Hey everyone, welcome back to The Corporate Escapee podcast! Today’s episode is a special one. I recently had the pleasure of joining Sabrina Romanov on her podcast, where we had an incredible conversation about escaping corporate life, finding freedom, and leveraging tools like AI to build a solo business. Sabrina was kind enough to let me share this conversation with you, and I’m excited for you to hear it

Sabrina's Links:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jf1aa6-w6g
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy9mLEnHHo4UqTYr50vaq2A7L48rJwAwT

Takeaways

• Brett's mission evolved from making money to finding balance.
• AI can significantly enhance business efficiency for solo entrepreneurs.
• There are various paths to escape corporate life, including consulting and fractional leadership.
• Many people have misconceptions about what it means to escape corporate life.
• Building a supportive community is crucial for those transitioning out of corporate.
• Generational differences impact how individuals view corporate work and escape.
• It's important to take the first step and not wait for everything to be perfect.
• Networking and referrals are key to finding clients as a solo entrepreneur.
• You can monetize your corporate experience in various ways.
• Education and community support can help shorten the learning curve for escapees.

Sound Bites

• "How do I get my health back?"
• "TikTok fundamentally changed my life."
• "Time is actually the most important thing."
• "You can be fractional without being full-time."
• "You don't have to have a huge marketing budget."
• "Educate yourself, right?"

Chapters

00:00 The Journey of Corporate Escape

02:53 Finding Balance: Time vs. Money

05:47 Leveraging AI for Business Efficiency

09:02 Paths to Freedom: Consulting and Fractional Leadership

12:09 Common Misconceptions and Mistakes in Escapism

14:5 6Building a Supportive Community

18:11 Generational Perspectives on Corporate Life

21:08 Final Thoughts and Resources for Aspiring Escapees

sole mission at that point was just to make more money. But as I slowly started taking back, having more time in my hands, I'm like, whoa, this is way more valuable. Also, and I've got time, like, all right, I've got time. How do I get my health back? Cause corporate has a way of just kicking the crap out of you and you don't make time for yourself. So anything we can do to help get you out of corporate and keep you out of corporate.

I'm here to help you. name is Sabrina Romanov and super excited today to be speaking with Brett Traynor. He's the founder of the escapee collective and host of the corporate escapee podcast. Super excited to speak with you today. Brett would love to have the audience learn a little bit about your background. Hi Sabrina. Great to be here. Like a big fan of you and your content and you've definitely helped me in my AI journey. The short version is, you know, 20 plus year corporate escaped about four plus years ago. Corporate kind of quit on me, but I knew I was done in.

Over the last almost five years now, it's been a journey of trying to figure out how to monetize my corporate experience. So made a ton of mistakes, but it's been really fulfilling, right? Getting out. There's been some bumps in the road, but now I'm trying to take those learnings over the past four years and help people that are still in corporate, especially Gen Xers.

Yeah, I really enjoy watching your TikTok videos, especially just learning about, you know, decisions that corporate makes and teaching people that you may not want to rely on corporate forever. You may want partial escape plan or a full escape plan, but just raising awareness that that's even an option. Cause I feel like not many people talk about it until maybe it's forced on you or something. And so, yeah, what's your experience been when you said you wouldn't have guessed you'd be in this position? I guess what, what, what, what did you think would happen kind of after you escaped the corporate life?

corporate, wanted to management consulting at the tail end, right? But one, it taught me my market worth. I knew what they were billing me out at, right? And I knew what I was taking home, like, there's a gap in here. And so that's when I exited and my sole mission at that point was just to make more money, right? I'm like, I know I can do this. I want to make more money. But as I slowly started taking back, having more time in my hands, I'm like, whoa, this is way more valuable. Not that the money's not important, but also I've got time, like, all right, I've got time. How do I get my...

help back in order, because corporate has a way of just kicking the crap out of you and you don't make time for yourself. So my mission really kind of changed from just pure income, make more money to finding that balance. There's a line in Shawshank Prediction where it says get busy living or get busy dying. Right. And part of where I really started to figure out, I started living my life again around kind of my terms versus the corporate terms. So.

