The New Face of Self-Employment

At Indigo Partners, the rules are different. Unlike traditional entrepreneurs, Indigo's partners aren't scrambling to grow a company; their joy is in the work they do and doing it on their own terms.

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When are soloists not soloists? When they're members of Indigo Partners -- "the ultimate entrepreneurial engine."

Jennifer Overholt sighed and gazed out the window at her dark, still street. On her home PC her hard drive whirred as a search engine combed the Internet for an obscure statistic on women's health. Finding no results, Overholt fought the urge to assault her monitor. It was one a.m. Her client expected to see the statistic in that day's presentation. And Overholt had run out of places to look for it.

Despairing, Overholt shot an instant message to Michelle Lee, a night owl who she thought was likely to be awake and online. "Still hunting?" came the immediate reply from Lee. "Try these links." "Thank goodness for partners," Overholt typed back before she dug into the Web once again.

Overholt and Lee are partners -- but not in the traditional sense. Their company, Indigo Partners ( www.indigohq.com), is an unusual hybrid that offers corporate customers the broad services of a group consultancy while preserving the perks of a soloist for its individual partners. Having begun life in 1996 as an informal support group for on-their-own marketing consultants, Indigo today has dozens of customers and a shared approach to strategy and competitive analysis. Its projects range from investigating new markets for Fortune 500 companies to reformulating the business road maps of failing start-ups.

Indigo's six partners have created an organism -- so loose an amalgam can scarcely be called an organization -- suffused with the energy of autonomy. The partners tackle projects on their own or in small teams. There is no hierarchy; there are no regularly scheduled meetings. Overholt and her cohorts -- an intense and experienced bunch, many of whom have young children -- labor in their homes, setting their own hours and workload. Anyone can leave the partnership for any length of time and for any reason. One partner left for a year to work at what was, at the time, a hot start-up. Another took the summer off to join her husband, whose job had required that he go to London.

Michelle Lee: She'd been a worldwide product manager at Hewlett-Packard and VP of marketing at an Internet start-up. But Lee wanted flexibility to work on projects that excited her, and to keep the hours she liked.

Indigo Partners has no overhead, no assets to manage. There is no central office or secretarial pool. There are no accounting services. Most projects are bid on a fixed-price basis, so there's no need to track hours. The partners' equity is in themselves, and they are constantly boosting their own value through education and experience. For projects that require heavy lifting, they temporarily bulk up by using people from a large pool of specialized freelancers that they have personally recruited. After four years of operation, the business finally incorporated in 2000 -- but only to simplify the paperwork that comes with projects from large companies like Microsoft.

By endowing individuals with the marketing and project- management resources of a whole group, Indigo is leading a trend that could transform soloist services, a vigorous but somewhat amorphous segment of the economy that encompasses everything from manicurists to recruiters to insurance agents. Although an exact number for the self-employed remains elusive, statistics for the past year or two hover around 20 million. Unlike traditional entrepreneurs, soloists aren't panting to grow a company. Their joy is in the work they do and in doing it without the burden of managing anyone but themselves. They own what they earn, but more important, they own their decisions.

Jennifer Overholt: The former product marketing manager at Sun Microsystems tried the traditional solo life, only to find herself working more hours rather than fewer.

Companies, of course, are the antithesis of solo life in both form and spirit, but soloists have not eschewed everything about them. For example, a growing number of the self-employed flock to shared office space in search of psychological and technical ballast, and companies like My Virtual Corp. ( www.myvirtualcorp.com) channel work to stables of soloists. But Indigo Partners is more than just a group of soloists plumping itself out with services that it contracts for on a project-by-project basis. "The Indigo partnership is a new species of business, what I call the 'real-time networked business' made possible by the Internet," says Ian MacMillan, professor of entrepreneurial management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. "It is the ultimate entrepreneurial engine -- created instantly for attacking the problem, paid only for the solution to the problem. No overheads. No slack time. No waste."

That's how the outside world sees Indigo. The company's internal partnership agreement -- until recently its only legal documentation -- explains how the members see themselves: "We want to work as management consultants, but would also like to spend a significant amount of time with our families, traveling, writing, and on personal development," the agreement states. "Because these activities, and others deriving from like interests that may arise over time, are incompatible with the demands of partnership in a more traditional consulting organization, we wanted to partner with others who wanted a similar, decidedly low-key and informal approach to the business affiliation itself."

The Pros and Cons of Single Life

The Silicon Valley-based M.B.A.'s who make up Indigo are all onetime soloists who found the reality of going it alone less compelling than the promise. Overholt, for example, used a year's worth of savings to set out her shingle as a consultant in 1994. As a Wharton grad and former product marketing manager at Sun Microsystems, she yearned for greater variety in markets, products, and technologies. As an athlete, she also wanted more time to travel to Ultimate Frisbee tournaments. Consulting seemed the natural pursuit for a woman of polished social skills, enviable efficiency, and the ability to quickly break big messy problems into manageable tasks.

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