Michelle Kvello Solopreneur: Leaving Corporate for Independent Practice

Michelle Kvello, founder of Lantern Partners and creator of the Corporate to Consultant course, shares what independent professionals need to know about finances when leaving corporate employment to build a solopreneur consulting practice.

Drawing from 12 years running her own CFO advisory firm, Michelle explains why most new consultants underprice their services by basing rates on their corporate payslip, and walks through the financial planning that prevents common mistakes that send people back to employment. 

She covers calculating what you need to charge and why building a client pipeline matters before you need it.

The conversation addresses the specific pressures facing women over 50 in corporate environments, and Michelle's framework covers purpose, pricing, financial readiness, and the mindset shift from employee to business owner.

Mentions: Cedric Chin, Lia DiBello

Connect with Michelle: lanternpartners.com.au | LinkedIn: Michelle Kvello

Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Transcript

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Nigel Rawlins: Michelle, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Can you tell our listeners something about yourself and where you're from?

Michelle Kvello: Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Michelle Covello. I am the founder of Lantern Partners, which is a CFO advisory business. And we work with founders of startups and scale ups, to help them achieve their business goals and growth. And I also help people transition from corporate careers into consulting.

Nigel Rawlins: That's going to be really interesting to talk about that. So let's talk about the CFO side of it first. How did you become a CFO?

Michelle Kvello: Okay, so my background way back in the day, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, in the UK at PwC. But I was only there for the absolute minimum time to actually qualify. I knew that I wanted to work out with businesses and I knew the kind of businesses that I wanted to work with. I focused, even back in my PwC days, very much on the media marketing technology space.

And then when I left PwC, my first commercial job was working for Reuters which most people should be familiar with in terms of the media and technology organisation. And I always worked in an area of finance broadly called commercial finance or FP& A which is financial planning and analysis. And what those departments do within bigger corporates is they partner with the business owners of kind of the business units within the organization.

And so we would be helping them with things like analysis and forecasting and business casing and really understanding the business and understanding how the numbers drove the business and how the numbers could measure success. I always have that very commercial focus within my corporate roles.

And so it took me a while actually to leave corporate. I always had a desire to work for myself, but I couldn't figure out how that particular subset of finance actually worked for smaller businesses and business owners because I'd always thought of it as something that bigger businesses needed, but I knew I wasn't a tax accountant and I'm not what they call kind of a transactional accountant that does a lot of the day to day data entries and journals and things like that.

I really wanted to work with business owners and within a corporate environment. That's what the CFO does, having a lens across all of the different units of the business, working very closely with the CEO and really working with the business and the rest of the executive team to drive the business forward and make the numbers make sense to the other people within the business.

And so a lot of what I was already doing was that simplifying and demystifying finance. And so I eventually figured out that this was such a critical gap for SME founders and business owners. They had the transactional kind of day to day support in their bookkeeper or accountant. They had their tax advice, but what they didn't have is that CFO lens, which was giving them the commercial and strategic advice.

And without that, they weren't able to really kind of drive the business forward in the way that they wanted to.

Nigel Rawlins: When you mentioned that you want to work with small business, how small a business would need the advice of a CFO?

Michelle Kvello: So I will start with my imperfect answer, which is, but I start with it because it's the easiest, I guess, criteria, or commonality, between my clients. So we work with businesses that generally do revenue between kind of five and 30 million. Okay. But I really hate describing the size and complexity of a business in the top line revenue numbers, because we worked with a IOT or Internet of Things business, which is turning over five or 6 million dollars but because they'd raised a lot of money, they had over 50 shareholders.

So they were actually a public company and had a lot of compliance. They had a very big finance team for five or 6 million, but they needed a CFO, because the business was so complex and they had a lot of lease requirements and accounting requirements, all of those kind of things.

Then we have some businesses at the 30 million revenue mark that have survived up until that point, really with just a bookkeeper and a tax accountant, and it's not until a certain business moment has happened. So a lot of the time founders that we're working with are looking to sell their business.

So really needing to, to get their house in order to do that. And then we get the call from them, but they've, they've survived without a CFO relatively well up onto a very high revenue mark. Really the time when someone is seeking out a CFO or a firm like Lantern Partners is when a founder has realized that what got them here won't get them there, and they don't quite know how to make that shift.

And they know it's in their numbers somewhere, but they also know it's broader than just their numbers. So we talk about it a lot in terms of financial storytelling or the so what behind your numbers. And that's what we help founders do, figure out the what now and what next.

