[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Advice for a Generalist Going Solo?
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Ask HN: Advice for a Generalist Going Solo?
I'm 50. I started my career as a developer but my role over the
past 15 years has morphed into a professional generalist in small
(<10 people) financial firms. I have responsibility for all non-
revenue activities (legal, accounting, audit, operations,
regulatory, etc) so most of the team can focus on revenue. I've
decided to move to another country and that means I'll have to
leave this job. As much as I have enjoyed it, I would like to go
solo / entrepreneurial. Being a generalist with no specific skills,
seems to be both an asset and a liability in such a transition Has
anyone made similar career changes with advice to share? EDIT -
_Great_ responses so far. I 'm particularly interested in hearing
from anyone that went from generalist to a completely different
direction/field. Not just contracting their generalism or
specializing within one of their general fields. Thanks!
Author : paulette449
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-06-02 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Corporate space has a hard time valuing generalists
|
| Crypto space does not, the more you can do, the more value you
| can extract
|
| easy to miss that this is what's happening, but private sector
| failed to value a skillset and another sector did not
| FredPret wrote:
| If it's not government, it's private sector
| yieldcrv wrote:
| ^one sector failed to
|
| you're right, it was a mixture of making a synonym for
| corporate while also trying to distinguish between business
| sectors
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| My experience has been that, atleast from a software development
| perspective, building and launching a product takes much longer
| than you would initially think. And so to be ready for two or
| three times as long to get off the ground. Not sure how that
| applies to non software entrepreneurship
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| For hardware, take your long estimate, and multiply it by about
| 3x more to arrive at a reasonable estimate for launching a
| hardware product. Especially if it's an electronics based
| product.
| a13n wrote:
| Question - is there a name for the role that is responsible for
| "all non-revenue activities (legal, accounting, audit,
| operations, regulatory, etc)"?
|
| Right now I'm doing all of that at our startup and would love to
| find an individual with this exact skillset so that I can focus
| more on hiring, product, and growth.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| > is there a name for the role that is responsible for "all
| non-revenue activities (legal, accounting, audit, operations,
| regulatory, etc)"?
|
| Overworked? I'm not sure legal and accounting are things that
| one can just "do".
|
| I suppose maybe just "operations".
| paulette449 wrote:
| Chief Operating Officer in my case though I have other catch-
| all titles too. lol.
| mike_h wrote:
| When I was younger I tried the generalist consultant thing. Did a
| bunch of interesting jobs and patted myself on the back for being
| able to tackle so many different types of problems, stacks,
| stages of the business, etc. It actually was really fun.
|
| To my surprise though, as I got more and more general the rates I
| could demand got lower and lower, even though I had all these
| successful projects and good references etc. I finally picked up
| on the fact that the only companies who would consider a
| generalist either didn't know what they were doing, or couldn't
| afford an expert in the specific skills they needed.
|
| Decided to specialize in something in-demand, and life got a lot
| easier.
| theonething wrote:
| What did you specialize in?
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Javascript.
| paulette449 wrote:
| I've been lucky in that respect. A lot of start-up financial
| firms in my sector are founded by traders looking to go our on
| their own. The last thing they want to do is deal with "back
| office" matters so it is one space where generalism pays a
| premium.
|
| I've done well and been paid well but I'm moving away from
| generalism for other reasons.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| That almost sounds like a productise-able thing? What is the
| sector ? Is there a "backend in a box" possible ?
| noodle wrote:
| I've had mixed experience here. It REALLY depends on what
| you're specializing in; specialization alone doesn't cut it.
| Also, you can get away with being a skills generalist if you
| instead specialize in a field/topic/etc (IMO).
|
| So its more about positioning, I think. How you're able to sell
| yourself and the skills you have.
| mike_h wrote:
| Agree on both points, and quite possible the "small financial
| firms" thing the OP has been doing is a targetable niche.
| ISL wrote:
| I once met a programmer who, while broadly skilled, had looked
| around and seen that .NET programmers were in high demand: "So,
| I became a .NET programmer!", and things worked out well for
| him.
|
| That observation has resonated in my head since.
| jameshush wrote:
| "only companies who wanted a generalist either didn't know what
| they were doing, or couldn't afford an expert in the specific
| skills they needed." Spot on.
|
| I went down the same path, and came to the same conclusion.
| Most of the time you don't even have to learn that many new
| skills to "specialize", you can just change the messaging and
| positioning on your website/resume/conversations with future
| clients.
| emeraldd wrote:
| Be an expert with the ability to generalize in your back pocket
| when you need to. A generalist skill set does not mean you have
| to do generalist jobs either.