That's when, to be honest with you, when I started the escapee, the first six months, my last year was crickets. So I was thinking, am I really the only person that cares and wants and knows there's got to be something better out there? But then you had mentioned TikTok and TikTok fundamentally changed my life as far as what I'm focused on, because I found a world of folks out there, Gen Xers that were desperate or looking for, for something better. And so I just kind of ran with it and figured it out as I went along.

You know, what does this look like? We're still trying to figure out what it's going to look like when we grow up, but we're getting smarter with it. love how you mentioned like your initial incentive was money. And I think that's very common. People talk a lot about financial independence, retiring early, but I've kind of shifted away from that term. Now I say time, money, freedom. And I think time is actually the most important thing because it's, it's very finite.

flies by and having the ability to choose what you want to do, the impact that you want to have on the world and in your community, like that is worth so much. And even if you get some time back where you can truly do something that energizes you, give back in some way, it's absolutely life-changing. Love to hear more about that. And also how does AI play a role in your education or in how folks are being able to escape the corporate nine to five? you move from corporate where

your day's pretty much mapped out into a world of chaos when you go solo by yourself, right? Cause there's so many things you can do. And one of the things I did was I over-indexed on structure. Every hour I've got it mapped for five days. Here's what I'm going do that worked for like two weeks. I'm like,

This isn't good work for me. So I ultimately swung it to where I got time blocks where like 6 AM to 9 AM is my most productive time. So that's when I'll do the TikToks. I'll write the articles, the content, anything I need to do from a strategy and development thing. Those are my mornings. And then kind of this timeframe where we're recording is late morning is either client work, community work, those types of things. The end of the day, it's bonus, right? I'll do the emails, whatever else I have to do.

But where I've slowly become much more efficient is with AI. Originally it was just, hey, help me edit this, right? Because I'm super wordy and I just needed a check and balance with AI to put something. So I started feeding it all my podcasts. started feeding everything else. So it really got a better, knew me better than probably I knew me. Right. And it can start to not replace what I was doing, but really hold me accountable to what I was doing.

I now have it structured as a business coach and life coach. So on the weekends, we'll do a 30 minute session, give or take just to review and hold me accountable for it. And it's still evolving. I'm just probably scratching the surface of where I can use AI in the business. But when I launched the community, it probably took me three weeks, what I can do now in an hour, right? With a session to go through and push back. talked.

with AI about the ecosystem of what I'm building with the escapee and talking about the stages of escapism and then do we have solutions and really we didn't have a solution for the end and like a 30 minute back and forth. You we had a pretty, I'd say an 85 % good plan where you iterate, it could be a month and then you're like, whoa, I went too far down. So yeah, it's been a game changer for me. And it's like I said, it's still in the early stages. And how are you finding AI?

on the macro impact corporate escapism. Do you find it accelerating it like out of fear or more out of opportunity? Like people are saying, wow, with AI, now I can actually build my own business solo without having to hire a big team or raise a bunch of venture funding. I was surprised. I don't know about fear because Gen Xers were kind of like, eh, do I want to do this or not do this and I'll figure out a way around it. But the number of people in the community that are actually using some version of AI with what they're doing is,

large kind of surprise. I think people, least GenXers understand the power of it and trying to figure out how to unlock, right? Because we don't need a team, right? We can, we can get by with very specific tools and functions to do this. Cause one of the beauty of being an escapee is it's a solo business. I mean, you can go buy a business, you can do other things, but I talk a lot about monetizing your corporate experience, whether that's consulting, fractional leadership.

creating a small agency, provide services, whatever you want to do for it. But having this tool to help you as a solo business, it's almost like a co-founder when you didn't even know you needed a co-founder, if that makes sense. Yeah, and I imagine for GenXers, because you have decades of workplace experience, you have actual experience with all the typical functions in a company. And I imagine like AI will accelerate you so much faster because you can give better directions because you've been there. You know what good HR looks like. You know what...

product direction looks like. You know all the different perspectives that it takes to like run a successful business, right? From marketing, sales, product, hiring. And so I imagine it's a massive accelerant for the GenX demographic specifically because you have so much industry experience already. Exactly. And that's where I see one of the future opportunities, right? Is even if a GenXer, if I'm not super skilled or I don't want to get become super technical in AI, if I understand it or I can partner with somebody that is an AI guru,

You can fundamentally change the small business space as well, because one of the challenges that they have, they don't have a wealth of sales, marketing, other experience. They've got the founder or the owner that probably did a good job getting customers to a certain point, knows how to sell a little bit. But when you look to expand it.