Nigel Rawlins: So at what point would they say, well, my accountant's not able to help me anymore 

Michelle Kvello: Usually it is because they have spoken to another business owner within their network, or they've started exploring what a sale process might look like, and started talking to an advisor or a MNA Mergers and Acquisition Advisor. And that advisor has come in and sort of said, hey, you need a little bit more help to get through this process.

Or, it's just been born out of frustration with the founder continuing to ask questions of their current finance support team and maybe just not getting answers to questions as quickly or as clearly as they would like. And that frustration has led them to kind of look for, something else kind of within this world of finance support that could help me get to where I need to get to.

Nigel Rawlins: So if somebody requires that, but they're not turning over a lot of money, you are a virtual CFO or a fractional CFO. Can you talk about what that means?

Michelle Kvello:

So there's a lot of lively debate around the labels, at the moment, which I find quite amusing because I don't really care what you call me but I appreciate there is, there is a need for education within the market because people need to understand what they're asking for, right? Fractional is a very new word in Australia, the US, Europe, UK, they've been using this word for a little bit longer.

And so there's a little bit more understanding around it. When I first started my business kind of way back in 2012, the words that were being used for CFO advisory were virtual or outsourced. All of those words though mean that you get a CFO, and this extends to other C suite roles as well now.

But you don't need to hire that level of person within your organization. So they will come in and work with you as much as you need. And that's the value of the model for a fast growing, smaller company. To give you an idea of the range, we work with businesses anything from at the very smallest end, kind of 10 hours per month.

Any less than that, you're really not getting the value you should be getting because we're not understanding the business well enough, to the top end of three days a week. And so the three days a week is probably more typical of what you would call a fractional resource. Between one or three days a week where you're really spending quite a lot of time with the business.

Quite a lot of time physically, going to meetings as well as virtually. Really building those relationships within the team and broader than just the founder because if you're working three days a week within an organization, generally they've got a senior level of management. Maybe not an executive leadership team quite, but people that are at least influencing the decision making within the businesses or not all sitting on the founder. And we can flex between those two things. The first thing we do with a new client is we'll do an initial financial health check, and that's a mandatory part of working with us. So we'll come in and we will look at your finance support system and structures and processes, what you have now, and also talk to the founders about where they want to go and what they're trying to achieve and what their frustrations are to figure out whether that team will support them going forward, right?

And what that change in support might look like. Because often for founders, I don't know what the role was within a marketing team or a technology team. I've got a general sense, but really understanding the granularity of what they do. That isn't my discipline.

So why should we as finance professionals expect a business owner or anyone else really to understand the makeup of the finance team, the makeup, the support, and what good looks like. So that's what we do with businesses. 

Nigel Rawlins: That's critically important. I think and people would have to be silly to assume that the business owner has got a clear understanding of what they need. That's why when you said it's mandatory that when you go in, that there is a diagnosis to, sense what's going on, to see what the real problem is.

And this is the case, I think, with most businesses. Somebody might ring up and say, well, I need this, or I need that. And. Do they really need that? Or is it something else? And, and I think that's, that's incredibly important. And I think finances and numbers are important, I remember running a simulation many years ago, a business simulation in Geelong and, had, uh, invited quite a big crowd of business owners.

And, we were just talking very simply. We said, okay, there's six companies in this business environment and they're jointly turning over 20 million dollars. What's the average turnover? And I had an accountant pull out a calculator to try and answer six businesses sharing 20 million in revenue. And an accountant pulls out a calculator. Everyone else, you'd be surprised, their eyes glaze over when you start to talk numbers. And this is the problem. So when you go into an organization, there's a good chance that's what's going on. 

Michelle Kvello: I think that for, not all business owners, but for a lot of business owners, and I think this is just a comment on general population, finance, maths, numbers, whatever you want to call it, can be a scary topic. It's the topic when you're at school, you go, oh no, we've got maths today. And frankly, which is a big bugbear of mine, I think there's an entire industry that's sprung up around making finances seem really complicated. It's really difficult, only we can do it. And it's not. I think if you really understand something and you're really skilled in your discipline, you should be able to explain it really, really simply.

And I always find that the people that are trying to make it sound complicated, or either trying to protect their turf, or frankly don't understand really the concept that they're trying to explain. So I have a big mission to simplify and demystify finances for businesses, because really it is, it's a tool for your business and you have to understand it as a business owner, even if you don't, even if you don't feel that this is your particular skill set and it doesn't have to be in that really deep level, but you have to be comfortable with talking about your finances.

One of the topics I often talk on is how to be the CFO of your own business. And there's seven focus areas that we talk through, but one of them is watch your numbers. You can do all this fancy stuff in terms of metrics and cleaning up your data and doing all the X, Y, and Z.

