Outrunning Ageism and Building a Second Career

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Yet another CTO Advisor podcast. I have Bessie Tong, who is the founder of Authority Architect. I think this is going to be interesting for the whole audience, but specifically for those of us that are at an age point where we're worried about aging out of the workforce. What is it that you're helping them do? Great question. The world of work we know is shifting. Those of us who have built decades of expertise and experience, and there's so much that we have to give and so much we can do with it.

The problem is that the standard workplace and easy apply with the keyword search software and all that other stuff does not play to our strengths. When I was 56, two years ago, I myself was laid off. Before that, I was on the, I've got a few more years to retire bus, was put in my hours. I had automated my work. My CEO didn't know. I wasn't working that hard, but I was getting paid. Then I got the call, which took about five minutes of, hey Bessie, we're going to go in different directions now.

I was like, oh, okay. That was both the worst day of my life as well as the best, because it was not a job that was fulfilling to me. It was just a job I was collecting a paycheck in, but the day after I looked at myself and I said, what do I do now? I do not want to go back into the recruiting, trying to fit myself into some job description, and I felt like I needed to do something else. That's when I started to think about this idea.

How do I help others do what I did? Which is take our expertise and our knowledge and turn that into a business. We know the world of work is changing. We know that more and more companies will need people like us less and less, but they'll still need us, but not as full-time as consultants. That's really the opportunity ahead that I help people find. I think the best example of this is what I'm finding in my business, that competitive analysis is a great example of places that have laid off their complete competitive analysis team.

They've given the BUs that require the data and insights, they've given them a budget to go out and get those insights, but where do they go to get them? I think this has become an opportunity for folks that have worked in competitive analysis. This is just an example of how to package up what they've done to offer skill, but it's not as simple as saying, hey, I can write that report for you. In this day and age, the reality is knowledge is a commodity, but transformation and insight are not.

Anybody knows they can make AI write a competitive intelligence report, but not everybody can construct or architect, in my terms, what a good report looks like and then what to do with the insights that come out of it. That is where people like us need to use AI and come up with that next layer of expertise. I think that that's one point. This is a period where it's never been easier to be an entrepreneur, particularly in the knowledge space, because when you know what good is, you can use AI to 10x your excellence, which I'm sure you're already seeing.

The second thing that is true for most people that have been corporate warriors like us for decades is when you turn in your badge, you no longer have the team, you no longer have the company logo, and you think, what do I do next? I take people through an eight-week process that says, who is your ideal customer? When we are in big companies, we have to talk about TAM, SAM, SOM, and all this theory. Well, for an individual consultant, your market is your connections.

Your market is people who will take a call from you. It's a very tangible, tactical thing, and so you have to identify that person, really who you want to work with, because it's hard to work with clients you don't want to work with, and it's hard to work with clients sometimes, and so you might as well be somebody you like, but it really has to be a person that you can see and picture. And then how do you package your expertise into a methodology?

Because people can't buy you, and you don't want to be somebody that is out there as a contract worker doing rate times hours. You want to package your expertise into a methodology, like the Keith framework, that's a method that shows clients not just that you've done it before, but you have a method that they can use with your expertise that gets them the transformation that they want at an accelerated pace, at a reduced risk, at more exponential growth, whatever it is, but that's where you start to define yourself as a value, not as knowledge.

And that's a really critical requirement if you're going to be successful in a consulting business. First, knowing who you're urgent to and what problems you solve for them, and then positioning yourself as not competitive intelligence, but what is a 32 millimeter drill bit that you are for the 32 millimeter hole that they want? So help me walk through this mental challenge that a lot of folks face. You know, they built frameworks, you know, usually at this career level, you've built the framework, you've implemented the systems.

The problem is you and you keyed on this earlier in your first point, is that before you have a team to kind of do the low level work. I'm a consultant. I don't have a team. I do have AI, but I don't have a team. How do I replace that team with AI, which is, I don't know if everyone is really clear on how that works. So I use AI in very specific roles, and let's take the example of book writing.

So, you know, I help a lot of my clients create books, and I'm deliberately using the word create versus write. And using my system, I can create a book in 10 hours. And this is not about AI generating a ton of schlock, but it really is the system that removes the blocks that stop people who want to from writing a book. And so for a consultant, the prestige of having a book and being able to use that as part of their marketing is good, right?

So in any case, so that's how I end up writing books. But I put together a factory of custom GPTs for the people who are writing books. So we have a development editor. We create their ideal reader. And these, in the starting points, are people personas that they talk to about the content of the book, the narrative structure, and whether the arguments or the method is at all insightful, right? And so it's a very different way of thinking about doing a project, in this case, writing a book.

And then we have, in my book, one of my books, I created a New York Times reviewer to review the book and give me a review. And he said it was okay for a first-time author, which cracked me up. I was like, great, I'll take that. But the point is that I'm not even talking about agents or anything terribly fancy. I am talking about creating personas that work with you in a way that you would have had teams do before. Does that make sense?

Yes, I have a GPT, a custom GPT, that has basically, let's say, two or three dozen of my blog posts. This is my writing style. Here's the posts that were successful. Help me by giving me frameworks or ideas or outlines or the language in the sequences that have worked for me in the past. And that has been an amazing unblocker. I just give it, you know, it spits out an outline, and then we go further. And you've developed a process to take that idea even further.

I think the following one, the next thing or the next question in the series of questions I want to ask is this idea of Rolodex. Mm-hmm. I've personally had a massive career across several industries. I've met a lot of people. There are a lot of people that I can help. How should I approach having kind of too many people that I can help? So when you're a solopreneur, and especially when you start, there's this feeling of scarcity that we get into, right?

