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New Year-> New You: 7 Steps to Take Back Control From Corporate

24th December 2025 • The Corporate Escapee • Brett Trainor

Brett Trainor (: 00:01

Welcome back to a solo episode of the Corporate Escapee podcast. I'm your host Brett Trainor, and I'm calling this one New Year, New You, Seven Steps to take you in that direction. Because one of the things that I found through this year is, and there's over a hundred thousand, there's probably a million people that are done with corporate and just don't know or not quite ready to take that first step out. And I've seen that with my audience.

and the people that I work with, right? If you look at across all my channels, we're over a hundred thousand followers now, which is insane to me, but just tells me that there's a lot of pain and anxiousness about this topic. But then if you look at, you know, the number of folks that are taking action and moving in the direction, it's just a fraction of that number. So I wanted to spend more time.

helping people just get started, taking that first step, seeing if it's the right path for them. Because if not, I get it. You guys get back into that corporate routine and all of a another year has passed, assuming you don't get laid off and you're even more miserable than you were before. And then you're starting to think through this conversation again. So today, right, as we close out our head towards the end of the year, I wanted to share, again, these are seven steps to help you get started.

Right. You don't have to leave, but it will give you a better understanding of really how happy or unhappy you are, kind of what your skill sets are. And is there some things you can do today, even if you stay in corporate to take better control of the situation and not be just reactionary and just take everything that they give you. And so I'm going to go through that process today. and as a note, this is right out of my new digital, starter kit.

And I really go through and explain each of these frameworks and steps that I talked through for free. So the links at the top of it, you can download it. I was going to charge for this, but there's just too many people that I want to get excited about taking that first step. So we decided to, to offer this for free. So the link is there. You can find it in my link tree or anywhere you follow my content. But in this episode podcast, I just wanted to give you that kind of the highlights, the seven steps, uh, even if you don't download the toolkit.

Brett Trainor (: 02:19

to help you rethink what you want to accomplish in 2026. So anyway, with that, let's get started. Again, I think the first step is maybe I'll let me step back. Who is this for? When I started the corporate escapee, I was focused on folks like me, Gen Xers, been in corporate for 25, 30 years, just ran out of roadway, right? What did we want to do? It wasn't chasing the corporate dream anymore.

And I just didn't know what that path out of corporate was for me. I didn't want to start a company and didn't realize going solo, solo entrepreneurship, solo business owner was a path. And then over the course of five years, I really discovered backward from the way I teach it now is there's absolutely a path to make money from the experience that you already have. And it's just working with a different set of clients, mostly small businesses, startups, nonprofits, or I still think are an underappreciated.

and opportunity for folks. And what I realized was I did it backwards. And when I left, started solo consulting and maybe I'll do another episode about the different offers you can have. But solo consulting is basically management consulting at a smaller level for small businesses. And I was just looking for six figure deals. So it's really hard to find those clients over, I'd say a year and a half. Realized consulting wasn't for me, moved into fractional leadership.

owner a thousand dollars or a: 2000

Than it is to sell a fractional engagement when you get fractional. It's a hundred percent great But I like to use the baseball analogy you're gonna win this game with with singles and doubles and hitting the occasional home run is fantastic But what I've really found is when people leave corporate the sooner we can get you that first win The sooner you get their first client the more excited you get the more you realize that this is absolutely a doable path. So

Brett Trainor (: 04:38

Anyway, that's kind of the backdrop of why I want to go through this process. And so, I guess I went down a rabbit hole there, but who this is for isn't just Gen Xers. I realized this isn't a Gen X problem. This is a corporate problem and people, 25 year olds all the way up through 65 year olds realize corporate's broken system. It's not for them and they want to do something else. And so in the toolkit I share, right, there's, different examples of the 26 year old, former investment banker.

well, he's an investment banker in training that realized after three years of really long hours that that's just not the life he wanted. That's not the life he envisioned. So he opened up a gym and he works with, with kids, training them, right. Making them healthy. So following a personal passion, but it was a skillset that he had already had from his college life. was a college football player.

We had a single mom by choice a 42 year old dad with three kids who was living the ideal dream job At least on the surface, but was missing all the events, you know a 30 year old new mom Just had a first baby now has to go back to the office and corporate corporate's not designed for any of these folks So just a high level if you're frustrated with corporate know it's not for you, but wasn't sure there was an exit

This is one, the upset for you and two, the path is there for you. just really, it is comes down to taking the first step. So anyway, all right. So the seven steps that I'm going to cover today, and then we'll get into each one of them and then then wrap it up. First one is reframe your reality. You can absolutely do this. Like I said, you don't need a new degree. You don't need a new skillset and you can do this while you're in corporate. It's really moving the mindset from a, um,

employee to a business owner and just how you would approach things differently. And step three, we're going to get a little bit deeper into that. So step two is establish your happiness baseline. And this is something that I wish I would have done prior to exiting or even a five years ago. realize I would realized how out of whack my life was, even though on the surface it looked good. Um, step three is your idea of solopreneur. We'll talk about that in a little more detail. Step four, define what you really want.