But then you actually have to be comfortable looking at your numbers on a regular basis. And it really is so fundamentally important.

Nigel Rawlins: There's a chap called Cedric Chin, have you come across him ?

Michelle Kvello: I haven't,

Nigel Rawlins: Okay. Well, Cedric Chin runs a website called Commoncog, and he writes articles about business. He's based in Singapore and he's run little companies overseas in Vietnam and places like that. And he wanted to really understand how business works.

So he's obviously a very bright young fellow and. He found a lady in America called Lia DiBello, who has a triad mental model of business, and the three parts were, understanding your market, understanding your operations, and the other one, the really critical one, was finances. And he actually interviewed her.

But the finances, you're right, I was a, primary school teacher in Australia for 16 years taught arithmetic and all that. And then I was surprised when I came across a lot of adults who, in running businesses, are frightened of the basic arithmetic. And you're right. It's simple. It's absolutely simple.

So the the skill we're talking about that you are, is to say to people, okay, the financial part of your business is really, really, really important. And it is not complicated. You just have to start addressing it and where to. So where should somebody start, when you say you've got to be the CFO of your own business, what numbers do you think they should be looking at?

Michelle Kvello: Well, the first thing that we get businesses to look at, or first thing that we look at when we go into a business is just looking at how clean their data is. So really simple things like, if you are getting costs from one particular supplier for one particular cost, are you always coding it to the right place?

Are you matching up your revenue timings with your expense timings when you're booking your numbers? Because otherwise it becomes really difficult to see on a monthly basis, quarterly basis. Are you making money or are you not making money? the second thing we look at is around margins and around gross margin and net margin and helping businesses understand what the difference between those two things and why it's important to actually look at them.

And, for those of your listeners that don't know kind of what that difference is between gross margin and net margin. So you've got your revenue, then you have a category of costs which directly influence delivering that revenue. So for example, if you're selling widgets, your cost of sales are the cost of that widget.

So how much it actually costs for you to either produce or to buy that widget. And you'll come up with a gross margin. So say that gross margin is, I don't know, 50%. For every dollar that you add to your revenue, before you've even done anything anywhere else, you know, only 50 cents is going to come back into your bottom line.

Okay. And that is more lumpy to scale. And we talk a lot about scale when we, when we look at businesses. And that's really how to squeeze the most juice out of your business. But underneath your gross margin, you have a whole bunch of costs, which are broadly your overhead costs.

So the things that you need to run your business. So, the subscriptions you need to run your business, the rent you pay, your marketing costs, all of those kind of things, but they're not directly related to your revenue. And those are the costs that so long as they stay relatively consistent, they will of course go up, but they won't go up at the same rate as your revenue.

And so long as you look at those two buckets of costs separately, you can really start mapping out how you expand your net margin. And that's really the money you make, right? And so that's, that's a key thing that we talk to business owners about and we look at when we come in. And then, I won't go through all of the seven areas, but the other one that I just want to touch on is around cash and the difference between your profit and loss and your profit and your actual cash inflows and outflows.

Because depending on your business, they can be quite different things. There's many a profitable business that's gone under, because they don't have sufficient cash flow. So we look at that, we look at the timings of cash flow and there are some businesses that have to pay out money very often before they get their money and that's one of the levers that you can pull to maximize your cash flow.

The other thing as well is making sure businesses don't spend money that isn't theirs. Many of us business owners are unpaid debt collectors for the ATO, when we collect GST, which isn't our money, we've got to hand it over to the ATO and also if you've got a payroll and you're paying your staff net wages, you also owe the ATO that tax and you owe your employees that super.

That's not your money. And so it's really important to kind of understand that distinction and make sure that you aren't spending that money that really isn't yours. 

Nigel Rawlins: So what you're saying is you're bringing a discipline to understand that that revenue is not all yours to keep or spend, because a good proportion of it is going into producing the revenue to start with. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't quite understand that there's the particular cost, the cost to create or make or buy your product, the cost to sell your product, the cost to run your business.

And if you're lucky, profitability at the end of it. And yes, cashflow makes it. 

Michelle Kvello: The other thing I'd say as well is one of the things that you can get very caught up with, particularly as a new business owner, is chasing that top line growth. Everywhere you kind of see seven figure businesses, eight figure businesses, nine figure businesses. That's great.

How much profit are they actually making? There's many a great top line headline, they're not making any money. So yeah, it's really important to look at both sides of it.

Nigel Rawlins: And in many ways, you might be better off being a tiny, tiny business and not have those sleepless nights or that hustling, what we call that hustling culture that we're seeing. And you and I were talking about LinkedIn before, and I think you've seen a lot of hustling going on on LinkedIn and Twitter and things like that.

