Being a Fractional People Leader with Chris Brown

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Chris Brown. How do you get started as a people leader? Fractional people leader?

Chris Brown:
Yeah. You have some deep reflection time on where you’re going with your life. Maybe you have, like, a mini midlife crisis. I don’t know. For me, it was more. I had an urge. I was thinking, look, I’m at a position now, and this was in different time than where we are now, where the market was still a little bit more buoyant. And I said in the back of my head, I said, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll go and find another full time job.

Said with much confidence, like, who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t have got another full time job, but I had to give myself something, which was almost like a safety net. Obviously, I was talking to my wife as well. I was like, okay, this much money means I’ve got this much time to find something. And I just knew that it was something I wanted to try. I would regret it if I didn’t try it. And then from that, it was a case of having conversations with different people in my network. And for anybody who does this kind of work, everything is really network, network. So especially in the beginning as well.

Yeah, especially in the beginning. And I can’t remember how many conversations I had. I had quite a few. And there were some people as well who say, oh, you know, we’d like to hire you full time. And I was a bit like, oh, you know what? Actually, it’s pretty tempting, but I was like, oh, going in this direction. And in the end, I ended up getting a project, my first project, from. From a connection that actually wasn’t someone who I’d say, excuse me, was very, very close, but rather someone who I’d had a few conversations with in the past. They connected me with someone, had a conversation, and then it just went from there, really.

And that was. Yeah, that was in 2020. And then from there, it was quite a roller coaster ride of just how, how many projects then came, I thought, from, as you say, like, fractional, interim, and then advisory and things like that, to a point where I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I need to actually hire someone now, and, oh, build a team. But I actually didn’t want that. I wanted to keep things manageable. So, yeah, that was my route into.

Thomas Kohler:
I would say, cool. And I had a similar reflection then. And I remember I calculated once for my first job was also five years, really valuable experience. Not for the money, more for the knowledge you got and relationships you built and in depth knowledge as well, because I think if you’re staying there for five years at one company, that is also not going super crazy, but just ambitious. The level of in depth knowledge you get is invalid. It’s really crazy. And from that point, I calculated my hourly rate, and it would be, I think, between five and €6 per hour. What I work there.

And then suddenly my first deal I got was €60 an hour, and I was like, wow. And I think within three months, I was up at €125 an hour. And suddenly it was always happening between 125 and 150 something right in the beginning, and I was not even experienced. I had five, six years experience and just did regular recruitment. Also, the market, I think, changed a bit. So that’s also, I think, a dynamic. And at some point, I also then felt about, okay, I’m so young still. I was 25 back then.

I now want to go the next step and try to build a company from it. And besides doing interim work, I always had recruiters in my network to also join. And then I needed a brand at some point to also make something out of it. And I think, as you said, this not life crisis, maybe, but when you really deeply reflect on how do you actually want to build your life, this is, I think, the important foundation you need to lay down, because it will be tough. It will be hard. There are so many doubts, there are so many uncertainties, there are so many fallbacks. But once you’re making it and you get that momentum, I think nobody wants to go back.

Chris Brown is a fractional people leader and started as a recruiter, went into people ops, led teams at two free companies, and suddenly made the decision to say, no, I want to try this in my life, to go self employed and do interim VP People, Head of People work. And we reflected a bit on why people make this decision or why he made the decision, and also about when to hire somebody or when companies are hiring someone like him. What are the usual problems? And also about financials, about what to consider to just be ready and learn from his experience.

Welcome, Chris. Looking forward to this episode. Because I think we met already in person and then had catch ups. And now we are here talking about fractional leadership as a people leader. But maybe we start with a short introduction about yourself.

Chris Brown:
Sure, yeah. Also, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Short introduction, it’s a difficult one. I always find this difficult. I have to jam pack so much into my introductions because every year you get a little bit older, you do a little few more things. I would essentially boil it down to, I’m now based in Berlin, been here since 2012. I came here, there’s either two reasons why you move. One of them is work, or one of them is, you know, love relationship.

