If you know corporate is broken but jumping straight into solopreneur life feels like too big a leap, this episode is for you.

Brett breaks down how to treat your “escape plan” like an insurance policy—not a dramatic leap off a cliff. You don’t have to quit your job tomorrow. But you do owe it to yourself to be prepared for the moment corporate quits on you… or you finally hit your breaking point.

Instead of trying to convince you to go all-in on a solo business, this episode walks you through how to build a plan you can keep in your back pocket—so you’re not starting from zero if things go sideways.

Download the FREE Starter Kit

Join the Collective

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why the gap is so big between people who know corporate is broken and those who actually take action
• How to think like a “prepper” (without going full doomsday): planning so you don’t have to plan in the middle of chaos

Step 1 – Define what you actually want

Step 2 – Get clear on your financial reality

Step 3 – Take inventory of your skills and energy

Step 4 – Shift from job title to problem-solving

Step 5 – Reframe your current employer as just one client

Also:

• A simple formula to value your time

• Annual salary × 1.25, then drop three zeros → a shockingly accurate baseline hourly rate

•. Why many escapees replace their corporate income in ~20–25 hours per week

• Why you don’t need 100 customers

• How 2–5 good clients can replace (or exceed) your corporate pay

• Why most of those opportunities will come from networking and referrals, not job boards

Who this episode is for

• You’re still in corporate, you know the system isn’t built for you, but you don’t see a clear path out
• You feel stuck between “I hate this” and “I don’t know what else I’d do”
• You’re curious about going solo, but the idea of just quitting and “figuring it out” feels reckless
• You want a practical, low-risk way to prepare now, so you’re not scrambling later

Welcome back to the Corporate Escapee podcast. I'm your host Brett Trainer. And today's episode is for you folks that are out there in corporate know it's absolutely broken. Probably know that it's not right for you, but leaving or going solo as I talk about quite a bit is just too far of a leap. And one of the things that I've realized over the past, I don't know, a few weeks, month or so.

is that the gap from folks that know it's broken to the folks that are actually taking action is extreme. And I think one of the mistakes I've made is just talking of going straight from corporate and then into an escapee solopreneur where you're running your own solo business. Do I think you can? You 100 % can. And I exited corporate or corporate exited me six years ago and I didn't have a plan. And that's one of my...

I know if say regrets, because it's worked out. I've learned. But if I would have had a plan, a process in place heading into when corporate quit on me, I probably would have saved myself two, three, four, maybe even up to six months. I had some success, but I was figuring everything out on the fly. I had no real other ideas other than I was in consulting, so I figured I'll do the same thing.

And it just, again, over time, I thought through what is the ideal process for me. But instead of trying to convince you that even though you know, corporate's broken and taking that leap is I think a good first step, just having the plan, right? I came across a TikTok video. I know it's going to be surprised, but if you guys aren't following me on TikTok, you should. I think we've just crossed 77,000 people.

which is insane. But because I do record, I end up going down some rabbit holes on occasion on TikTok. And one of them was doomsday preppers, which I'm not. It does make me think I should be better prepared. But what it got me thinking about is kind of the same thing. We all know that if things go sideways, we should have a plan, right? In what I found from these...

experienced preppers is they're not planning for the worst. They're just planning so they don't have to plan if there is chaos. And that's my long-winded way of saying we should absolutely have a plan, right? So if you're a stone corporate, you hate it, you're resentful, you don't know what the path forward looks like. Are you going to get laid off? These types of things instead of going out and having those first conversations with business owners, it's just build a plan.

And what I think that will help you with is one, gain some confidence that if you do get laid off, you're not starting from scratch and you take some time, right? Think through the process, but you don't have to start from zero, which is a huge benefit. Plus it can build some confidence as you go through the process. And the third one I would say is you may actually like this as you start putting some time and effort into it, that you can see that future and make that change.

when you want to not when corporate wants you to. So in this episode, call this a micro episode still, it's really about getting prepared. It's thinking through the process. And part of it is educating yourself that understanding solo preneurship and I don't care what you label it. it's I've been using escapee solo preneurship because I like to talk and encourage folks about leveraging their corporate experience or personal experience to.

Go make some money, right? You've earned it. You've had the time. You understand you have the expertise. There's no reason why you can't go do something brand new, reinvent yourself, et cetera, et cetera. The one thing that I have found with 90, 95 % of the folks is everybody still has a financial responsibility. So if you've been in corporate, you two years, three years, four years, up to four decades, most everyone I know isn't ready to hit the retirement button.

even if they could, there's still a financial component. What I have learned is everybody's goals are different, right? One of the things that really sealed this for me was a new mom, right? I think she's 30, 31 years old, was looking at, her first baby, had a maternity leave and then went back to work and just found, you know, when you're, you don't have kids, corporate.

may not work for you, but when you have a new board, maybe it really doesn't work for you. And, but she was stuck there. She didn't see a path forward, other than trying to find a different corporate job and in this environment that that's crazy. So anyway, just a little context of, why I'm sharing this episode. And you're going to see me put a lot more effort and resources because one, everybody that's in corporate, your value outside of corporate is so much higher than it is in corporate.