That owner just can't go and pull a out and say, Hey, give me best sales strategies and marketing strategies, right? It's, going to have to be more nuanced than that. so taking those two to three decades of corporate experience from GenXers, marrying it with AI, I think is a super powerful combination. So if there's any of your listeners that are AI gurus and want to work with me on how do we capture this power, I'm open to it because big corporate is just going to get bogged down in their silos. And there's going to be parts of the organization that figured out.

I think we can build some really high growth companies with very few employees just taking advantage of the tools that are out there now.

Absolutely. And I'd love for you to share with the audience, because I'm sure I have many followers who are interested in escaping corporate. What are the stages you mentioned? You made a list earlier, like starting an agency, doing consulting. Can you kind of like lay out what some of the real options are? Because I know a lot of people listening, you know, want to do their own thing. So what are some tangible paths that they could take? And maybe if you could differentiate between people who are earlier on in their careers, did those paths look different from the paths you recommend for a Gen Xer who has

has a lot more career experience.

is what I would call the established escapees, right? They've been out for a few years. kind of got it figured out, but there's ways to do it better. again, optimize, how do I get more time back, make more money, stop trading time, all that good stuff. so again, ideally you get to the, the mature established and then you can, then it's just.

How do I make things a little bit better? But I think as far as opportunity, corporate quit on me, I was kind of done with it. So it was mutual. I didn't have a plan. And so hindsight, I would have definitely had a little bit more of a hedgey leaving it. I figured I could consult because I was doing a lot of the sourcing of the consulting deals and closing. So I figured I could do that. But over the course, I realized that's not what I want to do.

That wasn't your question. So back to it, think small businesses have been hungry for experience, but they can't afford it unless you're in a VC that's got operators that can come in and help these startups that raised a ton of money. But 99 % of the businesses don't raise money. So how do they get access to somebody that was a VP of sales at a high growth SaaS company? They don't.

They can't afford it, but with fractional, now all of a sudden they do have access to one of these executives on a part-time days. I like to take it even further back. so if you're listening to this, think about the problem that you're solving in corporate today. It could be CRM, it could be data, it could be finance. I don't care what your job is. You're solving a specific problem.

Think about how you could solve that problem for a small business, because they're going to have that. And the one thing I caution everybody, if you've been in big corporate for a while, small businesses need the foundational help. They need the basics, the blocking and the tackling and the setting things up. And I think the easiest way to do that is to productize a service and say, like I said, if you're a CRM person on a monthly basis, you could charge a service where you'll come in and clean all the data.

whatever that looks like, have a one hour meeting with the sales team or marketing team, whoever is responsible for the day. And you charge four grand per month. And it's just repeatable, those types of things. Cause one of the clear paths is fractional leadership, which I know you're familiar with, but you can't do that while you're still in corporate, right? There's just too many hours. There's no reason why you can't set up a service to small business and position it as giving back to the small business community. So your company can't say.

It's a conflict of interest type thing. know that's a huge worry with a lot of folks and you could do it for free if you want, or as a mentor to these small businesses. And even if you just want to get started with content, even if you're not going to start selling, just share all the lessons that you've learned in your business world, but target towards your audience, the small business audience say, Hey, if I was starting a small business, here's the 10 things that I would focus on in this area. Just so you start getting your story, then one, if corporate quits you.

you've already got the foundation or two, you're starting to build that little side project business that then you can convert to full time when you want to and or if you're forced to. So could you explain the difference between fractional versus consulting? I fractional is in your term. Do you differentiate the two? How does it fit in positioning or even pricing? Both, think. So the way I look at consulting, it's usually project based. So fixed fee, fixed time. Usually you're coming in to do X, Y, and Z and it's going to cost you.