And my wife’s from Germany, an hour southeast of Berlin. So we moved when my boy was about twelve months old or so, like fast forward. Now I’ve got two kids, you know, a dog, now doing fractional stuff. Life’s completely like changed around. But I guess my path to getting here was in the UK. I did really a whole broad range of different positions, which there was kind of a backbone through it, which was even when I was working at UPS supply chain solutions, which was like 300,000 people, to working at some of the smaller startups, there was always this theme of fixing problems, working with people, figuring out what’s going on. And so when we moved to Germany, it was actually my wife who saw the job. In the end, she was like, there’s a job, it’s around music and it’s a startup, and the recruiting thing, you’ll figure that out.

So I was like, okay, cool. Thankfully I got the job at Soundcloud. Started off in recruiting, then worked my way through different positions there. Soundcloud was a great place to be exposed to lots of different opportunities. So I went through the whole kind of people team roles there till the point where been there for five years, thought I need to try something different, and then move to a different company. Went into a more of a senior role there. Figured out after a while that wasn’t for me. Then went to my first VP of people role, was there for a couple of years, and then at that point, that’s when I made the switch over to fractional.

Decision to go into fractional. Yes, it was round about the COVID time. And I would say, what for me out of this learning how this learning was like a lot of people at that time, I think there was a lot of people just burned out from it. There was this whole particular in, in positions where the responsibility is taking, taking care of people in that environment where there’s a lot of uncertainty that’s going on. And at that point it was my first head of people role, or VP people role. And there were so many different learnings anyway, and then we were moved completely remote, and I was working remotely. We had two smallish kids. We were working from a, you’ll probably know what a bow wagon is, but it’s like a small, little, like tiny house, I guess, in the garden of my in laws.

And that was pretty intense. Intense at times. And at the end of it, I was like, I’m done. And it was at that point I was thinking about it then, okay, on the reflection, what are the things that I enjoy doing? Where do I get the energy from? What am I ready to try out? Because actually, prior to that position, I was already thinking, maybe I should go and do something on my own. But I was thinking, ah, one more position, you’ve got more of the scope of the people team, and then do it after that. I’m happy that I went for one more position. It then meant that it was much broader scope that I was responsible for and I’d already gained some really hands on experience in a lot of different topics. And, yeah, that was in 2020 when I first started doing it. Yeah, that was also a step into the unknown as well.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah, definitely. Also during that times, we had a lot of turbulences and headwinds on the market. And what was, what is a bit interesting to me is also your journey at Soundcloud, because I think that was really your first, I would say, fully in depth people role. Right, where you really saw also maybe how good look like or had to build it, or also from different angles because you have been in recruiting and also then people ops. Maybe you can tell me a bit more how the switch came up, because I think that sometimes unusual to go from recruiting to people ops and vice versa, or what is the context to that? Because I think that’s also, on the other hand, a really valuable experience that you really go in depth because usually people jump in maybe one role to different companies, but you stayed there for five years and four months and a lot of things happened there. And I think that’s so valuable if you just have the full context of a company over time, transforming and also tackling different problems from different angles.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I still look back at that as well and think, wow, five years at a company, that’s crazy. I think that’s the longest I’ve ever been at a company. But those conditions there were. Right. I think it was one of those things that people will also know that as well. You know, when you get a company where you.

It’s that opportunity where you’ve got also people who believe in you and the opportunities from that growth phase as well. So I think it was just a bit of like great timing. And I, what I would say is like watching a documentary the other day about this hundred foot wave, you know, like these perfect conditions that you get to ride the wave that felt like my 100 foot wave that I was riding where I first got there. And I moved from Manchester Business school where I was doing a career management advisor position for MBA students. And a lot of that was similar, a little bit of similarity of sitting down and helping them understand. So how do you present yourself companies? How do we build relationships with all these companies to then get these MBAs on board? So there were some similarities, but it wasn’t pure recruiting. But I could definitely add a good idea from a candidate’s perspective, those kind of things. And I guess from that, it was the moment I got there, I was just so.