Brett Trainor (: 06:53

and need, right? It took me a decade to figure out or decide or even realize that I could choose what I want to do and what do I want out of the future versus just being reactionary with, you know, the corporate paycheck and where it's taking me building my life around corporate. Step five is take an inventory of your skills and experience. You're going to be shocked even if you've only been corporate for a few years, how much you actually know.

And really want you to start thinking about what is that problem that you're solving for in corporate? Because ultimately that's going to be your path into solopreneurship. The last piece of that step five is energy. What gives you energy right now? There's certain parts of your job that you really enjoy, gives you a lot of energy. And there's others that you just dreaded, right? So part of that exercise. Six is calculate your value. Almost every one of us that's gone solo and peaking from example,

And from folks I know and worked with, undercharge the first time, just what it is. But I've got a tool that will help you at least give you a baseline of what your market value is worth. So as you start to think about financial calculations, how much money do I need? Blah, blah, blah. It'll give you a starting spot. And number seven is define your ideal life. What is that vision, right? Do you want to live on the lake? Do you want to travel? Do you want to be one of those digital nomads?

And it may change, but I would encourage you to look 10 years out, then work back with, with what a plan is. So, all right. So reframing reality, I kind of touched on this. It's just a mental shift away from corporate thinking corporate is safe and the paycheck, and I can't do this 100 % wrong. You have the skills and I tell people all the time, it's easier to find your first customer than it is your next job. And that's like said, I'm on a mission to prove this to anybody that wants to hear it because the job market's horrible.

And two, might as well take control of your destiny, incorporate you. Everything's reactionary. They can decide when to let you go. They decide when to pay you more. You just have zero control. So it's really reshaping that reality. again, stop acting. I don't say like a victim and just let things happen to you. You have a lot more control than you believe you do. And I'm going to get into that here in a second. Second one is, you know, the five F lifestyle scorecard. This is something that

Brett Trainor (: 09:13

I built again for myself to help me track to see if I'm actually on schedule, right? Am I happier? And the one thing I warn or caution folks is this isn't an outcome based. It's to measure, you know, how you're doing across that journey. And if I had this scorecard while I was still in corporate, it would have been really low. And let me just give you the five areas and you can jot this down. But again, I encourage you to download the entire kit. You can do this. have the PDF in there.

The first one is financial independent. Are you independent because of corporate or are you tied to corporate and what they decide to do? I'd say 90 % of the folks I talked to are not independently wealthy. They need some form of financial work to do it. And right now they believe that only path is through corporate. Friends and family. How much time are you actually spending with friends and family and how much do you want to spend? Again, a score for this. Fitness.

I was trying to keep the five F's, but this is really around physical and mental health and didn't realize it at the time. But when I left corporate over the, I'd say less than two years, I lost almost 30 pounds mentally. I was a hundred percent in a better place. I didn't realize how unhappy I actually was in corporate until after I was out. And so again, the mental and physical piece of this is huge. Fulfillment is the fourth F and

That's again, I like to think of it as energy. Like what I'm doing right now is giving me a ton of energy over the five plus years of my escapee journey. Everything I moved to is giving me more energy. But once I focused on these corporate escapee, it went through the roof. And a lot of the time we just go through the motions may not be a great job. It's a paycheck. I hate I'm commuting, but you go through the purpose. So finding something that gives you meaning and some folks will say, just go follow your purpose and

It'll make it would be nice. That's good. It's not good advice. It'd be great if that would work. But most of us have a financial aspect that I have to worry about. So I focus more on does it give you more energy? And if the work you're doing right now is giving you no fulfillment, you don't have time to do something. That's a really tough spot to be in. And then the last step is fun, right? Are you having any fun? Life is too damn short to go through this and not have any fun. Yeah, you have to pay your dues. You have to work hard.

Brett Trainor (: 11:37

there's no reason you can't have all of this. And I think it was just beat into our heads for so long. You have to pay your dues in corporate. You have to work the extra hours, not get paid for it. You know, miss those events because you'll move up the corporate ladder. I honestly, I think it's crap. That's broken. There may have been a place for that before and things I did learn. but like I said, those things are long gone. All right, I'll get up my soap box. Step number three,

This one is a newer addition to the toolkit, but I really like it because it starts to again, reframe everything. So I tell people, if you were in corporate, guess what? You're already a solopreneur, a solo business owner. You just have one client and that's your corporate client. And odds are if you're here listening to me, you're not happy with it. It's a bad client. And what I put together is again, another scorecard or framework to think through.