You know, I talk all the time that corporate has completely adopted the profits over people playbook and it just an unfortunate reality. I know a long time corporate folks will tell me it's always been this way. And I would agree to an extent, but it's become when layoffs become a business strategy, not a last ditch effort. The times have changed and folks clinging to hope that they're doing a good job.

reviews there maybe that next promotion or the next opportunity is the one that gives them what they're looking for it's just not there and I see this time and time again people just unhappy resentful miserable in many cases doing with their corporate role but again that leap to solo business owner solopreneur is is a path too far even though I think it's more perception than it is reality

That's what perception is, is reality, right? So if you think it's too far, you're probably not going to take the steps or the efforts to go start that business. So like I said, with this episode, I want to highly encourage you just to start the planning process. And it could be as simple as, one, you don't have to have a conversation with people in your network. You can if you want. But I would encourage you to, there's three things that I would look at. The first one is really sit down.

and think about what you want and not just today, right? I don't want to be in this corporate job, but 10 years, 10 years is a good goal. So if you're 30, what do you want when you're 40? When you're 40, what do you want in 50? And kind of map out what that ideal looks like. Cause I can tell you from my experience when I was in corporate, I never did that, right? It was paycheck to paycheck. And the only thing I was looking at is where's that promotion and can I get to that next level? Right? Can I get to the C suite? You get to the C suite in corporate.

big companies you're gonna be just fine but that's like winning the lotto right it's there's just not that many of those seats and most people just work and work and work and never get to that point so so take some time really understand what it is that you want and map it out right so what is it gonna take to get there in ten years right and then work backwards five years one year six months so you can go as detailed as you want

I didn't do that even after I left corporate. My sole mission was to make more money. I want to make more money, prove them wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Money is still important, but I discovered free time or extra time owning my time. Health and fitness became a priority again. It just became much more balanced once I got out of corporate. And it's OK if that 10-year plan changes. But I think thinking through what does your life look like in 10 years, and one is corporate

your corporate job going to get you there. I'm gonna argue probably not because you probably won't be in it in 10 years. You may be doing something else. Corporate's gonna look completely different, but that's a different podcast episode. So really think through what you want and that includes financial, right? What is it that you and if you have a partner or a family, what is it your family needs? How much do you need to replace? And you know, what's the price of that? So I think building that financial plan will help you again.

Can you make more money solo? Yeah, you're not capped. In corporate, you get what you can. Maybe if you're in sales, you can overachieve your quota and get paid more. But for 90 % of the folks in corporate, what you can make is a capped number. If you go solo, you can overachieve. You can make more money. You can build different revenue streams. But you have to get started. So I think identifying what is that revenue number that you're looking for.

makes a difference, right? I'll use the collective and the community that we have that we've got different thresholds, right? The first one's 3K per month. If you get to 3K per month, you're replacing either some of your corporate salary, maybe you're doing a part time, maybe you are that new mom that just needs 40K per year. Again, without having all the corporate stuff taken out of your salary and time, again, a whole separate episode. 10K.

We are starting to replace your corporate income. Some that does replace, others you're getting close to it. Then we've got a number of folks that are shooting for the moon. They're shooting for 25k per month. This is all per month. And those start to achieve some different goals. And the beauty is there's no wrong answer. I believe the starting place is the exact same, is how do you make that first dollar, break the seal? How do you gain that confidence? And I think it starts with having this plan.

So the first one is really define what you want and what you need, right? Two different things. So define what you want and then start to design what does it look like to get there is one. Cause at least you're driving towards something. Two is take an inventory of your skills. Like I said, if you've been in corporate for two years, maybe you're a CRM specialist, maybe you're a financial analyst. It doesn't matter.

sales marketing, you've picked up some skills, you've got some experience and also look at your personal skills, right? I'll use the example of Greg Budansky who was on the podcast 26 year old, I think, three years in investment banking early on. So he was in the early stage of his career, realized that wasn't for him and moved in a completely different direction. It would seem, but in college, he played, he played football.