I don’t want to say like, it wasn’t overwhelmed, it was just so like in awe of this. Wow, I’m working in a startup and like, if I say yes to things and actually, you know, oh yeah, I’ll do that. Or, yeah, yeah, sure, I’ll try that. And that’s all I did. I was essentially, yeah, sure, I’ll try that. Every time there was an opportunity that came up, I was like, yeah, feel good, I’ll do that. Because also I think I felt that there was the culture there that would say, look, if it doesn’t work out, then that’s fine, you know, you’re doing a great job at the moment, but there’s stretch opportunities there for you to do that. And so essentially I was just like, every time an opportunity came up, I was like, yes, definitely having the grounding in the recruiting side of things helped a lot because when I was then switching over and it wasn’t so much straight from ta into the people upside of things.

What I was also doing was I also started managing my first interns there as well. There was also a mixed bag that I had managing interns for the first time. Interns, as you know, can be an interesting case to manage because you’ve only got a short amount of time with them. Sometimes it’s three months, sometimes it’s six months. And also there’s a lot of just getting people on board with, you know, how do you use certain tools and things like that? And from that, then there was, then there was opportunity. And this is after I’ve been doing recruiting from broad non tech recruiting to the more technical recruiting. And then we were focusing more on the people, analytics and technology. And I think it was that bridge as well, where it was like the data side of it.

The data side was a link between the other side of things and the people outside of it. So then you’re able to connect the dots between, okay, this is one part of the employee lifecycle, attraction, hiring, and then the other natural part is what happens. Then we need to start taking care of these new colleagues who are joining. And so I didn’t really have an idea of the HR side of things, but I had some colleagues who absolutely did know that element of it. And they were also very switched on with regards to how do we connect each one of these different employee lifecycle stages as well. Yeah. When that camel card just. Yep, sign me up. Let’s do it.

Thomas Kohler:
Takes also, I think, the right attitude, right, to do that because this can also, I think that’s also really uncomfortable that you suddenly need to also unlearn things, what you did before, and then also be open to something new and maybe also starting with a beginner’s mindset somehow.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does take that as well. I would say maybe that’s not for everybody, but certainly at that time as well. At Soundcloud, we were talking a lot about the growth mindset, and we had people as well who were also doing some kind of trainings on growth mindset as well. I wouldn’t say that because we had the training then that opened up my mind to having that growth mindset. It was rather, the opportunities were there. And in my mind, why would I not, if somebody was trusting me, if they believed in me, then I was thinking, well, I believe in myself as well.

Thomas Kohler:
And why is somebody hiring you now as a fractional people leader? What are the circumstances? And yeah, maybe you can describe the situation a bit, because I think for some companies or individuals, it’s still hard to imagine. So maybe you see a pattern there, what works for you at least.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there’s definitely, I would say now that there is more of an openness to this. There’s still some hesitation, for sure. And even when I have conversations with companies, you know, it doesn’t always work out for whatever reason. They might then find they might then after reflection on it, then think, actually, you know what? We do want to go with that permanent hire because we do want somebody who we can build the culture with from the start, and we’re okay to wait for that in other instances. And a lot of instances where I do work with other companies where there’s a good click between me and the founders or whoever I’m going to be working with. There’s this need of, look, we understand the importance of the people topic. We need to focus on these things to really get the company moving forward.

And after having the conversations or going through an exercise with you, we believe you are the right person who can instantly come in and start addressing some potential issues that we’ve already got or start helping us build for the future. So that when we get, I don’t know, like the 50 person mark or above, we are already in a good place where we’re not going to then start hitting obstacles. And it’s one of those things where it’s typically around the founders who understand the importance of the people topic. They’re kind of self aware that they’re not the expert in it, and they’re prepared to make that investment in somebody who can come in and start to make the changes for them. And that’s also something that sometimes people have this hesitation with, as well as this initial cost of having somebody come in on a fractional basis where the costs do look higher. But what they’re also getting from that is then the breathing space to be able to find that permanent hire that they want and not make a rust rush decision and make progress in many different fronts, not just on the people space, but also in their space as well. So that’s what I’d say people work with me the most, is that kind of like that sense of urgency around what they’re doing.