It drives me mad. You know, you can get 10, 000 followers and sell them all this stuff and no, don't.

Michelle Kvello: What for?

Nigel Rawlins: I don't want that hassle. And, I've paid for some of those courses, $150 and which I think is a reasonable price for a small course, and it just teaches you to hustle like them and I'm thinking, no, I don't want to do that because, if you're seeing what's going on LinkedIn, you see a post comes in, there's a grabby headline. You've got to click to open up and read this rubbish. And I'm thinking, oh, please stop it. And if they're all learning to do that, they're going to destroy LinkedIn.

Michelle Kvello: Yeah. And I think it's really interesting, around LinkedIn. And I think people have a different perception of LinkedIn than other social media because it's a business platform. But you've still got the same thing going on on LinkedIn that you do on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok. You're only seeing the shiny kind of highlights reel of someone's business.

And sometimes just pure made up nonsense of someone's business. It really is important not to kind of get distracted by that comparison, and really focus on what you need to do as a business.

Nigel Rawlins: I was contacted by somebody who I've linked up with and they say, Oh, I don't use LinkedIn much, but I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Tik Tok, and I'm thinking, where do you get the time to do all this? now I've run a marketing services company now for about 25 years. So I'm used to being able to put together stuff really quickly and automate it all and all that.

But, if you're a new business or something like that, you can be running around like a headless chook trying to do all this stuff. Okay. Now you made the shift from the corporate to your virtual, so when COVID hit, how did that affect your business? If you couldn't go physically into another business?

Michelle Kvello: It didn't. we have always been hybrid. So we've got a team of 10 across Australia. And most of our clients are in Australia, but not necessarily in the same city as our CFOs are based and we have a couple of overseas clients as well, kind of primarily Singapore and the US. And all of our systems are on the cloud.

We don't have any physical service. Over the years I've sort of flirted with the idea of having an office, but our team is flexible both in terms of the hours they work and the location they work from. We have quarterly kind of in person off sites just to get together as a team.

And I always say to them, do you want an office? Just checking in, do you want somewhere to go? And they always come back saying, well, no, not really. I mean, because we're either working from home or working from a client office, I don't want a third place to go to. So we've always been very comfortable in that environment.

I would say post COVID though, we are going into offices less than we did pre COVID. And a lot of that is driven by the client, but the vast majority of it is driven by the client, right? Because as we all know, offices and businesses generally haven't It's got a sizable mass of people going into the office, certainly very, very few businesses, unless you physically have to be there operating something, that are expecting their staff to be in five days a week, right?

And so, that timing of when you come in and the benefit for us of going into the office, it's the same as any other business. It's that water cooler conversation or incidental conversations that you have, with the business whilst you're there. And so we've just had to be a lot more intentional around how we build relationships within the business and with the clients that we're working with, particularly with the founder, because that is such a critical success factor of what we do.

And so we've just had to think about it a different way. And, isn't that what all businesses have had to do? As we that very overused word, pivoted multiple times over the last few years, you just need to figure out different ways of doing it. 

Nigel Rawlins: One of my concerns about the virtual as against the physical is being in the presence of other people, and I just wrote an article a couple of weeks back on LinkedIn about this is looking people in the eyes. And when we're, on our screens and stuff, talking on Zoom and other things, we look at a camera or golly knows where our eyes or our gaze is going.

Do you find that the physical meetings are different to your virtual meetings? 

Michelle Kvello: Look, there is definitely something to be said for in person. For me just personally, I love the person to person, human to human interaction. I'm loving the return to in real life events. I do a fair amount of speaking as well, and it's just so much more fun to be in a room with people and feel that buzz and that energy and that vibe. But I think the reality is there are benefits of working remotely in terms of how everybody's been able to manage their life in a different way than they did previously. And I know that, certainly the people that, that I know that even want to be going back into the office, suddenly that, whatever it is, hour, two hours, sometimes three hours, round trip commute into the city, that really becomes front and centre in your mind when you're thinking of doing it, when you don't do it every day. But I think it is really making sure that you are balancing that in person, and why you're doing the in person, versus what is appropriate for deep work and really concentrating work and uninterrupted work and that middle ground of things that are perfectly reasonable to do online and in Zoom meetings or whatever your particular poison is.

I think getting that balance right because I get far more work done at home, like that deep work, concentrating work, than I would do if I was in an office. But the benefit that I get from being in an office with a client is that creativity and that spark and that, have you tried this? And I just heard someone say that.