acts to do this. Fractional, you'll get slightly different definitions from folks, but I look at it as a leadership position within a small business, just not full time. So for example, some people will tell you you have to be a chief marketing officer, chief sales officer, something like that. That's not true. I'd look at it, any small business that needs some leadership help, something set up within that organization, you can be fractional. And the good rule of thumb is eight to 10 hours per week with that small business. So you're not full time to them.

but they may not need a full-time position yet, right? So you're providing the strategy, the leadership, some oversight within that. So you become a part of that team. And the beauty of it is if you can get these roles, is they cut out all the other crap. Because they're paying you pretty good money to do this. So they're not going to include you any of the non-value add type meetings or the non-value add type projects. So it's a really great transition. It's just a little bit harder to find small businesses, one that know what...

fractional is, two, if they need fractional, and three, sell them on the value, which is absolutely there. That's why I go back to what is that problem you're solving? And there's multiple ways you can do it to help that business from a few hours a month to all the way up until fractional. So I think if you take the approach as a problem solver that you're charging a fee for versus a product that you're selling, it's a much easier transition, at least mentally it is.

Okay. So to recap, so we talked about fractional consulting as well as content. I obviously like content. I encourage that for a lot of folks just to even figure out what it is they like and to find their voice because it takes quite a bit of reps, like quite a bit of content production until you kind of figure out what it is you want to say, what niche you want to focus on. I wanted to ask though, for many people who are kind of hesitant to jump in, have you seen folks kind of jump in and then they hit a dead end? They were maybe expecting it to go one way. Didn't quite go that way.

And they're kind of like, what do I do next? Does that happen often in terms of expectations people have about escaping and then what is reality? And then how do you course correct from there if expectation did not meet reality? I do caution people. say, I'll give you what I think this standard timeline is. And then we'll can dig into some of the specifics when people get started. I look at it within the first six months when you're on your own, you should find some success, whether that's your first customer or your

couple of customers, you don't have it figured out at this point. And you may not be charging enough for what you're doing for these customers, but you've got a taste of success. I think at the end of the first year, if you keep building off that, your run rate at the 12 months should be equal to what your corporate salary was. Some people do make it back super quick, but it's not the norm. But by that 12 months, you should be making enough going forward that you've replaced that corporate income. And then by year two, you'll have a, at least for me, I had a confidence level that I'm not going back.

I may not have it all figured out, but now I know how to make money. I know how I can do these things. And I may pivot, which I've pivoted probably six or seven times over the course. But I know that corporates, I'm not coming back into, to corporate. So I think it's people, I don't know if they have a false sense of what they can expect, but we also do a lot of the wrong things early on, or we get hung up on the wrong pieces. It's just a matter of sticking to your conviction. And you would think that extroverts would be the favored.

And this is not the case. And some of our most successful early escapees are introverts, right? They don't necessarily like the networking or some of the content, these things, but they figured out how to do it the most efficiently and most effectively. So, so if you're out there and you're an introvert.

There's definitely room out here for you. I love that. And I imagine having a community or being part of a community might help stabilize some of the highs and lows and just having real world examples of people to talk to. Could you talk more about the community? How is it helping folks? How is it structured and how can listeners?

potentially join the community if they're interested in escaping corporate. Yeah. You know, it's funny when I left, I don't think I told anybody for like two years that I left corporate. That was the biggest mistake I made, right? Cause it's not like I was protecting anything. Just maybe it was more of the fear that he's going out on his own. What does he do when he's not starting a company? So I couldn't tell you what my mindset, why. And it's really support, right? That's the one thing that I've found is it's just a positive place. I don't know if we've been

You've got somebody just behind you, right? So you're kind of leading that person. Somebody you're on, you're going through the exact same journey, you're at the same stage and somebody slightly ahead of you. So you're always learning is perfect. And that's where I think this community comes in handy. Cause we do have people that are like still not sold that they can pull jump out of corporate. Yeah. I was going to ask that. it open to folks who haven't decided just want to learn more? Yeah. And that's what I said, the education's free. Come on in, right. And if you come in for a couple months and see.

you're still welcome to come back whenever, because we know everybody's journey is different and we take you a little bit of time and we'll get smarter and provide better tools. And one of the things that we're really focused on for this year is the educational piece for those curious escapees of how do you think about it from a financial standpoint, right? What about taxes? All these things that you don't have to worry about when you're in corporate, because they're kind of take care of, but there's some real advantages if you do this, right? How do I set up the company? Do I need to set up a company? I just go to insurance?

