No One Owns My Calendar (Mostly)

Invariably, people are curious about what a full-time switch over into independent consulting looks like. I suspect everyone wants to know if they could make it work for themselves, and how 🙂.

Are the pros really as good as they seem? Are there unexpectedly unpalatable bits? Michael Seiler and I did an AMA towards the end of last year not long after we launched Sprout Informatics, where we discussed some of the operational “how-tos” and early challenges. With a year of operating experience under our belts now, we’ll be doing a 1-year update soon.

Before that, though, I wanted to provide a more personal account of my thoughts over the last year, after we jumped feet-first into running a business without a clue between us. Because while by and large, our top-line assumptions going in have borne out over the past year, there were a few personal surprises as well.

Pros

Yes, the ability to “set your own schedule” is amazing and introduces a level of flexibility that you can’t really dream of in a 9-to-5 full-time role.

e.g.

• This is the first year (of 10) that I saw sunlight every single day during a Boston winter.

• The first year (since when, even??) where we’ve had a home cooked meal almost every single night.

• The first year (of 7) that I didn’t worry when a child got sick, or there was a snow day, or a teacher workday, or an unexpected half day of school (so many, why???).

• And every morning wasn’t a mad dash to get the kids fed and out the door in time to rush to a 9AM meeting (curses! In person, and in Boston! And this, coming from someone who is a fan of in-person meetings).

• And I started taking cycling classes???!

I may not have predicted these would be the examples that stuck out as especially noteworthy, but in hindsight that is clearly because I had never experienced any of these before, and I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

In a nutshell, being an independent consultant affords you the privilege to live free of someone else’s clock* (of course there’s a disclaimer, because if things are going well and you like your clients and are staying busy, you are probably beholden to someone’s timelines, to some extent).

Cons

But (and you knew a “but” was coming), “set your own schedule” doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. If the work is not getting done during the regular working day, it’s getting done into the wee hours of the late night, every night. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, sometimes, or often, depending on the season.

And there are other “buts”, some of which I understood on the surface but took a while longer to hit home, like the standard:

• Time off is never paid.
• Outreach isn’t billable.
• You won’t hear back from most people you cold outreach to.
• Conversations don’t equal contracts, and a promise isn’t a check.

And the operational:

• You have to pay for health insurance out of pocket 😭.

And the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants:

• More often than you might think, you get thrown into a fire and are expected to do stuff and make decisions ASAP, even if the contract literally just kicked off days earlier and you know next to nothing about anything (except your subject matter expertise, ofc).

Personally, I find the above fun and exciting, but I’m listing it here under the “cons” list because it didn’t fit thematically into my list of “pros” above 🤷.

Can you make the same take-home salary as you did working 9 to 5? Yes, probably, but it’s not easy, it will take time, and you have to be able to weather the down months.

Maybe the more difficult thing is the inconsistency—you never know when one contract may suddenly end, or one slow, drawn-out conversation finally kicks off (usually while you’re on vacation, fyi), or one verbal “let’s get started!” turns into two months of “actually we need to figure out X, Y, Z….”, followed by crickets.

I don’t think any of this is surprising, but when it is your day-to-day, and there isn’t a “backup” 9-to-5 salary with benefits floating you in the background, it can hit differently: You can feel highly productive one morning and completely unmoored by the afternoon.

My personal variety of special cons

Surprisingly—to me, at least—the two most unexpectedly challenging things for me were not on the list above.

The first pain point was actually a mental reckoning that, now that I’m selling my services on an hourly (or project-based, or retainer) basis, I am, in fact, a salesperson. As such, regardless of my experience or love for the science, many people will treat me as a salesperson first and then only warily as a scientist.

When you’re accustomed to being “part of the team” and trusted to have the company’s best interest at heart by default, suddenly being locked out feels very jarring—because let’s face it, no one trusts someone in sales (sorry), and it feels sad to not be trusted. I haven’t gotten over this, tbh.

However, I’ve changed my expectations when I interact with potential clients, especially people I don’t know. If anything, I am less “intentional” than I was before: It’s fun to have conversations about cool science, and to worry less about “selling”, per se. Maybe I can contribute something, maybe I can’t; maybe the stars align, maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m a bad salesperson 😅.

The second pain point dawned on me really just in the last couple of months, when the initial buzz and excitement started to quiet down. Working at a biotech full-time, you have the shared group mission that you wake up to every day (can you tell I always drank the kool-aid?), day in and day out. Maybe it’s a program, or a platform, or some infrastructure, or some unknown biology you’re all trying to suss out. But it is shared, and it is continuous.

As a consultant, you may have some clients who take you on long term and bring you along on their journey, but that isn’t always the case. You may parachute in one day, work on a specific project for a month, or two, or three, start to get to know the team and the science, and then suddenly one day they have what they want (or they don’t), and you’re parachuted out just as quickly.

Some of the people I’ve spoken with really love the parachute-in/parachute-out kind of work. Some have gone back to in-house after missing that sense of ownership. For some, it has to do with where they are in their careers, in addition to their personality.

It turns out I’m a mission-driven kind of person. What does that mean for me, long-term? As I was advised recently, “Don’t try to plan for the next 25 years of your career. Start with the next 5”. So, I guess we’ll see how things go.

My takeaway, 1 year in

It’s been a year. Sprout Informatics has worked with 10+ companies, from seed stage to VC funded to publicly traded, across the US and EU, from N<5 to N>100. We’ve worked with therapeutics, platform, and diagnostics companies. We’ve had a greater variety of experiences than we could have imagined at the start of last fall.

My main takeaway, after all of the above, has less to do with consulting itself and more to do with my first post in this series, and my planned last post (which I’ll probably never write): Co-founding Sprout has granted me time and optionality to a degree I never knew before in my professional career.

When was the last time you sat down and asked yourself what it is you really want to do? What energizes you? What drives you?

What would you do with your time if no one else owned it?

It is a surprisingly hard question, taken seriously.

For me, it’s staying up way too late, bouncing between being extremely productive and spiraling into the void.

…

No but actually, I considered so many potential paths and they all led me back to science. The way that I get to practice science looks different than it did a year ago, maybe: I do stay up way too late, but I choose to do so now because doing so makes space in my life for other things that matter to me, that can get robbed when your time is not your own: family, food, sunlight, mentorship.

And so I ask again: What would you do with your time if no one else owned it? What would you learn about yourself?