One, if this was an actual client of yours, which it is, how would you grade them? Right. And I break it down into payment terms. They pay on time, bonuses, reliable scope, clarity, right? Do they know what they want from you and are paying you to do a job in corporate? Rarely do you spend more than 30 % of your time on the actual job they hired you to do. So again, score appropriately, respect for the vendor. Do they respect your time and boundaries or do they expect you to be on

Line answering email overnight, working over weekends, extra hours. Again, I think most corporations don't anymore. They're trying to extract every last ounce of value out of them at the price they're paying for you. The next score area is hidden cost, right? This is one, again, that I did without hesitation was commute to the office.

And one job I had was it was 90 minutes each way. So three hours a day into the office, which I was donating my time to the company for the privilege of working for them. Granted, there was some opportunities and it taught me some skills, but that trade off with that commute was totally not worth it. think, right meals, commute costs, you know, if you're working extra hours, right? So if you're working 50 hours a week, you're only getting paid for 40 and

Brett Trainor (: 13:57

That all adds up. if you wanted to look at your hourly rate, which we'll get to later, it's going to be much less than what that salary is. And future growth is the next category or scorecard. Is it a growing or shrinking? Are you going to keep getting your 2 % raise in your cost of living, which isn't the cost of living over time? And then the last one is, you know, the energy cost. How much is it draining you or is it energizing you? And I gave you an example where this scorecard may be more beneficial than you think.

is if you're working completely remote, doing a job you love that gives you flexibility to do what you need to do either around the house or in your personal life. And it's not making you work extra hours. To me, that's, that's a fair return, right? You have your time, it's balanced and you're con you're in control of your schedule, at least a little bit. There's still some things you're capped. You're not going to be able to make more money than what you're making. And at the end of the day, you're still working on projects and the expectations for them.

but it may not be as bad as going to the office five days a week, working 60 hours per week on a job that you hate. I mean, your score is going to be much lower. So anyway, I think it's, it's a really valuable exercise and really starts to rethink that say, Hey, you're already a business owner. You landed this really big client. You just negotiated poor terms. But guess what? If you were, out and looked for a more of these, but on a smaller basis,

with smaller scope that was focused on that 30 % that you really like to do. Those people are out there and it's a much easier sale than trying to find this next client. So, um, all right, let me move on before I could really drill down to that. The next one is really define what you really want and need. And for decades I did not do this in corporate, right? I just built my life around that corporate job. I was chasing the, uh, the corporate ladder, right? That next promotion, the next title.

and really wasn't thinking about impact to me or the family or time or really what's the end game, right? Because unless you end up in the C-suite in corporate, you're going to have to find something else to do down the road anyway. It's just when are you going to pull the trigger to do that? Because like I said, most folks, once we moved away from pensions and moved to 401ks, again, unless you want to take a slow draw for 30 years, man, you're going to have to find some other way to generate revenue.

Brett Trainor (: 16:22

Again, what this step four is, it's really define what you want and need. So think about it from financial. Maybe you're the spouse that's the second income. You don't need a full salary, but you need to replace some level of it. You don't want to go into an office. You only want to work 10 hours per week. So this is an exercise just to go through and say, hey, in my ideal life, what do I really want? What's important to me? And good thing is this can change. This changes for me all the time as I move down the path. And again, think of this as a journey.

not as an outcome. All right, the next step, the inventory. Again, go through your job. What are the skills you have, right? If you're in sales, marketing, finance, there's certain things that you're good at that you know, and you're solving a problem within that company for whatever function that you're in. So this is just a good exercise to think through and what have you done, and then start to think through what do I like? What is it that the problems that I was solving that was really helpful?

that I enjoy doing that gave me the energy. And again, this is more of a brainstorming is just to put anything, but from this list is where you're going to pick, you know, what is that first offer? Who's the ideal customer you're going to work for and what is that problem that I'm going to solve? So to me, this just helps you itemize everything to think through and think clearly. Cause the one of the bigger shifts that you're going to have to make from corporate to solo is instead of thinking of job titles and functions, you think about problems that you're solving.

which to me is easier and there's more value to business owners and that's in the course that I have, we get into how to build offers. But this is just that first step that if you're stuck and you're not sure what to do, I want you to go through these seven steps. The last piece of that take inventory is what are the constraints, right? Maybe you have two kids, you need the income to pay for the mortgage, you may have some timing, you may not be able to move because you've got family here, whatever it is, this is just your place here, right?

book market or stamp right now, where you're at, what are those experiences you have and what are the constraints just that it can factor in what you're building later. All so that's step five. Step six is calculate your value. This again is difficult. And again, most people will greatly undervalue what their market value. And when I'm talking about value in this case is what can I charge a small business owner or a nonprofit or if I want to coach and teach

Brett Trainor (: 18:48

folks that are behind me in their journey, how to get ahead and do different things. mean, there's just a whole unlimited path that you can take. Again, we want to keep it simple, but one of the things you have to know going back to that financial constraints is, what can I realistically charge per hour? So I developed a simple methodology to help you develop a baseline.