Yeah, all of that. So we're, we're getting fried a lot more tools just for the free. Come in, learn, educate yourself. You may say this isn't for you, a hundred percent fine. But if you go, then we'll start, you know, putting some more tools to help accelerate that. So you don't have the two year learning curve that I have. can shorten. There's some of the stuff you just can't avoid. You're going to have to learn and figure out, but we can help you avoid a lot of the main mistakes. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. So what are some of the main most common mistakes or misconceptions about escapism?

think it doesn't, one thing when I was in consulting, had a guy who's still alive or he's still in consulting. He used to tell me all the time, he's like, Brett Dunn's better than perfect. And I think we get way too hung up on having all the details, right? All the I's dotted, T's crossed. I need to have the perfect offering and my website needs to be done before I have a conversation with a potential client. No, just go take the first step, have the first conversation. Cause what you'll find with these small businesses, they're open to share. They need help.

And just establishing the relationship is going to get you there versus over again, making sure everything's perfect and having the website. had early on one of our more successful escapees. didn't have a website or a name for her business for over a year, right? she had already doubled her corporate income without any of it.

You're like, well, maybe now is a good time to do it because that's the other thing. If you're out there thinking about this is you don't have to have a huge marketing budget because for most of us to replace that corporate income, it's two or three clients, right? You're not looking for 50 or a hundred and almost 90 % are going to come through network and referrals. So it's having conversations like this and just creating awareness. And it's really is a lot of people helping people that again, it's good to have your process and your thoughts.

articulated, but nothing beats just getting started. And it's very different when you're building a company, you've raised VC funding, you have a sales team, you need marketing to fill the funnel with like thousands and thousands of leads every single week. And it's like a monster engine. You're trying to feed and trying to grow as fast as possible to like a massive outcome. But when you're talking about just being solo, a couple hundred thousand per year.

an annual income is plenty. It's a very different mental model because most people in corporate are used to that idea of like the big machine we have to feed all the time, nonstop. And that's just not the case when you're talking about going solo, working for yourself, as you said, just finding a couple really good clients that are long-term.

And then they'll refer you into a couple of others. And all of a sudden you've got a good, like networking with intention. just had something on the podcast not too long ago and it was really, it's smart. I need to get better at doing some of those things. Right. And the other thing I'll share with folks that are still in corporate is in corporate, it's kind of every person for themselves, right. The promotions company jobs here, it's people really can work together. And the example I use, we've got two classic marketers, CMO-ish type.

Both had 15 to 20 years of industry experience. Both went into consulting on partner tracks. Both got burned out and went in. So you would think that they would be competitors. on paper they looked the exact same, but what happened by accident, they both had a mutual, a shared contact that was looking for help. And they said, well, why don't you work with each other on this deal?

They got together and now all of a sudden they've got a partnership. So they'll go after together, they'll go after bigger deals that they can work on together, but yet they still have their own little solo practices. And the beauty of that is if one's busier, it's not quite right. They can refer it to the other person. So in the world, corporate world, we're caught as competition. Literally you can have the exact same backgrounds and you can grow together as not partners, but close to partners, right? That it's just a different world. And do you view yourself as a problem solver? You can be successful as a solo.

Is it for everybody? No. But do I think everybody can do it? Yes. Yeah. And so for those who are curious to learn more, what would be your main message for kind of the top of the funnel learning about this for the first time or slightly daydreaming about it, but it just doesn't feel real. It just doesn't feel like it could ever happen. What would be your message to folks who are curious? Yeah. Educate yourself, right? Because I'm trying to help everybody get out of corporate.

But if there's a specific path, for example, like if you do want to pursue fractional or if you want to pursue consulting, there's communities that are focused specifically on those pathways. And I'm more than happy to introduce people into that. I'm happy to have conversations with folks. What really started this was I was offering free 20 minute strategy sessions with GenXer to say, is life outside of corporate? I didn't have any offerings. didn't have a Q and A.