| mr90210 wrote:
| If anyone hasn't recommended, you should join IndieHackers.com's
| community.
|
| You'll find people on a similar path.
| Stronico wrote:
| It's important not to overthink this - You're a specialist at
| being you, more specifically you have a bundle of skills, some of
| which will be useful to people with both problems and money. All
| you can really do is to isolate those skills, give them a name,
| and offer that as a service.
|
| Based on your original description - you are an expert in "back
| office" skills.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I'd make sure to validate the business idea while still on a
| paycheck. Burning your savings with no success is more and more
| painful as years go by. It was already painful at 33 for me :)
| I_dev_outdoors wrote:
| I'd say it's less painful as you're closer to retirement since
| a large portion of your earnings are coming from compounding
| interest.
| paulette449 wrote:
| I agree 100%. My move is 12-18 months out. I'm ready for an
| income drop, just not to zero.
| allynjalford wrote:
| Focus on building a solution to a problem. Not your problem, but
| a paying customers defined problem.
| noodle wrote:
| Depends on what you want to do. Entrepreneurial as in start your
| own consulting company? Or starting a startup where you're
| (generally speaking) selling a product of some sort?
| paulette449 wrote:
| Great question. I've always felt "entrepreneurial leanings". Of
| my parents and siblings, I'm the only "employee". Unfortunately
| I've always been paid generously enough to curb those leanings.
| i think this is as good a time as any to test those "leanings"
| and reading about entrepreneurship and take a risk. Having
| worked for 25 years, I need to de-institutionalize my thinking
| and figure out what I'd like to do. It would have to be a
| passion project thogh because at this stage of life, that's
| what is going to drive me.
| noodle wrote:
| IMO step 1 is figuring out what kind of business you want to
| build.
| gammabetadelta wrote:
| Sell yourself as a specialist consultant, invariably companies
| need generalists they just don't know that they do.
| atlgator wrote:
| There are riches in niches.
| summertime42 wrote:
| Specialize to catch the attention of HR/Recruiters/VPs; you are
| right, no one wants a generalist.
|
| However, I find once I get in and do my specialty, I'll then
| generalize and flex as the project needs me. I am paid to be nice
| and make problems go away, above all.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| > I am paid to be nice and make problems go away, above all.
|
| Absolutely. Sometimes I'm also just paid to be ,,that outside
| guy" who can bring in fresh ideas or change things that were
| set in stone just by virtue of not having a stake in internal
| corporate politics and not looking to take away anyone's cushy
| job.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Been a generalist self-employed consultant (non-I.T.) for 20
| years. Some suggestions:
|
| * To do well, you'll need to learn how to consult -- your skill
| set and the skill set of consulting are two very different
| things.
|
| * Even as a generalist, you need to figure out what you can do
| better than anyone else. That might be a specific skill or it
| might be particularly compelling packaging of your skills but,
| either way, you have to stand out. If you don't, you're competing
| on price and client stupidity, and both are a good way to be
| frustrated and poor.
|
| * Have rules and stick to them. Mine were always: No clients who
| had never hired a consulting solution in my space before, because
| the training-wheels stage takes time. And no clients who were so
| small that the owner was my primary point of contact -- when
| you're spending your contact's butter-and-egg money, it makes for
| messier engagements.
|
| * Learn to sell. You'll want to believe that you can do in on
| social media, do it with the strength of your existing network,
| blah, blah, blah. Nope -- all of those things will eventually
| fail you and you won't have developed the sales muscle to get
| through the dip. You have to get good at aggregating and then
| talking to strangers. convincing them of your value. Related: Set
| your rate high enough that you are living good on 1,000 hours of
| billable work a year or less. That gives you a lot of time to
| market.
|
| * There's unreasonable value in being easy to work with. Fixed
| fees. One-line invoices. Charging a high-enough rate that it's
| easy to say yes to minor scope tweaks without having to change
| the contract. Stuff like that stands out.
| sultanofsaltin wrote:
| One of the most overlooked strategies I've found for lining up
| new work is to be always helping others find gigs when they need
| them. This is a great long and short game (and it feels good). If
| you help someone land a dream job and they need a pinch hitter
| down the line, it can be a great stepping stone from small
| businesses to top tier clients.