And similarly for the Lantern Partners team, we meet in person for quarterly off sites and spend kind of the best part of the day together and that's a very structured session where we have particular work topics, soft skills topics, but then we also spend time together and there are things that one CFO might be working on that they hadn't thought to specifically surface up in an online conversation with another CFO, but all sitting in the same room, just chatting, they suddenly realized, Oh, actually, Joe needs to know that information. Mandy needs to know that information. And there is an enormous amount of value to that, particularly those creative and strategic discussions. They're always best in person.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fantastic. Cedric Chin, who I was talking about, has gone very big on what he calls cases. Rather than stories, he calls them cases, because sometimes one story is not sufficient. There might be several cases, and that's a perfect example of that, is, okay, I did this here, and I did this here.

And you're more likely to remember those and recall them when you need them. So yeah, that's really important. So let's now make a shift. You've put together a course under your name called Corporate Consulting and teaching people how to make that shift. So let's talk a little bit about that.

I did notice that on your website, you had a whole lot of interesting questions. It's like, how do you know when to leave? And how do you get your first client? And I thought they were brilliant questions. So maybe we could talk about why you set that up and maybe some answer some of those questions.

Michelle Kvello: Sure, sure. So, I've been doing this for, like I said, 12 years now, and over the years I seem to have been the go to person when someone has said, Oh, a friend of mine wants to start their own business. A friend of mine wants to go freelance. A friend of mine wants to consult. Go have a coffee with Michelle.

And so I would be having a lot of these coffees. And I was saying a lot of the same stuff to the same people. But the only people that were getting access to that was the people that happened to know me or happened to know someone that knew me. , So eventually, and I only launched the course about 18 months ago, I just packaged it all up to actually be able to help people that weren't necessarily in my very close network.

My big thing across Corporate to Consultant, across Lantern Partners, just in life generally, is I hate seeing people stuck when I know what information can unlock kind of the way forward for them. And that really, that was the driving force behind Corporate to Consultant. So Corporate to Consultant is an online self paced course.

But there's also the ability within that course to actually spend a couple of hours of one on one coaching time with me to kind of really push, push through to the next level. And so we talk through the specific modules, and there are seven modules within the course, and there's homework too, to actually really set yourself really well, for this transition.

So whether you are just thinking about it or whether you've just made the leap out of corporate, I hate seeing people have to go back to corporate because they couldn't make something work. And generally it is around, they've jumped out, but then, but they didn't take the time initially to work out why they were doing what they were doing.

It was kind of, I'm just jumping out and away from something rather than very consciously jumping into something. And that's a really important distinction. Then, the other two key things which send people back into corporate is either they haven't done enough planning financially, because the reality is, like with all businesses, it takes time to ramp and it always takes a little bit longer than you think.

So what's your personal financial situation? Do you need to start this before you leave your corporate job? Do you need to have some kind of hybrid for a little while? Or, I've talked to some people that have been made redundant. So I have a little bit of a financial cushion to actually explore this.

Everybody's situation is different, but it needs thinking through. And then the third thing that generally sends people back to corporate is that sales aspect. And so many people, particularly I think if you've been in, quote unquote, back office roles or kind of not necessarily in a sales role before, a lot of people are allergic to that word. Right? But, you have to get over that if you're going to work for yourself.

Nigel Rawlins: That's the big, big thing about working in a corporate. You might be working in your little area, but you've also got teams there, like an IT team, when the computer doesn't work or the internet goes down, you don't have that at home. You have a marketing and sales team in there that know what they're doing. And then you've got the accountants and the financials as a whole and, and you're being managed. Mmm. Yeh.,

Michelle Kvello: And absolutely. And there are some some really easy ways you can set that framework up for yourself. I talk a lot about mindset and mental preparation and having support networks around you when you do this and what the right support networks are because it's not necessarily friends and family.

You actually need a support network of people that have done what you're doing or, ideally people that are a couple of steps further down that road than you are because they know exactly what you're going through. Whereas, I joke about Auntie Margaret's view and she's worked in corporate for 20 years and she's terrified for you. She thinks you're going to be destitute, she's lovely and go have tea with her by all means, but she should not be in your support network for this. You actually can't listen to that. And so really being able to craft that support network is really important.

Nigel Rawlins: Totally agree with that. As you said, what got you there won't get you there. You need a new, new direction, or you need people who are going to be okay about you taking that sort of risk, whereas family are more likely to say, how are you going to pay for anything? Let's go back to this, how do you know when you leave?

Some of the guests have been talking about the age of around 50 for women.