But I had like 300 people sign up to have this conversation. And that's really how the community started because I just wanted to house these folks so could have future conversations with people. it grew. Again, yeah, I won't sell you anything. If you want to stop by the community or connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to have conversations with anyone.

right now and just, you know, try to get this message out. One last thing I'll mention when I first started, almost all of my messaging was replace your corporate income through monetizing your corporate experience. But what I'm finding a lot of, and even the path I am now is the coaching and the teaching. Almost all these Gen Xers that have started their monetization process also have some followers coming along in a different path. And they almost enjoy that more than.

the monetization work, if you will. And so their passion now is starting to grow out these mini communities. So I was surprised. I didn't realize that was my calling, if you want to outline it that way. But yeah, that's definitely another path. And you'd probably know this while you can teach people is if you're slightly ahead of anybody, right? They're, they're going to be curious, right? So even if you have 15 people in a community, you can make that your business if you want. amazing motivation too. Once you have even a little community, you kind of feel that.

accountability to like keep learning, keep sharing what you learn. And that's what motivates me. just keep learning, then I share it. You know, a lot of people ask me about like my process, but it's, it's really not more calculated. Learn stuff I think is cool and interesting, and then share it with other people who are probably interested in learning too. What are some ways that you're noticing your community using it to get over that hump of finding their first clients?

And are they also using it to scale up? Just starting to see some of the scale up. think it's a little early or at least I haven't been exposed to folks that are doing that yet. But every time I have a conversation like, yeah, that's what I am doing. So there's, there's a lot of stuff going behind the scene. I think it starts with the content first helping with content, but where I'm starting to again, teach where I'm learning it is the advisory. What's the thought partner, somebody that can challenge kind of your co-founder, if you will, on strategy, strategy, guess is the biggest one and tactics.

And then research, I use chat, GBT, the pro for most of my one-on-one and bouncing ideas off, but I use perplexity if I have to go a little bit deeper into stats and make sure that it is providing the right stats for me as I want to do some of the research into these marketplaces. And so I think those are the first two places people are going. And again, this isn't my, Zapier was a number of years ago. It just fundamentally makes sense, but I never was that person to technically understand it. So it can be.

I'm probably more advanced now in AI and I'm still up in the newbie range of this, but being able to take something like Zapier with AI and just build process and organization around it is where I think that's the next step. So I see some of our process folks that have been focused on Notion, trying to use Notion to pull it in, but I think the other path is to with AI and build it this way. So I think we can create little operating systems for solo business owners because a lot of people get wrong is they want to go too deep. One of my...

10 golden rules is you get that 20 % right across four or five things, your business is going to go like this. But yet we get so bunkered down into just one aspect to try to get it to 90 % that we completely lose sight. So again, as tools start to develop or wrappers around the AI helping in the, know, the, the fundamental pieces is going to be a game changer, right? All of us are doing it. That's really funny. You mentioned workflow automations because my last newsletter, I put up

hole at the top asking, what kinds of like gifts or rewards would incentivize readers to share my newsletter? And it wasn't even close. Number one was AI automation blueprints. So like hundreds of people want automation blueprints for their small business, figure out how to automate tedious processes. And it's, one of those things where I think the education around that area has matured.

Everyone's kind of heard of Zapier or Make or similar platform, and you kind of know that it can automate a bunch of stuff, but there's still a really big gap. Like the average business owner is already way too busy to sit down there and like fiddle around with Make automations and like build them from scratch. They kind of just want like a plug and play system or someone else to architect everything so that it's custom fit for their business, but it automates like all of these key processes.

And so I see a massive opportunity there. it was just funny you mentioned that, cause I just saw the data come in this morning. It's like, oh, okay. Everybody wants AI automations apparently. It's true because I think there's a whole service industry around this, right? Where even if you want 10 or 20 solopreneurs, escapees, whatever you want to call them to help do that. Right. Because I'm, as I'm looking to automate more. So I want to do this weekly session with the, new life coach as I've review everything, but I can't figure out how to make the,

Reach out to me on Saturday morning, right? I've still got to remember and put in my calendar. So I'm just using as a micro example of where if somebody can come in and not build a one size fits all platform, but be able to provide a service that, Hey, give me office hours on a weekly or a monthly basis to say, Hey, I want to integrate my AI with my calendar. Maybe with email, these five things come in and help me do this. I'll pay you a retainer to do X, Y, and Z. Again, you're probably not going to build.