This is not a hundred percent accurate, but it's going to put you in the ballpark. it's, it is surprisingly consistent with when I looked at it with folks that went into fractional space consulting what they're charging per hour. We're pretty damn close. And that three steps to this is one, what's your annual salary. And for the sake of the podcast where you don't have the visuals, let's go with a hundred thousand dollars.

Multiply that by 1.25 and the 0.25 is benefits, right? What they're paying for insurance, those types of things. So annually that's up to $125,000 for this exercise. Drop the three zeros. That's your hourly rate. So if you're making a hundred thousand salary, you can realistically charge $125 per hour for the similar type of work that you're going to do into the small business space. If you're making 200,000, right? That

jumps up to 250 with the 1.25, you can charge $250 per hour. All the way down to if your base salary is 50,000, you're probably looking at $63 an hour, give or take. And businesses are happy to pay for this because they've never had access to people that have the skills and the talent of working in corporate because they can't afford to pay those full-time salaries, but they can afford to pay on a fractional or a service-based

basis in order to help them solve that problem. And so you can absolutely charge us. Now, if you're an AI, there's definitely a premium and give or take. And obviously you can discount it if you want to pick up more clients, but just from your planning purposes, this is actually a good baseline to help you kind of understand where you're at. All right. So that gives you your value. Now we're going to go to step seven, which is to design your future.

Brett Trainor (: 21:02

And this is think ahead. What in 10 years, I like the 10 year mark, right? If you're earlier in your corporate career, you probably think in 20, 30, 40 years, but 10 is a stretch. But I think you need to be thinking that far ahead in order to start planning what you need to do to get there. And, you know, like for me, that puts me near not there, not into the 70, but close to it. So what do need to do in the next 10 years to be living on my lake? Right. That's close enough to

family and grandkids that they come up doing the work that I still like to do and choosing when I want and how many hours that I want to work. What do I need to do here the next one, what five years and then break that down into one year. And again, this is not a step-by-step actual plan. It's to help you visualize what do you want, right? If so, if you're a younger family, you know, in five years, 10 years, maybe the kids are in high school. Where do you want to be? How much time do you want to spend?

It's just something at least my generation, we never asked, right? It was, all right, you're going to design your life around the corporate job. That's just what it was. And having the freedom and the flexibility to actually think about what is the life I want and then how do I integrate work into it. It was a game changer. And some of you are probably out there shaking their heads saying, can't do that. 100 % you can do it. And it's really about taking action.

And the beauty of this process is it's not an all or nothing, right? You don't have to quit, give away everything and go all in on this. You can start to test this while you're still in corporate. Go find that first customer while you're still doing your job, right? If you're donating 10 hours a week because you're working 50 hours, figure out how you get your 10 hours back that they're not paying you for. Put it towards this.

hat's what I'm going to spend: 2026

Brett Trainor (: 23:22

It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to overanalyze it. That's one thing I still have to catch myself doing is figuring out. mean, I am a perfect example of this because two years ago, the corporate escapee wasn't even on the radar. I wasn't even thinking about it. Now it's a full-time passion project for me coming out of what I did as a solo business owner five years ago. And there's countless stories of this working this way. So anyway, those are the seven steps.

Go through this process, it's gonna help you do it. I've also included in that digital starter kit a checklist to help you think. This to me is the baseline. You do these seven things, these seven steps, it's gonna give you a much better understanding of how happy you are, how much you really do need to make a change, and kind of the foundation to look at that next step. And this is why I gave this away for free because...

It may tell you, right now it just makes sense for me to stay in corporate, ride this out. Hopefully I don't get laid off, but the odds are if you're following me, you're done. And this is that first step of the blueprint. And like I said, I've got other tools and resources, DIY to help you get through this. You can check out the rest of my tools there, but for the purpose of this, if everybody would just go through this process to get level set, then that opens the door. So for everything else, anyway.

s a good way to close out the: 2025

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New Year-> New You: 7 Steps to Take Back Control From Corporate