Michelle Kvello: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: They're starting to get older and they're starting to, maybe their health is starting to deteriorate, or they've just been working for so long they've let things go, or they're finding that they're no longer getting any promotion, what point do you think that they need to start maybe a transition, or seriously looking to get out?

Michelle Kvello: I think if you are even mildly contemplating going out for yourself at any point in the future, you really need to build your networks in person and online and just because that network, both from a client perspective, as well as a support perspective, we work with a lot of partners, so people that work with the same client bases as we do, but in different disciplines like marketing, legal, HR, for example, build those networks out way before you need them. Because I think one big mistake that people make, in when they think about networking, as they think about it in a very transactional way, what can I get from this connection with this person?

Which is completely a backwards way of thinking about it. You really need to think about mutual value. So that's one key thing that I think you should do. In terms of the timing, it's a really tricky one because it is so personal to you and your personal circumstances and the way that you operate in the world and kind of what your tolerance for risk is.

So there are different ways of going out and consulting. You can do it completely on your own. You can do it within a team like Lantern Partners. We have employees as well as consultants working within Lantern Partners, and a lot of them are wanting to join a framework like Lantern Partners to have that team feeling and that collaboration, and they don't want to lose all of that.

And then there are, particularly within the CFO stream, there are franchise models that you can join where it's all incredibly structured and you have these out of the box solutions that effectively you go out and deliver. So I think that, that exploration process, is really important, but I will have to say I'm the worst example of this, because I actually went and started up my own business, because I had pushed myself into total and utter burnout, and I just couldn't do corporate anymore, because I pushed myself beyond that point, and I was, gosh, how old was I then? I was in my mid 30s? Yeah, mid to late 30s, and for me, it coincided with thinking about how I balanced the kind of corporate career that I wanted with the kind of life that I wanted. And that was also, it was family life. I didn't have kids then. I have a seven year old and a 10 year old now. And I just couldn't work out how a corporate career where I was working 60 plus hours a week fitted with having a family and actually seeing them.

So I think there are, there are different inflection points and for the women that you're talking about in their fifties, I mean, I know for myself, and the other women around me, it gets to that point where you really think, what am I doing this for? And I think COVID prompted a lot of that thinking for a lot of people as well, partly because of more time spent on their own.

Also, frankly, the way a lot of corporates treated their employees when things got tough. We're seeing a lot of redundancies now. The reality is, honestly, I don't care how much your HR department or how much the company values say they value you as an employee. Brutally, at the end of the day, it's a company, it's a business, and you need to look after yourself and what you want out of life.

And if you work within a very warm and embracing corporate, that is wonderful, but their responsibility isn't ultimately to you and, and your goals and objectives. So, I think it, it gets to that stage where you think, what am I doing this for? And you think about all the things that make up your life in terms of your relationships, in terms of the other things that you want to do.

With a lot of people in, in their 50s, they've got teenage kids or kids going off to university or kind of leaving home. And you want to spend some more time with them. And how does that work with this corporate life that you've created? And I think, frankly, with women in their 50s, there's a different level of confidence that you have at that point.

Even though, maybe society and work are saying that you don't have as much value. I think there's something very different for, for, that's happening internally for women and particularly within their friend support networks. That's saying actually I, I feel more confident in directing my own path.

I have confidence in my own abilities and if they're not being recognized in a corporate environment, well, I'm going to do it for myself because I know I have value. And so I think that is a catalyst a lot of the time for going out on your own.

Nigel Rawlins: The issue I guess that I'm seeing is that they're hoping that their employment will continue on. And so they're, in other words, like in a financial risk, they're putting all their eggs in one basket. The other thing is too, when you go out, the last thing you want is one client.

Because if you lose that client, you've lost your income. So, that is the benefit of working for yourself, is ensuring that you've got several clients. What's going to make it easy to make that shift, do you think?

Michelle Kvello: Preparation. I think being really clear, and this is why in the course this is the first thing that we start with, is why are you doing this? What is your new career going to look like? What's important to you? It's the Simon Sinek thing, right? What is your why? And be really clear about it.

And it's not someone else's why. And it's not someone else's purpose. I talk a lot about purpose when I'm talking on this subject as well. It's like, what is your purpose? For me, it's really helping people get unstuck. And that becomes my North Star. Whether it's in Lantern Partners or whether it's in Corporate Consultant. And that is what I build all my business decision making on is, what I'm doing, helping people get unstuck. But that financial preparation is really, really important. And tempting as it might be to kind of just make that leap and with that one client. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to make a leap with that one client.

When I first started my consulting career, now we have a team, but for about half of the business's life, it was just me. And the first few consulting roles that I had were one big client. I was working full time at the time, one big client, which was kind of four days a week. And then I would build up my pipeline in that fifth day.