Google or Facebook with it, but you could do this in 30 minutes and get your charge me for three hours of work in the sense of where I'm going to get the benefit from it. And you get five or six accounts all of a sudden you could. So I think can GenX do this? Absolutely. That's somebody that wants to take on and learn AX it is, it seems like it's really far down the road, but it's still in its infancy, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of hyper on, I guess what they're calling it AI automation agency.

And I know a lot of people are trying to get into it, but to me, it makes the most sense if you already have decades of industry experience, because you understand how the different functions work together. Like I'm not saying, you know, if you're brand new, you can't be successful, but I see a ton of value if you already know what it's like for a CEO to run their busy schedule, what the expectations are for HR, what the expectations are for the CRM. Like there's massive advantage there, the tribal knowledge that you've accumulated.

over decades in corporate. And so I see a massive opportunity there. I just made a TikTok video the other day asking, maybe I should make an automations library where that's totally free. It just compiles like a bunch of automations that you can then just grab it and then tweak it for like your custom use case, your custom business. Yeah. I think it makes, makes a ton of sense. Some of the knocks on GenX is right. Technology challenge. I'm like, the fact is we grew up in the workplace with all the technologies. They didn't exist when we started. And so we've managed through everything.

Do we know how to program everything? No, but do we understand the impact on the business? A hundred percent. So that's why I tell Gen X, go take advantage. said, think leveraging that expertise that you have, you you've earned it. Might as well go cash in on a little bit of it because you know, Gen Z is not going to have that business experience. Yeah, exactly. I say that all the time and it's, it's funny because I, talked to a lot of tech people as well. And like the thinking is, well, AI is an amazing tool that you still need expertise to guide it. Right. And like that's where Gen X comes in.

an amazing job and you're helping a lot of people. A lot of people I know are feeling stuck. I'm a millennial, I'm in thirties, but I'm seeing it in my demographic, in my friend group as well. Just people wondering if there's another path, right? And maybe they don't completely switchcorp. Maybe they just go to a smaller company, whatever that looks like, but escaping from...

something where you're not fulfilled and you're entirely dependent on income. Maybe just to close off on that, the different generations, right? I wrote a piece, we'll see if anybody picks it up on, you one of the things that fundamentally changed in corporate was the pensions, right? And Gen Z, may have millennials, what the hell's a pension?

Believe it or not, corporate used to pay, right? If you worked there for 15, 20 years, for the rest of your life, you're guaranteed a salary, right? Which again, in corporate, that makes sense. Us as Gen X, we followed the boomers into the corporate world. Really a clear understanding of how we were going to pay the bills at the end of the, when that clock ran out. And we write, so you got the 401k, you can manage it yourself. It's a benefit. No, because that's a fixed amount. So if the average American Gen Xer has 600k, which I think is high for a 401k.

I live another 30 years, I gotta make that $600k last 30. That's not very much. So to your point on millennials, I think they followed Xers into it, but they're more skeptical, right? They're already seeing like, this end game isn't gonna work out very well. And Gen Z is like, it's a transaction, right? If I'm going to work for this company, you're gonna pay me, I'm doing eight hours, I really don't wanna come into the office, but pay. So I think they've got it kind of figured out. And now as Gen Xers, we're trying to figure out how do we make, not the last stand, but...

take care of ourselves where we just didn't. Sounds a little morbid, but it's true. mean, good healthcare and those types of things. Yeah, we could be here to healthy 100. So yeah, enough money to live to a hundred. Most Gen Xers that are in corporate probably don't. And on that note, yeah, where can folks find out more about you or your community? Where can they join? If you search the Corporate Escapee, you'll probably find some knockoffs and taxidermy careful. it's there, you can find me on LinkedIn and or email is just bt at bretttrainer.com.