Thomas Kohler:
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And what is usually then the value you can add when, when entering a company at, let’s say, post 50 people mark, what’s usually what you find and what you do?

Chris Brown:
Yeah. So actually, typically at the moment, what I’ve seen happen is it’s been getting an earlier and earlier stage, which is also great. And I mean that great as in there’s more awareness at an earlier point that the people topic is of such importance, and the founders need to focus on other things. So it really depends. I mean, you can say a 50 person organization, it’s as you would imagine as well, not all organizations are at the same stage at 50 person. 50 people. I was talking to a company the other week where they were at 250 people, and they don’t have, they didn’t have a HRIs, they didn’t have any process in place around performance, performance management feedback. The first level of people managers training those kind of things, to really have that whole support network in place.

So I wouldn’t say there’s a typical case at 50. What I would say is typically what you’ve got is either the founders who’ve been managing everything themselves and are now at that point where they’re really stretched beyond belief, or there’s an existing couple of people in the team, maybe a bit more junior, who started off at the beginning, who have then hit their natural point where they need some external support to help them navigate through things. And some companies have already got things like values in place. Some of them have got some form of structure in place when it comes to hiring as well. Maybe they’ve already got like, okay, this is our hiring process. We’ve got clear steps. We know we’re asking these questions for these reasons. We’ve got some form of onboarding in place.

But as you can imagine as well, a lot of it is, a lot of the time it’s, we’ve done the best job that we can do with information we had at the time, but now it’s okay. We really need to start making this to moving it towards the next level. Yeah, but that’s also what makes it interesting as well, because not all companies are doing exactly the same thing. They’re all facing, of course, the people challenge, but they’re in a different kind of flavor.

Thomas Kohler:
What I see is the biggest blocker is usually inexperienced managers. That is then translating into implications on the people side because I think when there is no cohesiveness on how certain decisions are made in the company, then it can get really wild, especially when the company is scaling. What is your methodology in setting a cohesive management experience within a company when the experience and also the style of management is completely different.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That is one of the classic cases that you see as well, which is where also the first line manager, the first line managers would be basically the people manager level that I would talk about there as well, which is there’s been a lot of, I don’t know, faith trust put in these people and they’ve moved now to the people manager position. And a lot of the time they move to the people banner position, they’re just literally like, okay, you’re a people manager now. You know what to do. I do a great job managing you. You do great job managing them. That’s how it goes.

And of course, the complexity is completely different. Different there. For me, what I would look to do there is really, there’s different ways you can do it, but one, I would say, and this would come back to some form of career framework, which is, you’ll know this, you have the individual contributor path. Individual contributor path, which then is the expert path, so to speak. You know, as someone who is working as a people manager path in a very simple form, those two paths. And on that, you really want to be making sure that you’ve got the right people on the right paths. And when you know that you’ve got the right people on the right path, then you can give them the right level of support, which might come in the form of, okay, we’re going to get all the people managers together. We’re going to give you a playbook, whatever you want to call it.

We’re going to give you best practices of how you can lead the team. We will give you these parameters. So how do you run a one on one? These are the topics you need to cover. Of course, you might ask specific questions relating to the individual team because you tailor it a bit more. But some of the basics and the one on one, I think does drive this a lot, which is how often are you checking in with your team? How are you structuring that? Also, are you spending more time with new joiners who will need more support in the initial stages versus someone who’s a little bit more experienced? So you could say, actually, that person’s fine. I will meet with them every two weeks or three weeks or every month versus every one week, asking things around, how is your development going? What are the kind of things I can do to support you? But again, this needs the bit of the structure from the organization itself, typically driven by the people team or the leadership team, which is giving people a clear idea of this is where you are, this is where you can get to, and then your manager can support you, not give you the answer, you can go there, but rather help you think about how you can get there. And the manager plays the role of the coach, I would say, as well as best as possible. That’s in an ideal world.