And so that's a perfectly valid way of doing it. But you're absolutely right. You need to be a little bit careful because if you have a small concentration of clients, if you only have one or only have two, and that's the way that you're going to run your consulting career, that's actually okay. So long as during those stints, with that particular client, which is likely going to finish at some point, otherwise you might as well just be employed if you're going to work with them forever.

You need to be building up your pipeline and having those sales conversations and having those networking conversations, even whilst you are embedded with that one client. And so that's Very common mistake that new consultants make is that they go and start working on a contract. Everything's great.

Hopefully they're making loads of money. The contract's for six months and then it stops and they go, Oh, what's next? I haven't been talking to anyone for the last six months. And so then you're starting from scratch again. And it takes time. So I think that just that kind of making sure that you're constantly having those conversations, being visible, LinkedIn's a great way of doing that.

But also just showing up and having coffees with people, helping people, sharing your knowledge, doing all of that two way street thing that makes people think of you, when they have their next project and being vocal about the fact that, hey, my contract's finishing up in a, in a month's time. Are there any interesting projects that you're working on?

I think that is really, really key.

Nigel Rawlins: Some of the questions you had on your website there.

Michelle Kvello: Mm hmm, mm

Nigel Rawlins: They, they decide they want to go out. They, they sorted out their financials. They know that they can afford to do this. They know there's gonna be a bit of a possible delay before they get clients, and there'll be some ups and downs.

The first question you had there is how do you get your first client and how do you know what to charge? These are real big issues out there. Now I do work with quite a few clients and, unless they know others in the industry, or they know, from their corporate work, what things cost, they have no idea what to charge.

Michelle Kvello: So as part of the course we actually have a pricing calculator on there, so you can work out what you should charge. I always start from, and actually one of the big mistakes, that new consultants make is that they look at their corporate payslip and they look at the hourly rate on the corporate payslip and go that's somewhere to start, right? But they forget that you get paid that hourly rate in a corporate world when you're on holiday, when you're sick, when you're not 100 percent kind of utilized within your corporate world. You're still getting paid that hourly rate. So, the broad principles are, okay, work out what your annual salary needs to be for you to do all the things that you still need to do.

Everybody needs to put food on the table. You need to keep a roof over your head. If you've got small humans, you need to kind of keep them alive. You know, all of those kinds of things before you even think about, we all want to live a joyous, fun life. What are the, what's the budget you need to put against doing those kind of non food and shelter things?

So how much money do you need? And then you have to take into account, you're gonna pay yourself super, cause that's another big mistake of consultants going out for themselves is not paying themselves super. You've got to work out how much holiday do you need to take? Do you want to work full time or part time?

You have to build in sickness, particularly over the last couple of years, right? There will be times when you won't be able to work because you're not well. There will be times when you won't be able to be sending someone an invoice because you're spending time doing business development.

You're spending time working on your business. And so all of those things ratchet up the actual number of hours you have available to earn their annual salary. And so that's kind of what we walk through in this pricing calculator. And that's why the minimum rate you should charge won't look anything like the hourly rate on your payslip. Once you've been doing this for a while, you start thinking about value pricing. And positioning yourself in the market. On that latter one and positioning yourself in the market. I almost find that the least helpful guide because , I'll give you an example.

This is a real example. So we quoted a job to a client, to a couple of clients, quoted them exactly the same rate for exactly the same job. One of them came back horrified at how expensive it was. The other one came back to check that this was actually correct because it was a lot lower than they were expecting and had been led to believe.

Okay, so the market doesn't really know what they should be paying. There will always be someone that's cheaper than you and you've got no idea why they would be cheaper than you. They might be outsourcing to another country, for example, and that's bringing down their rate.

There are some people that are independently wealthy and just doing this for fun. They're going to charge a lower rate because they can, and there will be other people that are a lot more expensive than you. And, sometimes that's because they've got their own expenses or they're working under a franchise umbrella or within a firm that has its own overhead costs to, to layer on top of that.

So, I actually find what other people are charging to be the least helpful thing. But the question around value pricing is really interesting because at some point you could and should be making the shift from salary and hourly rate to how much pain are you taking away from your clients.

And that's kind of where the art comes in with the pricing. So yeah, there's various different ways to do that, but for a new consultant, I always start with how much money do you need to be earning if we're thinking about it in terms of salary and let's work back from there.

Nigel Rawlins: Plus they've got to remember they're not able to do 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week because you'll be even more exhausted. But one of the things I do notice about consultants or professionals who work from home, they don't have to go to the meetings anymore. They don't have to have all that time wasting stuff that goes on. So an hour of a professional at home is a hell of a lot more productive than, say, possibly a day or two in an organisation.

