How I'm building my Portfolio Career [#51]

This is the fourth part of an (at least) 4-part email series, published over the next weeks about the topic of the Portfolio Career. 

• Chapter 1: What is a Portfolio Career?
• Chapter 2: How do you build a Portfolio Career? 
• Chapter 3: The Three Steps towards Multipreneurship
• Chapter 4: How I’m building my Portfolio Career (You are here)

This post relies heavily on the framework introduced in Chapter 2: How do you build a Portfolio Career?. Read it before you dive in.

[1] Product

When I first launched my newsletter, I asked everybody I knew what they think I’m exceptionally good at. I also looked into messages that I had received in the past asking for my advice, things that I’ve consistently gotten positive feedback on, and tasks that tended to find me in my previous jobs. The outcome was a huge clusterfuck. 

What I’m good at 

• Being hyperproductive and managing my time (this was - by far - the most common response)
• Building systems and processes
• Writing
• Selling
• Motivating others
• Doing push-ups 
• Leading and managing teams
• Identifying business opportunities
• Hiring teams, both in terms of selecting the right people and motivating them to come work with me
• Getting shit done fast 
• Foreign languages
• … 

NB: This doesn’t serve the purpose of praising myself. There’s a - probably longer - list of things that I suck at.

(Which is also important to understand, as it informs what you should outsource right away.)

What kind of advice people look for from me

• Career advice
• Startups 
• M&A
• Productivity & Time Management
• International Expansion
• Content Creation
• Fitness & Injury Prevention

Tasks that always find me

• Leading teams
• Organizing stuff (travel, events, …)
• Negotiations 
• Running and managing cross-functional projects

Hm. Okay. I won’t make a living doing push-ups, I can tell you that.

But this experiment already revealed a variety of roads I could take. 

Since I was already writing a lot, the content gave me a good platform to test a variety of hypotheses.

For example, I figured “international expansion for startups” would be an interesting topic, so I started writing about it. The audience was rather small, but the few people who were interested were very interested.

So not a mass market product, but a tailored service that I can provide. Which lead me to do some International Expansion consulting on the side. 

Productivity content, on the other hand, performed quite well and that’s what most people associated with my newsletter. So I picked “Personal Productivity” as the first topic for the solopreneur stage - and created an online course about it. A better “mass market” product, if you will. 

Lastly, I knew I needed to get back into entrepreneurship to scratch my itch of building businesses. The combination of having a network in startups, the ability to sell, and the ability to select and attract outstanding talent then brought me to my newest venture: Generalyst Recruiting - a company that places early-career generalists in startups as Founder’s Associates or similar generalist roles. 

So now that I have this clusterfuck of businesses, how do I acquire customers for my Portfolio Career? 

[2] Marketing

What’s kind of cool is that all of these business nurture each other: 

• You read this newsletter
• You might decide that you want to improve your Personal Productivity - so you sign up for my online course 
• Next time you look for a job or are hiring, you might reach out to me

Or vice versa: 

• A candidate applies to Generalyst
• They become a subscriber
• And maybe do business with one of my other companies in the future

The entire marketing strategy revolves around this email list. People either find my products & services through my email list, or my email list through my products & services. All of the social media stuff that I do really is just marketing for the email list. 

Of course, that’s not enough. I reserve time every week to do warm or cold outreach, and run paid ads for both the online course and the recruiting company. All of Hormozi’s core four of lead generation are humming. 

Refresher:

Fundamentally: 

• Every day, create content
• Every day, reach out to people
• Every day, run paid ads 

And then watch the flywheel turn faster and faster. 

Now, this is all fun and games, but … how do I run this operationally with only 24 hours in a day?

Good f**king question. 

[3] Operations

This is what a typical day looks like for me: 

• 08:45 - begin work, write for one hour
• 09:45 - quick break
• 10:00 - deep work for 2 hours on whatever the biggest problem I have is 
• 12:00 - check communications, answer most urgent messages
• 12:15 - hit the gym and/or go for lunch
• 14:00 - do as many business meetings as possible or needed within the next 3 hours. Use spare time to send emails and answer comms, or work on shallow stuff. Right now, that's mostly interviewing candidates for Generalyst.
• 17:00 - tackle urgent to-dos from the day, plan next day. 
• 18:00 - finish work (or throw in another hour of deep work if I feel like it)

The key points here are:

1. Protecting the morning: I don’t take any meetings or check any communications before noon, which allows me to focus and work super deeply. 
2. Same structure every day: By maintaining the same structure, my workday becomes predictable for both myself (routines are good) and others. 
3. Not wearing oneself out: Of course there are all-nighters at times, but mostly, this schedule maintains my energy. 

I also don’t work on weekends, except for the occasional 2-3 hours on a Saturday if I feel like it. 

As of right now, I don’t have any employees, but my first hires will be: 

• A virtual assistant 
• A founder’s associate (if I'm placing them in companies, I also gotta walk the walk)
• A social media manager 

(Know someone that would fit the bill? Would love an introduction.) 

Since it’s just me, I need tools - and a lot of them. A few of the most important ones are: 

• Motion for task scheduling and planning
• Notion as wiki, knowledge base, and content management tool
• Kit for sending out emails and building custom marketing flows
• Carrd for creating landing pages
• Thinkific for hosting my online course and the billing associated with it
• Senja for automated testimonial collection
• Pipedrive as CRM and ATS
• Tella to record beautiful videos
• Apple Notes for literally everything else 

I could definitely upgrade my tool stack - my email structure isn’t great right now, the websites are haphazard at best, and my Notion is a mess. But it’s working just fine for now. 

The bigger the Portfolio Career becomes, the more systems will be necessary. 

[4] Finance

Lastly, finances need to be managed. I’d love to speak to this, but can’t really tell you more than the fact that I track everything in a set of spreadsheets - which works for me.

These spreadsheets have both individual plannings for each venture, as well as a consolidated cashflow model for myself privately. Probably not the most sophisticated solution (and happy about input here!), but gets the job done for now. 

What’s important is to track your finances in the first place. :) 

That’s how I’ve set up my portfolio career. 

It's a work in progress, but I hope this gave you some inspiration on how to eventually design yours.

Question for you:

After reading all this –

1. Which questions are still open for you?
2. What next steps will you take to launch your Portfolio Career?

Thanks for reading.

Whenever you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:

1. Personal Productivity OS: double your output and your free time with 14 proven systems in less than 3 hours.
2. Generalyst for Candidates: the career accelerator for those who don't want to specialize (yet). Apply today, find your next startup jobs within weeks. EU only.
3. Generalyst for Startups: hire A+ generalist talent within weeks with zero risk.

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