That’s where I would kind of level up to getting to. And obviously, you would need the leadership team on board with that because everything role modeled from the top down, you can’t have the first level managers doing all this and then their managers are not doing it. So it’s very, very important that working with the founders, the senior leadership team, that everybody’s on the same page when it comes to this kind of thing for consistency.

Thomas Kohler:
And that company stage really gets expensive because I think first you really need to build this management layer and then it maybe starts a bit lean, as you said right from, okay, you’re now a manager. Suddenly things are not working out again because there is no overall coordination function sitting on top of it that is also interacting with each other, that it’s really building a cohesive system. Suddenly then you need the more experienced managers and you need to hire them from usually outside in. And that’s first of all, usually an expensive hire where maybe startups first time pay more than one hundred fifty k a year in gross salaries. And then suddenly what they need and find is you need a different setup to enable all the first time managers that they can really work at one level. Plus that all my peer functions can be aligned and suddenly you have overhead in the company and that can also take a lot of time to build that. And I think if done right, you can really scale as a company and you can really scale in a healthy way, or not in a healthy way, but in a maybe professional way, and then still things can break. So on the process side, what do you usually look at? That systems are there and that the professionals, managers, employees, the HR function or the people function can do their best work. What usually needs to be there or what do you build?

Chris Brown:
Yeah, yeah. So it’s very much, it’s very tempting to go in with this playbook and say, oh, these are the things I’ve seen work really nicely before. And of course there are some aspects we say, look, this is, this would be a given. So trying to, as an example, everybody running their one on one in this kind of structured way, again, you can have the parameters of as long as these things are covered, you can do in a specific way. But when it comes to the processes side of things, I think also you’ve got to be very, very careful and mindful of the specific stage of that company’s app because you don’t want to start bogging the company down with, okay, now we’ve got all of this internal wiki that people need to read and you’ve got all the rest of the things. I would say it’s good to have that information and you can drip it in over time. But I’ll be very careful about weighing companies down too much. And it’s a little bit like, you know, that if the company is going through a bit of a growth stage, what can you do to really help make things as fluid as possible? So now, for example, and I think this is where some HR teams or people teams get bogged down a bit too much, is to try and fix everything at once or they don’t think through the enormity of what they’re doing here.

So, for example, if you’re trying to introduce a new applicant tracking system, if you’re trying to, and this is a classic as well, introduce a new system that’s going to fix all our problems in some instances, of course, it might do. It might be if you’re managing everything on an email or through notion of something and it’s a lot of manual work, then I would say, okay, that might work. But for me, I never go in and say, right, first thing I’m looking at is the ATS or the HRIs. I will have a look at it and see how bad it is. Is it terrible? Is it causing us problems? If it’s not, I would leave that, but essentially what I’ll be looking for is to say, okay, well, if hiring is a priority at the moment, what are those key components of hiring that are going to make us better? So it might be, for example, are the hiring managers clear about the profile that they’re looking for? Do we have a hiring strategy in place when it comes to what’s the headcount planning? Why are we hiring these rules, those kind of things? And then from that, when people are interviewing, is everybody interviewing roundabout to the same standard? Are we doing debriefs? How are we making sure that the candidates are kept in touch with? Because also you don’t want to lose candidates easily through the process. How we’re making sure that we really assess them for the right things. And then from that the other component would be, okay, so how are we then onboarding them to make sure once we’ve gone through all that effort we don’t lose them? And then how are we involving the people managers on this to make sure that they are aware of their role in all of this as well. So it would be the people manager side of things, keeping in touch with the leadership team and making sure communication is one of the most important things you can be communicating and still specifically focusing on things that are going to move the needle rather than try and fix everything at once.