|
| In the short term, helping friends and people you meet find their
| dream jobs almost always pays off in a good friendship, intros,
| and occasionally sub-market help when those individuals are
| looking to broaden their skills and you want to take a risk /
| increase capacity. It can feel scary to add payables, but it's
| much easier to sell when you can confidently go into a meeting
| and say: I/ we've never done that before, but we have a really
| healthy network to pull fresh devs from, it mitigates very legit
| concerns of on the job training. Any savvy client that's going to
| challenge you to bring your A game will sniff out being oversold
| from your first conversation.
|
| Also, don't overstay. Especially right now, with startups having
| real concerns about their ability to raise, getting 2 projects
| with a few months in gap from the same client can be a great way
| for you to have a natural renegotiation about rates, work-style,
| etc without running the risk of bikeshedding, which is bad for
| everyone (your skills will suffer, making it harder to write
| clean, short proposals). This habit allows you time to make sure
| you've got good deal-flow and that you're showcasing work
| regularly, and you stay relevant.
| sumy23 wrote:
| I moved to a different country and attempted to start a business.
| I failed, but here is what I learned:
|
| 1) Doing business in a foreign country is hard. Your two options
| are to target your new country or target your home country. If
| you target your home country, meeting with potential clients is
| going to be hard due to the physical distance and the time zone
| difference. If you target your new country, you're going to be at
| a disadvantage from a language and business relations
| perspective. Also, pretty much every country is inferior to the
| U.S. in terms of business development. Companies outside of the
| U.S. can be much more risk adverse and unlikely to do business
| with an upstart.
|
| 2) Getting a cofounder is really important. Moving to a different
| country can be lonely, and running a business can be stressful
| with a lot of failures. You need a partner in your business to
| lean on and to fill in for your weaknesses.
|
| 3) Have a good idea of your business plan before you start. You
| should basically have people lined up to use your product before
| you build anything. If you don't have that, it's likely you won't
| have a product people want once you build your product.
| pmarreck wrote:
| With cofounders, do you have any advice on how to make sure
| everyone's OK with how everyone else is contributing
| (especially in a remote situation)? or is it just a lot of
| candid communication combined with some trust?
| neonbat wrote:
| What's most important is to have complimentary skills and
| shared values. Lots of clues to what sharing values can look
| like:
|
| 1- social cues (do they say or do things the same or
| different?) 2- similar goals/motivations (do you often pursue
| similar milestones? do their motivations match or compliment
| yours?) 3- similar methods/reasons (do they think in lean
| terms? or large strategic moves? are they abstract? or ultra
| practical and metric driven?)
|
| Make sure you can trust this person and that they always try
| to follow through on what they say. Understand how their own
| perception of their own status and recognition by others
| affects their decision making. I'd advise to watch very
| closely what they do, and weight what they say
| (justifications, rationalizations,) very lightly.
| caffeine wrote:
| My advice is, watch your costs. When you leave paying work it's
| easy to think the slug you've got in the bank will last a while.
|
| But traction will take 2-3x longer than you think, and an
| unexpected stream of "one-offs" will eat your runway.
|
| So be extremely conservative on costs from the very beginning.
| nathias wrote:
| don't try to do everything yourself
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| (find cofounders, or teammates/a network you can look to for
| the things you don't do well!)
| nathias wrote:
| I think the challenge for generalists would be to find other
| people to do things you can actually also do better than the
| people you can hire and live with that.
| paulette449 wrote:
| In my case, you are right. An accountant, a lawyer, a HR
| professional etc could each do that element of the job
| better than I could yet I doubt any of them could do all
| aspects of my job better than I do.
|
| The question is scale. When you're a small firm that needs
| all these services, you cannot afford a professional in
| each role so you outsource all those functions to larger
| firms ... but you still need someone internal to have
| enough depth of knowledge of each field to direct and
| validate the specialists' work. There is absolutely no "set
| it and forget it" when it comes to outsourcing the
| professional services that keep a (heavily regulated)
| company ticking over.
| mooreds wrote:
| I've been a generalist in tech and a contractor, so my
| experience, while not directly applicable, may be helpful to you.
|
| In my mind, being a solopreneur is all about lead flow; that's
| the toughest part for me. I leaned heavily on my network as they
| knew the quality of my work and I didn't have to sell them much.
| I'd start reaching out to everyone who you have worked with in
| the past decade and letting them know you are looking. My
| favorite phrasing, which doesn't put past contacts on the spot,
| is "I'm looking to do XYZ. Do you know anyone who is looking for
| such help?"
|
| I'd go looking for work 6-8 weeks before my contract ended (I
| tended to have 1-2 at a time).
|
| You could also look at productized services, though I didn't do
| much of that. More on that here:
| https://neilpatel.com/blog/productized-services/ Maybe a 'startup
| package' which handles most of the toil to get an org set up?