Michelle Kvello: Yeah, it absolutely can be. And if you've just got that focus, it's a different kind of mentality and a different kind of focus when you're working as a consultant. And that's also the thing that I talk about in the course around mindset and, you are now a business owner. I hear a lot of that, I'm just a consultant. You're, you are a business owner and you need to wear different hats and you actually have to think about yourself as a business and are you providing really potent value to your client?

Nigel Rawlins: There's a lot to think about, isn't there?

Michelle Kvello: I get a lot of people coming to me kind of feeling totally overwhelmed with all of those things to think about, which is why I've tried to structure it in really bite sized pieces, because it can be incredibly easy to get overwhelmed. It's a very normal feeling and it doesn't mean that this consulting life is not for you.

Nigel Rawlins: I had a look at your course outline and I thought it was very, very good. And I think from a financial perspective, it's, it's really important to look at that. Obviously, they have to learn to manage themselves and run their own operation, and they have to learn how to market themselves .

But, a financial underpinning is really critical in this. And, sometimes, a little part time job in a supermarket pays really, really well to give them that little bit of income a week. Now, when I quit, I was a teacher and I quit 25 years ago, I probably should have gone out and got a bit of a part time job to start because it took me a few years to get going and understand what I was doing.

So there are those opportunities out there to do something different.

Michelle Kvello: 100%. And, with a couple of the people that I've been coaching recently, who've done the kind of the level up from corporate consultant and we've spoken directly. They have managed to negotiate a kind of hybrid role with their current employer. And actually, particularly at the moment, that becomes a really positive conversation, right?

I'm not going to quit. I'm not running away, but I want to do this other thing. But do you need me for maybe two or three days a week? And so that becomes your anchor as you go and explore this consulting world and get your new clients. And a lot of people are scared about having that conversation because they think, Oh no, they'd never go for that.

They'd hate it. Okay, fine. They might hate it. But what's the worst thing that they're going to say is no. Then you're in a no different position, but a lot of the time it's a positive conversation. They don't want to lose a great employee. If they can keep you for a couple of days a week, perfect, and then they can think about how they eventually replace you.

You're not pulling the rug out from them immediately. .

Nigel Rawlins: Sometimes that two or three days, you're able to get as much work done as you were previously doing full time. And, I think that's very revealing. My former mentor was a former Hewlett Packard marketing manager for Australia. He told me when he was in his role, most of his work was done in two days.

The rest of the time he had to hide. And, he was, very, very strategic, very, very focused, probably the most brilliant person I've ever worked with. But, he pointed out that productivity gets drained when you're in a workforce sometimes. And that's where I think the freelance talent thing, the fractional CFO and things like that are coming.

So, is there anything else you'd like to mention? Because we're probably coming to the end now.

Michelle Kvello: Sure, the thing that I always come back to when I'm, when I'm talking to people about this is, that the really key thing is to make sure you've got those support networks around you and just, there's so much information out there. Absorb the information, but also focus on the things that are actually going to make you, let you move forward because as we were talking about before, it can be really easy to start drowning in this overwhelm and having the support networks. Finding the tools are really your key to unlocking what could be the best decision you ever made.

Nigel Rawlins: I agree there. And I think we should say that, sometimes it's worth paying somebody to help you, or pay to do a course. You mentioned about the pain that we alleviate with people. To maybe pay somebody to talk this through and suddenly realise, Oh, okay, you're sort of looking at it the wrong way.

Or, to do a course like yours, I would really suggest that people do a course before they actually quit their job, so they've got a sense of what's involved. Yeah, alright, obviously you're running two businesses here. One is the Lantern Partners, so if somebody is listening to this and they are in a fairly large business, they need that advice.

How would you like them to contact you? And then on the other hand, the corporate consulting. 

Michelle Kvello: So, the best way to, to contact me for either of those things is actually through LinkedIn. The beauty of having an unusual surname is that there's only one Michelle Kvello on LinkedIn, so long as you spell it right. And I'm If you want to find out a bit more about Lantern Partners and the work we do with founders, you can also check out our website, which is www lanternpartners com dot au The Corporate to Consultant course, you can find out more about the modules and how to work with me at www dot corporate to consultant com au. And then just for the fun stuff you can follow along on Instagram, which is just Michelle Kvello.

Nigel Rawlins: Lovely. Well, that's fantastic. So thank you very much, Michelle, for joining me. So thank you again.

Michelle Kvello: So welcome. It was lovely chatting with you.