And then I would be looking at, okay, almost like regular intervals. How are we doing with this? What’s the next thing coming up that we need to target? And it could be then around, okay, well, if we know we’re at this stage now, number of employees and we don’t have any kind of structure in place, and it comes through our people managers who are the main influencers or multipliers within an organization. I would have that on the roadmap and say, okay, we know we’re not going to run out a full program for them, but how can we also layer on what does it mean to be a great people manager at Company X and how can you support your team and what can you expect from the leadership team? So there’s a good flow of information. So for example, the leadership team are very clear about the priorities, what’s happening. They’re in touch with that next level of people managers and that people manager in touch with their people. And there’s a nice loop that goes up. I know there’s a lot of talk of the products that we’re building in the people space and the impact that we can have in so many different areas. I think you really got to look at this case by case and say we’re not going to fix everything at once.

We’re going to focus on the things that are really going to help us. And also my role as well. What I need to be mindful of as well is I’m not building a twelve month strategy like roadmap. That’s not what I do. That just doesn’t make sense because the next person who comes in might come in with completely different ideas. My goal is to create good foundations or a good launch pad that that person then can then come in and say, okay, a lot of the like say, mess has been tidied up and the next person can come in and already, okay, I know now that I need to build this on and this on and this on. So, yeah, it’s a little bit different in my role when it comes to that, but nice.

Thomas Kohler:
And how do you get started as a people leader? Fractional people leader?

Chris Brown:
Yeah, you have some deep reflection time on where you’re going with your life. Maybe you have like a mini midlife crisis. I don’t know. For me it was more, I just had an urge. I was thinking, look, I’m at a position now and this was in different time than where we are now, where the market was still a little bit more buoyant. And I said, hide in the back of my head, I said, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll go and find another full time job. Said with much confidence, like, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have got another full time job, but I had to give myself something which, which was almost like a safety net. And obviously I was talking to my wife as well.

I was like, okay, this much money means I’ve got this much time to find something. And I just knew that it was something I wanted to try. I would regret it if I didn’t try it. And then from that, it was a case of having conversations with different people in my network. And for anybody who does this kind of work, everything is really network, network. So especially in the beginning. Especially in the beginning as well. Yeah, especially in the beginning.

And I can’t remember how many conversations I had. I had quite a few. And there were some people as well, who say, oh, you know, we’d like to hire you full time. And I was a bit like, oh, you know what? Actually, it’s pretty tempting. But I was like, oh, I’m going in this direction. And in the end, I ended up getting a project, my first project, from, from a connection that actually wasn’t someone who I’d say, excuse me, was very, very close, but rather someone who I’d had a few conversations with in the past. They connected me with someone.

We had a conversation, and then it just went from there, really. And that was. Yeah, that was in 2020. And then from there, it was quite a roller coaster ride of just how, how many projects then came afort from, as you say, like, fractional, interim, and then advisory and things like that, to a point where I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I need to actually hire someone now, and, oh, build the team. I actually didn’t want that. I wanted to keep things manageable. So that was my route into it I would say.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas@pplwise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

Cool. I had a similar reflection then, and I remember I calculated once from my first job was also five years, really valuable experience. Not for the money, more for the knowledge you got and relationships you built and in depth knowledge as well, because I think if you’re staying there for five years at one company, that is also not going super crazy, but just ambitious. The level of in depth knowledge you get is invaluable. It’s really crazy.

And from that point, I calculated my hourly rate, and if would be, I think, between five and €6 per hour, would I work there? And then suddenly my first deal I got was €60 an hour, and I was like, wow. And I think within three months, I was up at €125 an hour. And suddenly it was always happening between 125 and 150 something right in the beginning. And I was not even experienced. I had five, six years experience.

Chris Brown:
Yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
And just did regular recruitment. Also, the market, I think, changed a bit. So that’s also a good dynamic. And at some point, I also then felt about, okay, I’m so young still. I was 25 back then. I now want to go the next step and try to build a company from it. And besides doing interim work, I always had recruiters in my network to also join. And then I needed a brand at some point, right.