| djbusby wrote:
| Every startup I've ever spent any time at has needed help on
| the business administration side. Nobody likes that paperwork
| and the packaged services are incomplete. Needs an experienced
| human.
| mooreds wrote:
| Yes, at $CURJOB both the founder and CEO (different people)
| spend plenty of time on the biz admin side, even with part
| time accounting and CFO folks to help.
| paulette449 wrote:
| I think you are right re: productized services. I don't want to
| go from employed generalist to contractor generalist. I've been
| an IT contractor earlier in my career and I felt it was just
| another form of employment, with certain advantages and
| disadvantages (ymmv). I had been thinking of pivoting out of
| generalism completely but perhaps productizing some aspect of
| what I have done/learned is worth exploring. Thanks
| mooreds wrote:
| > I don't want to go from employed generalist to contractor
| generalist.
|
| Ah, then you'll want to specialize. I've seen this work for
| many folks and I did to some extent (definitely got egg on my
| face because I thought "<new tech X> can't be hard to learn,
| I'll just accept this contract and pick it up". Narrator:
| <new tech X> was indeed hard to learn).
|
| If you are looking to specialize, I can't recommend Amy Hoy's
| work enough: https://stackingthebricks.com/ The team there
| has a ton of articles, books and whatnot to help you find the
| focus you need.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Pick a niche and become visible great at it. Make sure you have
| an efficient process for generating leads and new customers.
| ISL wrote:
| Going solo may only make sense if you plan to take on a number of
| clients.
|
| If you're planning to work with one at a time, you can avoid the
| overhead and costs of running your own company by convincing
| desirable companies to simply hire you.
| pphysch wrote:
| In which case you can potentially evolve your employment into
| your first contract, while moonlighting additional leads.
| encoderer wrote:
| Sorry, how can you handle legal, accounting, etc, in a different
| country? Python is just python no matter where you go but
| obviously laws don't work that way. How does this work?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Compliance, contracts, and accounting are at their core pretty
| similar throughout the world. The details differ locally, of
| course. Think of it like running your Python code in different
| environments without the benefit of containers.
|
| This is not just an international thing, some types of
| businesses need to do this on a state-by-state basis within the
| U.S., or even for localities like city or county. For example
| retail chains may have to deal with signage and parking laws
| that differ from town to town.
|
| A person leading operations interacts with local subject matter
| experts to succeed in these areas. The structure of those
| interactions is pretty consistent: you tell them your business
| priorities, and they tell you the risks. You make business
| decisions based on those conversations, and then monitor for
| changes.
| paulette449 wrote:
| Great question.
|
| Take legal for example. I spend a lot of my time working with
| lawyers in countries where we are setting up a vehicle /
| working with a client but where I am not domiciled and IANAL in
| any country! I decide with our management team what kind of
| legal structure we want, the terms, the carve-outs, the
| financials etc and I draft layperson's language based on that.
| Our (external) legal team will turn that into a 60-100 page
| document that is compliant with the laws of the territory in
| question. I will review that in excruciating detail, look for
| errors, edit and iterate many times until the document is good
| for our purposes. This really means going through every kind of
| scenario (defaults, bankruptcies, early termination for any
| reason, loss of key personnel etc etc) to make sure nothing
| will bite us in the butt down the road. Once the vehicle is
| launched, it is my job to make sure that the financial vehicle
| follows the rules laid out in the legal document on a day-to-
| day basis. By this stage, I know every clause in that legal
| document, usually better than the drafting lawyers because I'm
| the one that "lives" with the document. I can do all of that
| without being a lawyer or being knowledgable about the specific
| laws of the territory where the vehicle is based (which is not
| necessarily where I am domiciled) because other people bring
| that local knowledge to the table.
|
| So .. while as a firm we hire outside counsel to perform our
| legal work, it is far from outsourced. I am heavily involved
| with my business knowledge and prior experience with legal
| documents (learned on the job), and the lawyers have their
| legal knowledge, prior precedence and all-important templates.
| And we marry the two to craft and manage our legal agreements
| and vehicles. I am confident I could apply that skill in any
| country with similar legal foundations to the US.
|
| To be clear, I cannot think of any scenario where you would
| allow a non-lawyer generalist to operate without external
| counsel.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Possible scenario: OP has gone abroad for their current job and
| is now returning to the country where they grew up and is
| familiar with all the rules, perhaps even friends back from
| school who became accountants, attorneys, etc.'
| [deleted]
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