Why I Went Solo

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I can't remember exactly when the fantasy started, but it was probably when I was in college. I dreamed of going into business for myself. And I mean really for myself. No boss, no partners, no employees. Just me and the customers. Finally, six years ago, when I was 36 years old, I took the plunge.

At the time I was one of three partners in a small executive-search business on the West Coast. We were a 15-person, top-quality recruiting firm, successful and growing. I'd joined the company four years earlier after managing personnel departments in two large corporations, and since I was the best of our threesome at managing people, I was the partner designated to do most of the supervision. The arrangement was fine by me since I like being a manager. The problem was that I also like dealing with clients, and as my managerial duties increased, I had less time to spend on searches.

Traditionally, the way to grow and make money in the executive-search business is to have less skilled and lower-paid employees do as much of the search work as possible, leaving the partners free for the more complicated tasks. Our company was a financial success and an example of how well this structure worked, but I never fully accepted it as the way I wanted to do searches. If I were goint to recruit top executives, I wanted the time to be able to interact with the clients and the candidates from beginning to end. So I found myself slightly out of sync with my two partners. I wanted a small, stable business in which I could still be involved in the searches; they wanted a fast-growing business that would spin off lots of cash and enable them eventually to devote less time to it. The way things were set up, I was going to be the manager who would make all this possible.

Because I was in my mid-thirties and my partners were in their mid-forties, we had different perspectives on life that created other problems as well. To take one example, I felt strongly that we should be incorporated so that I could defer income. They insisted that we remain a partnership so we could make as much current income as possible. We talked quite openly about these issues but couldn't find a way to resolve them to everyone's satisfaction.

The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the time had come for me to turn my fantasy into reality. I was convinced that executive search was one of those businesses I could do by myself. Yet I have to admit that as I came closer to making a decision to leave the firm, I did feel some moments of trepidation. My worst fear was not that I'd fail, but that I wouldn't be as successful as I wanted to be and that being on my own wouldn't be worth the effort it was going to take. Part of my uneasiness had to do with my upbringing. My father worked for the U.S. government all his life, so as a family, the idea of job risk never even entered our heads. And while my friends and acquaintances were supportive, they also pointed out the difficulties I was likely to encounter.

You're going to be perceived as being between "real" jobs, some said, and what kind of credibility do you think that will give you with big companies? Some were quick to tell me that the world is too tough to be in business for yourself, that you need people around you to help generate clients. You don't have any built-in clients, so where is the money going to come from? How are you going to pay fixed costs? How are you going to compete with the large firms that dominate your industry? Did you ever think about how lonely you're going to be without anyone to talk with? And on and on.

A final consideration not to be overlooked in my decision making was that my wife gave birth to our first child just as I was reaching an agreement with my partners to leave. That did nothing to ease my worries about financial pressures, but, luckily for me, my wife was totally supportive of my decision. In fact, she had more confidence than I had in my ability to succeed in my new venture. Still, I had to think through the likely consequences of leaving the firm.

I'll be forever grateful that I took the leap. I'm having a wonderful time being on my own. The ups have been higher than I expected, and the downs haven't been nearly as low as I feared. One truly extraordinary revelation for me is that I have yet to meet a successful solo practitioner in any discipline who has any enthusiasm at all for going back to a corporation, no matter what the size. I have met many successful senior-level corporate executives who hunger to escape that environment.

When I first left my old firm, I gave myself some time to think about where I was heading. The financial settlement I got as part of the buy-back agreement with my partners had given me a small yet essential cushion. But, on the downside, the agreement prohibited me from going after any of the firm's client companies for a year. In effect, I had walked out the door without one guaranteed search. Still, I resisted the temptation to jump right in looking for clients.

Instead, I spent my first two months at home with my new daughter. At the same time, I began to put some of the pieces together for when I would begin my venture in earnest. One of my first moves was in reaction to my frustration over being in a partnership: I incorporated. I also made two strategic decisions during that time at home. First, since I couldn't hope to be all things to all people, I pushed myself to focus on a very particular market: young high-technology companies. My decision was made in part because there are a lot of these companies around the San Francisco Bay area, where I live, and in part because I particularly enjoyed the relationships I had developed with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Second, I had to figure out a way to organize my time, since I didn't want to hire any staff. My best tack, I decided, would be to have as much data on hand as possible, both on potential clients and prospective executives to fill searches. I spent quite some time in those two months gathering this information and thinking about ways to use it effectively.

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