To also make something out of it. And I think, as you said, this not life crisis maybe, but when you really deeply reflect on how do you actually want to build your life, this is, I think, the important foundation you need to lay down because it will be tough, it will be hard. There are so many doubts, there are so many uncertainties, there are so many fallbacks. But once you’re making it and you get that momentum, I think nobody wants to go back. And I see this in a lot of executive dinners I do that people just don’t want to go into the next management or executive role if they did it already three, four, five times, because they know what to do, how to solve it. But sometimes there are headwinds or politics or some people that make decisions and just don’t decide for certain things or prioritize certain things that at some point you’re just getting, I would say you don’t believe it anymore.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, I can appreciate that. I see that as well. Also to go back to the point of what, what I was thinking about why I wanted to do this was, you know, I’d heard all, when you’re doing an interim, then you can pick your days and you can have more flexibility and, yeah, for sure, with the salary side of things, when you look at this, when you look at your hourly rate and what that’s built out, there’s some discussions you have with companies sometimes or you hear from people like, oh, you know, that’s, that’s a high rate. But then, as you’ll know as well, once you start, okay, 50% of that goes straight away. Then there’s all these other costs that have to happen. Then the realization after I’ve been doing this for a while was, well, when I have a holiday, it’s like I’m paying for it twice because I don’t get paid for my holidays, I pay for the vacation, and I’m missing out on the income when I’m going on vacation as well, which obviously you don’t want to be thinking like that too much, but it’s a bit like those are the realities as well. And sometimes what I found as well is you definitely have these periods where for me, what I see now, definitely a trend is the summer times, the quieter times for sure. And then you’ll find now, round about now again, it’s starting to go up again. And so end of summer, autumn, winter into spring, typically busy times, and then the summer time. So you have to factor that out. So it might look like, yeah, you’ve got higher salary, but then it goes down like that.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely.

Chris Brown:
And I’m not quite sure people who are thinking about it realize that. And. Yeah, but the free, the free having this. So I always said for myself, always said from the start as well, I’m keeping one day of the week free. I want to do that. And that was quite nerve wracking at first. I was like, oh, my God, these companies, they won’t accept that they’ll want me in five days a week. And I did have a little bit of that, but I just was very clear, like boundary setting.

These are the days that I work four days a week, if you want, that can be like, Monday, I’ll be out, Friday, I’ll be out. But those are the days I can, I’m available for you.

Thomas Kohler:
I think that’s so smart, because also from a stability standpoint, you’re not relying on just one account. And then you also have, or maybe sometimes it is like this, but there is a possibility that you can also do just two times, two days a week, for instance, and then you also never have the pipeline problem. And I think what is also important, once you did this, maybe for a few, one or two years, the money you can make with it is really better than being employed, but you need to be careful in managing it. Right. And if you once have the funds just on the bank, for times where you say maybe a longer vacation or maybe a time where a pipeline is not good or the market is not good, I think this is really making you then being able to be comfortable with the ambiguity and with the uncertainty that is there. Right?

Chris Brown:
Yeah, definitely. That was one thing I did as well when I first started out, this, I had one of my pockets and one of my accounts, which was purely for my rainy day fund. It was for more pockets by then. I had one which was for my business kind of needs, and then one which was for, if anything happens and I don’t have a project, I’ve got a couple of months, a few months to bridge that again.

Thomas Kohler:
What was your roughly calculation on how much time of. I don’t know, fixed cost or whatever you want to can run dry. Do you have a formula for that or some, some number?

Chris Brown:
Well, if you ask my wife, she would tell you like six months I need to have there. I’m a bit more like, I would say three months is probably about, probably about fine. And I think that’s the advantage as well. You know, if you got a partner, then there’s some, hopefully some income coming from there. If you’re on your own, then it can feel a little bit more, I would probably say have more money in the bank there, just to be sure. Because also to go back to your point as well, it doesn’t always work out where it’s. I’ve got two different clients at the same time. Back in 20, 21, 22, it was a little bit more like that.

