Why am I choosing fractional portfolio career over standard employment? And what is it?

In this edition of my newsletter, we're exploring the motivation behind building a portfolio career.

What the heck is a portfolio career?

Portfolio career is when you have multiple clients/projects/streams of income, not just one employer.

What’s the difference with freelance?

Freelancers are usually people who cover one task e.g. design, copy. If you’re a fractional leader, you’re invited to make a change in your area of responsibility (mostly for a few months), and then give this area to somebody you trust.

Portfolio career people usually have other streams of income, like blogs, newsletters, podcast integrations, public speaking gigs.

The biggest example for me is Elena Verna and the various companies whom she helps to grow.

Who can become a portfolio career professional?

Honestly, anybody. If you have any kind of deep expertise that companies/specific people need, you can do it.

You need a high level of tolerance towards uncertainty (it takes lots of time to build a stream of clients), self-organization (you will have to move yourself in terms of tasks). It’s not just ‘working for yourself and having vacations any time you want’. You won’t have holidays at all. But it’s highly rewarding: you work with different clients (= getting different expertise), can do impactful projects, and be a very valuable person in the company. Plus, you can also get additional money from ads or integrations if you’re consistent enough with your content.

Why did I decide to build a portfolio career?

I’m multi passionate which means I get bored easily when working on just one task. I want to explore and switch tasks/industries, so employment cannot really fulfill it. I feel the need to share my knowledge, this is why I’m making this newsletter and Telegram Blog. I just can’t sit in one place. Plus, you might feel that it’s unstable, but it’s the opposite:

If you’re employed and you lose your job, you lose all your income.

If you have multiple clients and one of them leaves, you still have other clients.

How does it look like now?

1. I have a two constant projects whom I work with in terms of marketing and HR.

I’m leading these functions, but not full time. In each of the companies I have a team who helps.

2. I have Telegram blog. I do ads there.

3. I have this newsletter and will focus on paying paid subscriptions.

4. I have career consulting clients (I help people with finding jobs around the world).

5. I have business consulting (I help businesses solve their HR and marketing issues).

6. I have ad-hoc projects (for example, recently I was developing employer branding strategy for 1000+ people company).

7. I’m a partner in employer branding part of the consulting&recruitment company.

8. I teach from time-to-time (internally in companies and externally when being invited)..

In the future I hope to make more money from ads integrations + grow LinkedIn more to get clients from there.

As you see, I’m focusing on different tasks, and this is what keeps me going. It’s interesting, exciting, and very hard. But totally worth it. It gives you freedom, variety, sense of control over what fills up your day.

If you want to know more about my career and how I built it, let me know in comments, I’ll be happy to write more.