And so fitness, nutrition, everything was very important to him. And when he realized that financial, the financial sector wasn't going to be for him investment banking, he moved into a world where he's coaching and inspiring kids, right, middle school and high school kids to find that balance, right? It's not necessarily peak performance, but you know, and he's now open to gym. So he leveraged the experience that he had to move forward. So

take that inventory list, you're gonna be shocked at how much you've actually done, what you've experienced. And the other thing I would encourage you to do, think about what you do preferably for work and what gives you energy. I'm sure there's different, sitting through endless meetings probably doesn't give you energy. Fire drills probably doesn't give you energy. There's probably certain aspects of your work that motivates you, right? It gets you excited. And I'll use me as an example. When I left,

Management consulting at the end of my career went into solo consulting. I had some energy right because it motivated me I liked what I was doing better than what I was doing in corporate But over time realized that I that's just not the path solo consulting isn't what I wanted to do Then I moved into fractional leadership again It gave me that energy bump and it gave me a different sense of ownership But over time realized that's just not you know, it wasn't where it needed to be

And over the two years after that, I monetized and experimented and figure out, you know, seven additional ways to make money from my corporate experience. That started to give me energy, but it wasn't until I started, you know, the corporate escapee as kind of a pet project to say, Hey, is there other folks in corporate that hate what they're doing looking for a path out? Don't see that path. And maybe I can help. Right. So that went from, you know, a podcast episode here and then a free community.

Now it's a full on, you know, this is what I'm doing 100 % of my time. And I've never been more energized. Now it's not to say in two, three years that something is going to change and it's going to even give me more energy. But that's why I think it's important to think through your day to day life and what is it that gives you energy? Because you can marry some of your experience with what gives you energy to get you started and then move towards what

what that ideal is, right? I don't even know what it is. It's just part of my process. It feels like this could be it, but you know what? I don't know. We'll see where this takes me. So I think that's important. So map your financial and your wants, your life wants, and then start to look at it from an experience standpoint. And the third thing I would say as part of the prep process is focus on a problem that you would

want to solve. If you were to start a business, either like said, advisory coaching, I will really encourage you to start a service around that right smaller, better stackable, instead of going for the home runs, which is fractional and solo consulting right bigger six figure deals a lot of the time if you can get those contracts which are fantastic.

but there are a lot of work to get there. think there's a path of least resistance through services and stacking some of these smaller offers to start to get you where you want to go. But with that said, instead of thinking about it from a job perspective, this was my job title. This is what I've done for, again, two years to 40 years. And think about it from a problem standpoint. That's why it goes back to the experience and the problems that you want to solve. Because if you're solving a problem in corporate, which somebody's paying you to do, you are.

Small businesses, nonprofits, startups have these problems as well. So the more you can hone in on what a specific problem is, the better chance you are to get customers quicker because you will find businesses that have those problems. But start that process now. You can do this in corporate, right? Again, you're not having conversations with anybody. This is absolutely real risk. It's not going to take you a ton of time to do. And once you kind of have this plan,

Right. You've identified the problem. Then you start to think about right. A solution for that problem. Who's your ideal customer. And again, you can just build off of these as you go. You don't have to sit down in a one hour session, but if it gets you excited, a path out of corporate is what excites you. Then this isn't, this isn't going to seem like work. It's going to seem like a good project. And quite honestly, even if you were going to stay in corporate, I would go through this process.

Right. The last piece of advice I have would have from the prep standpoint to get you to reframe the way you think about, solo pernicious, solo business owner. Again, whatever you want to call it. I'm not as big into the labels with this, but you working for yourself and building a life that works in versus the other way around is if you looked at your current employer as a customer. So basically you are a solo business and they deal with your employer.

is your employment contract, right? So you are the VP of sales or a director of finance or a manager of financial analyst, whatever it is. And your pay, right? Your terms with them is salary benefits. Maybe you get two weeks, four weeks, six weeks PTO. I don't know what your pay time off is, but more than likely it's a bad deal, right? Cause if you start mapping out, does that hourly rate look like for you?

compared to the total number of hours that you're putting into this organization, including your commute time, anything that's associated with that job, it's time taken away from something else that you could be doing. So even on the surface, that annual salary looks good, if you look at the number of hours you're committed to that organization, it doesn't look nearly as good. So go through that process of, if this was your first customer, would you hire them, fire them, rehire them? You may find that you work remote.

You don't have to work really hard. You like the job that you're doing. You've got flexibility. Maybe it's a good fit for you. 85 % of the folks, say that's not going to be what the case is. So go through that process. And the last little tip I will give you on this, and by the way, you can find this all. I've got a free starter kit that kind of walks you through this process to get started. It's a PDF. I'll put the link in the show notes, or you can email me and I'll send it to you.

is just estimate what your hourly rate would be based on. Again, this is a good starting point baseline. I think you'd be surprised how much you can make. I encourage people to take your annual salary, multiply that by 1.25. It's your benefits and some other things that are tied to it. So if you're making $100,000 a year, multiply that by 1.25. It's 125,000 per year.

and drop the three zeros at the end. So your hourly rate is $125 per hour. If you're up to 200 or 250, right, you drop those your $250 an hour. Is this exact? Absolutely not. But it's been shockingly close to the rates people are getting as fractionals or advisors when they're working with businesses. Now the more scarce right the resource that you're you're supporting the bigger the problem that you're solving, the more you can ask for it.