23 wasn’t like that. Parts of this year haven’t been like that. But because it’s also difficult to say, okay, I’ve got a project now and I want to take another one. It’s like, how soon do they want you to take it? Have you got enough capacity? How is it working with their existing ones? So I find that actually really trying to plan for this, your overlap is still one of the trickier things. So I’ve got this client here. How do I overlap? So I can still give what I’ve committed to this client as well as also given to this client and on that, and it depends on their needs. So, you know, I’ve also had that conversation. But for the new client, they needed more from me or they needed something else I couldn’t commit to.

So I couldn’t have that two clients at the same time. So it’s never, you can never bank on it. And then also really the one of the trends I’ve seen as well is you have these periods where it is a bit quieter. You go through this period of, okay, I want to start being a bit more vocal now because when you’re also working for a client, it’s difficult unless you’re working with someone external to do your social media and keep things ticking over, then you suddenly like, oh, okay, I need to get out there and I need to start blasting. I’m here, I’m here, here. And then typically what happens is a few months later or a month later, like three new projects come along at the same time, just like this. Crazy. Yes, timing that happens wherever.

I’ve seen that a few cycles now. So it’s something I’m aware of, but I wouldn’t always bank on it. So you’ve really, you can’t underestimate when you’re doing this as well, how much time you have to put into the networking and marketing side of it. And also, for me as well, the admin side of it. Some days I’m like, shit, you know, I’ve got to do, I’ve got to do these invoices. I’ve got to upload this to dart. If I’ve also got an accountant as well. And then you’ve got the accountant stuff you’ve got to deal with, which, if you talk to my wife, who was originally doing it for me, to now a ton of time, but there’s also a lot of overhead that has to go with that as well.

And if anybody works in this side of fractional as well, still to this day, I’m like, okay, I put this money away for tax and I’ve got my VAT, and then I’ve got all my costs for the accountant, which is like, it’s just like I’ve got this pot of cash. I’ve got a rough idea of what money belongs to who because I keep it there. But it can be quite crazy as well, trying to manage that side of it, because you’ll know you’re paying the prepayments for the Weber Steuer. Are you paying the prepayments for the tax year?

Thomas Kohler:
So the good thing is, also what I like is you can control the money flow, right, in terms of company expenses. Plus also what I just do, I also put away a lot of money, and I know I need to pay that. And sometimes you just don’t know when is the finance, I’m coming. And then since then, you can just lay it on an account and it’s a, giving you dividends, like four or 5% at the moment, right? And absolutely, I was like, wow, cool. That’s paying for the gym membership from that. And that’s really nice.

Chris Brown:
No, that was something as well. For a while I had an account where I wasn’t earning anything on it. And then I think it was trade republic, something like that. I was like, why have I not got my money in there, the tax money? Because I know that’s tax money. I’m not going to put in anything risky. But now the interest rates are good. And then, like you said, yeah, it’s 80 something as well. Exactly.

But yeah, definitely, definitely having a good system in place for making sure that you’re very kind of diligent with that. That’s everyone else’s cash. And this is what I then need for my rolling expenses and those kind of things.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah.

Chris Brown:
That’s also an interesting one as well.

Thomas Kohler:
The problem is, when you’re employed, you don’t have any chance. You just get the net net, right.

Chris Brown:
Yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
And that’s a bit unfortunate because there are so many smart decisions. What you can make by just having the choice. Yeah. But, Chris, we need to wrap up. That’s really a great episode for everybody that wanna do this. Maybe at some point, or just thinks about it. I have a lot of people in my network who do. So listen to that episode. Really valuable. And maybe we can do another one down the road, going deeper.

Chris Brown:
Yeah, sounds good. I love that.

Thomas Kohler:
Thanks.

Chris Brown:
Please. All right, Thomas. Cheers.