private coaching. That means then that I can coach people who are early in their career for free. That's a part of my portfolio life. It helps me feel fulfilled and whole.
In terms of the structure of different portfolio careers, I've created my own type of structure which you can read further here . Basically, there's four different shapes. Depending on your skill set, you fit in one of those four. So, for example, I'm a T-shaped portfolio careerist, meaning I have generalist skills with one specialist depth skill. That is my venture building skill. But I also have a secondary shape that I often play with, which is M-shaped, meaning that I love to innovate and do a lot of different things. So those two together describe the shape of my portfolio career. Some people have many different versions.
Now, you've mentioned a lot of advantages of a portfolio career. What are also the downsides that one must consider? Is there the right type of person that fit into that lifestyle? And some others might completely be out of a portfolio career just because of what they enjoy and how they enjoy actually work?
You are just so aligned with my thinking! Some of the cons of a portfolio career is the instability of income. In a corporate set-up you know that you can consistently rely on that money coming in every month. Independently of how you like your job or not. Assuming that the company pays you on time every month. Whereas if you are in a portfolio career, from a nervous system perspective, you must be OK with having your income fluctuate month by month. Certainly, when you begin. So, in my group program, what I'm starting to see is more of consistency of income month or month. However, that was not the case when I started. So, you have to be OK with fluctuating income.
Another thing is that in your corporate career, you take a lot of time at the beginning to do your interviews, to do interview prep, and shape your CV. You get the job and then you can relax into the job. Whereas as a portfolio career, you're always marketing and selling. You're always filling your pipeline with warm leads, hot leads, making sure that you get new cold leads in. To make sure that if one income stream dries up, you have another one to supplement it. At the beginning, that's a lot of work. But as you get further in your portfolio career, the pipeline naturally fills when you get more of a name in the market. However, initially it's a lot of work. It's a startup of you. It's a one-person business.
Everything that you do to start a business is what you're going to have to do for yourself. And some people don't like that. There are three examples where I would say, this is it's just not right for you at this moment in time.
First, if you've just graduated out of college and you're going into the world of work, my suggestion is go get that team, corporate, creative agency, whatever you want to do experience because learning by osmosis from people who have different skill level sets to you is so critically important. I saw this during COVID with the graduates I was training. It was so hard for them to learn by osmosis because they weren't in the office with me. They weren't learning by looking and being around the manager and seeing how they interact with clients. That’s why I think that it is an incredibly important part of one's professional development. To jump into a portfolio career off the bat, I just don’t think time.
Secondly, another profile that comes to mind is if you have a young family. A lot of young moms approach me and say, Jules, I want to quit my job. I hate it. But then they have a two-year-old, a one year old daycare, a partner who travels, or that could be a single mom. And my recommendation is “not yet”. If you've got a stable core income and finance is an issue for you, having a portfolio career and starting it could be a lot of pressure on you at this season of your life. My suggestion would be “start investigating what side business you would want to launch”. But going all in at that season of life, would be stressful.
And then thirdly, some people just like stability, right? They love the nine-to-five job. They love the routine. They love being in a team. They don't want to sit at home and do marketing and selling because that's what you have to do when you have a portfolio career. It does not light them up. And that's okay, too. Some of the things I say would really turn some people off in terms of what it takes to have a portfolio career. For me, I love it.
Do you see the future of work also encompassing portfolio work careers?
The data tells us already a lot. Data coming out of the OECD and other future of work reports, as well as some future of work commentators are suggesting that by 2030, 50% of people will have portfolio careers. In the United States and in the UK, a third of full time employees already have a side hustle. So that's a lot of people doing it already. Now, is it out of necessity or do they really enjoy it? Maybe it's a bit of both.
But I do think that the meta theme is that the agility and ability to learn new skills is going to be really important, whether that's in a portfolio career structure or not. Having this flexibility and ability to jump from job to another job is key. Because this stable full-time role that you're going to stay for 10 years won’t be happening in the future anymore. Like it used to be 30 years.
If you’ve been in a role for even seven years now, it’s already like a long time. And the data is also telling us that executives turn around every 18 months to two years now. That's a lot quicker than only five years ago when it was three to five years and redundancy happens every 12 to 18 months.
Companies are restructuring all the time and we just got to be really agile and flexible as employees or workers. My guidance would be to have a clear statement of what you're good at, what your skill sets are and have three killer stories that you can tell that you've delivered or an outcome you've delivered on your CV. You're going to have to build a personal brand, which I know people are going to hate me for saying it. It is quite important that you stand out as an entity versus being sucked into an organization's brand.
That's a fantastic final word. Thanks a lot for this insightful discussion!