But as you're starting to think through what the planning process looks like, this is where you can see that that financial path, right? That's why I did it. I don't think I did an episode on the podcast, but I've written about it is, you know, a lot of people do and have replaced their corporate income in 20 to 25 hours per week because of this hourly rate. So you can absolutely replace your corporate income with, going this path.

And you can start to see how that math adds up with it. The one little piece, I'm going down a rabbit hole here a little bit, is towards the work you actually do in corporate. If you think about a good week, if you do 30 % of your time is spent on the job you were hired to do, that's a good week. Think about all the unnecessary meetings, the fire drills, one-off pet projects, whatever it is. Like I said, I found least

speaking from my experience and from others, that if you're doing 30%, you're doing pretty well. You're just taking that 30 % and focusing it on the small business problems. They don't need you to do for the other somebody fluff or non-value ad type stuff. So if you start to do the math, you can see that path pretty quickly. Now there's a whole other step of how do I connect with folks? What's effective networking? This is where you got to start putting some extra more time in. But too often people think like, all right, I'm in corporate, then I've got to go all the way to

having those discovery sessions, Or chatting with potential customers. And we don't talk about kind of the middle ground of getting prepared, having this plan. And just so think about this, if you develop this, have this plan ready to go and corporate quits on you, you know, January 2nd, they're making layoffs, you don't have to panic, right? You have time, but you've got this start of a plan. And there's people and folks that can assist you to go, me included.

that can help you go from what that plan looks like to how do you execute it. And again, it's not rocket science, what I'm talking about, but you do need to put some thought into it, some strategy into it. But like I said, it's not everybody out there that if you've been successful in corporate, no matter how long, you're smart enough to absolutely do this. And what I'm offering,

and sharing is a way to shorten that learning curve. You will figure it out. I figured it out. Like I said, I'm not in Einstein when as I went through this process, figured it out. But there's a lot of mistakes I made and others have made that you don't have to make. You can jumpstart this process. There's things you're going to have to go. You're going to have to have those networking calls by yourself. You're going to have the discovery calls with your customers. But again, think about it from a problem solving standpoint.

Maybe I'll leave you with this is reframe this. The one thing you have to do is reframe it from job titles and functional titles to problem solving. And the more you start thinking about this, even in your day to day job, it starts to give you some clarity of what you can do with small businesses. And the last piece that I'll share as far as why I'm so bullish and optimistic about this path is you don't need 100 customers.

You need two, three, four, five, right? To be able to replace your income. And those are going to come through referrals, your network. And again, there's a whole other episode as we get into the networking, but with this episode, I wanted to highly encourage you start the planning process. It's good to have, it's going to give you confidence. And if things go sideways, you get laid off. You can start to execute this plan while you're looking for your next corporate job. I would almost guarantee you that once you get into this,

have some success, you're not going back to corporate. But I understand it being still in corporate, that that's maybe looked like it's a little far. So two things that I will share is I'll put a link to the starter kit. It's PDF. Please do download it. It'll help you think through it. It has a lot of these frameworks that I talked about today. And two, if you haven't heard me talk about the collective, I got the escapee collective where when it started, it was really heavily focused on helping folks that have escaped corporate.

get better at what they're doing, make more money, be more efficient with their meetings, scale their revenue. So thinking back to those milestones, right? It's the 3K to 10K and the 10K to 25K. But where I'm now focused in building a lot of resources for is the preppers, right? The people planning, the people who should be thinking about what's next, but not quite ready to take that step. Think of it as an insurance policy. So with that being said, with the collective, am offering, this is now recording in

December two months free right because we're upgrading and up adding put in a few new sessions in January So join in December you get that free you get January free So you can see all the new sessions start to connect with other folks like said I've got a segment of can be the the preppers Versus the folks that are already out that you can start to build this network build that confidence have your insurance policy that link will also be in the show notes and

Yeah, like I said, take your time. You're going to hear me talk more about the prepping and how to start thinking about this a little bit differently. anyway, I appreciate you listening. really do. Uh, pre especially the folks that have been along with the ride for over six years now, super, uh, thankful and anybody knew that we're picking up. So please do share this with other folks. Um, like I said, the more the numbers, the better. And we just want to get as many good people.

both on the podcast, both in the community, et cetera. So if you're still in corporate, as I like to say in my TikTok sign up, sign off, good luck. And again, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer questions. Thanks again for listening.