Self-paced · Corporate to Solo
The twelve-week course for senior people leaving corporate to build an advisory, consulting or coaching practice. CHF 750. Opens soon, and credited in full against a seat in the 12-Week Studio.
It is not the fear, and it is not the money. Ask anyone eight weeks into their own practice what is eating the week and they will not say strategy. They will say they spent Tuesday trying to work out what to put on an invoice.
You left behind a finance team, a legal function, a marketing department, an assistant and an IT desk. None of them came with you, and every one of those jobs now comes out of the same hours you were going to use to do the work people pay for.
That is why a solo practice used to cap out at the founder's own hours. It is also the part that has genuinely changed in the last two years, and almost nobody teaching this has updated for it.
I built Mayer Advisory after sixteen years in banking. Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse, then head of technology reward at UBS, during the integration. I had spent those years advising senior people through exits and restructures. I still got the first three months of my own wrong, and this course is largely a record of what I would do differently.
Four phases, the same four the Studio runs live. If you go on to a Studio seat, you arrive having already done this.
Phase one
Five things that stop a practice before it starts, checked before anything else. A live non-compete. A permit tied to employment. Equity still vesting. Regulated status. A former employer you intend to invoice.
Then the eight decisions that shape everything downstream, each with a default so you are choosing rather than starting from nothing. And two routes through it, depending on whether you are building before you leave or from day one.
Phase two
Who it is actually for. What you are the person for, stated narrowly enough that somebody can repeat it to a colleague. The offer itself, what it costs, and the money model underneath it.
This is the phase most people skip and then spend a year paying for, because everything after it inherits the decision.
Phase three
The conversations. How a discovery call actually runs when you are the product. The seven objections you will meet, in the words people really use. The proposal, and what goes in it.
Selling is the part senior people find hardest, because nobody has had to do it for themselves in twenty years.
Phase four
Proof when your clients are confidential, which is the position almost everyone from financial services is in and the one no marketing course answers. Delivery. And a map of what to automate later, once there is something to automate.
What this is not. This is building the business. The operations layer, the systems and the automation, is a separate piece of work and it is deliberately not bundled here. In month one you have no clients, so no bookings and no invoices, and there is nothing to automate yet.
Three people arrive here who would be better served somewhere else. If one of them is you, go there instead.
And one thing to be straight about. This will not produce income next month. A practice takes longer than that to pay. The course is built on that assumption rather than pretending otherwise, which is why the first phase is about what is true before you start rather than about marketing.
I am a chartered management accountant, not a tax adviser. The course will frame the choice about how you set the business up and what each route costs you in practice. It will not tell you which to pick, what your tax position is, or what the thresholds are where you live. If that is the question, you need somebody who knows your country's rules, and the course says so at the point it comes up.
CHF 750. It is not open yet, and I would rather say that than take money for something I am still finishing. It opens imminently, and the full 750 comes off a Studio seat if you go on to one.
If you want to be told when it opens, email me with The Practice Room in the subject line. One word is enough. No form, and I will not add you to anything else.