We have to go help everybody. We got to offer everything to everybody. And that's a great way to, number one, get burnt out really quickly. And number two, never sell anything. Because it's really, really hard to be a generalist in this market. Because most of the people that we know, when you get to a certain level in the companies that we rose in, you have a great range, right? You're a generalist problem solver. You can fix anything. But when you're out in the world trying to sell, nobody can really hear that.

They have to know you can solve the exact problem and pain that they're having in the moment that they need it. They don't need generalist support. And so you have to get an outside-in perspective in that, which is, yes, you do have a great Rolodex. And yes, you probably could help a lot of people with a lot of different things. But for you to have a sustainable business where the business is working for you rather than you being a low-paid worker working 60, 70-hour weeks in your own business, you have to really be selective and really be pointed and focused.

And that's honestly one of the biggest problems of most people that I work with is they don't want to be focused. They're like, well, I could do this. I could deal with this. I could do this. Like, great, but you can't manage multiple clients doing five different things for each one. It just, it is not possible as a solopreneur. The first version of the CTO Advisor, my original business model, was going to be two phases. I'd give advisory consulting and I'd do content marketing.

And I quickly discovered those are two very different motions and two very different back ends. And it split my attention. I could not deliver to two very different customers because it's not even the same buyer. So I focused on one buyer. So I had to pick a path and we chose content marketing. And I'm faced with that decision yet again, because I built a great content marketing business and now I want to build a better advisory business. But I personally can still do pretty good at content marketing.

So this is not something that, you know, that you decide and goes away and you never have to deal with it again. It is a content reinvention of yourself. So with that, I think that the second question I want to ask is something that we're all very familiar with. Especially we worked on a technology provider side of this. It's product market fit. There's what we want to do and then there's what people pay us to do. A good friend of mine said that, hey, you can have a hamburger stand and sell a lot of hamburgers and you'll see the steakhouse across the street and they're doing really well.

You have to make the decision if you want to sell steaks, if you want to sell hamburgers. So I would always say, if you are a solopreneur and you are like us with a deep, deep, deep level of experience, sell the freaking steak. We are not entrepreneurs to be corporate philanthropy. We're in business. Business means you have to make money. And you cannot sell to people and make a living if they don't have money. So don't do that. Sell the steak, not the burgers.

Get the margin, right? The second thing that I will say is that a lot of entrepreneurs get into that even worse than paycheck to paycheck, but it's kind of client to client of money comes in and then I spend it and then, oh my God, I'm in a crisis moment again financially. And one of the very, very important things that I do with my clients is get them into a profit first thinking mode, which is that whatever you're pricing, right? A portion of that has to go to your compensation.

A portion of that has to go to the taxman and a portion of that has to go to a profit pool. And then the rest goes to whatever else is happening in the business. And if you can't afford what is happening in the expense side, then you have to rethink the expense side, right? Because so many of us just leap in and we are not clear on how the cash is flowing. And then we end up spending more money than we're making without realizing it just because of the cash cycles.

And yeah, go ahead. It's very easy. It happened to me early on. There's this $900 thing that I want to get. There's this $500 thing that I want to get. And after a while, you look at it and you're like, wait, why do I have an $8,000 credit card bill? I don't have that much in recurring expenses and it's really easy to do that. And then the follow-on problem, I guess the last question I want to ask you is kind of you know, packaging your services.

Because there's this idea that I need to trade my time for money. And consulting is kind of the easy, well, I'll charge $500 an hour, which sounds like a lot of money that really isn't in this model. No, I mean, first of all, I have a mentor who says all the time, their budget is your price. And not the lower end of the budget, but one of the things that we always do is that we do do that rate times hours. So number one, with AI, nobody cares about your hours anymore, right?

You're competing against something that can think through a white paper in three minutes that would take you in the old days, weeks and weeks to put together. So rate times hours is a dead business model. And what we really need to be positioning ourselves for is the value that we deliver. And so if I can accelerate you, right, if I can get you your first client within 90 days, and that client is, I don't know, 30, 40, 50K, why wouldn't I pay based on, you know, taking some portion?

Like in my head, I'm not telling you that I'm taking that portion, but you're getting acceleration from me. So I should be pricing based on the acceleration that I'm giving, or you should be pricing based on the cost avoidance or the revenue growth that you know you can deliver. Those are the models that I think allow you to create a decent amount of living, as well as really forces you into a different mindset, a different mindset in terms of how you package and how you say what you do, because you're not just what you do.

I do competitive intelligence. You are now the value that you deliver and the impact that it has on the business of your clients, right? Like that is a higher level of, as you know, a higher level of consulting discussion that most people don't get to. But if you can think of yourself that way, oh my gosh, it's incredibly powerful and also lucrative. Yeah, and I want to not discourage the younger folks. If they, if you're trading time for money, you're in that phase where you're building frameworks, you're investing, you're doing the low level work that you get to where you can start to really sell on value.

I'm not telling you not to sell on value, saying don't be, don't feel bad if you can't just say, give me $50,000 for this outcome. And you're confident that you won't spend, you know, too much time in delivering the outcome. At this level of expertise, you're pretty comfortable that you can see the business outcome and you know what it takes from a low level, from a, you know, bomb perspective to get to the outcome. You can comfortably say this outcome is $25,000, $50,000, $75,000.

I think where Betty, where you can help a lot of my audience is helping them kind of get through the nuance of what outcomes are. Because at Spirit World, we work towards someone else's KPIs. And now the value is helping some of our peers and some of our friends reach their KPIs. We seem to be able to translate, you know, we need to translate what we do into that end value. Absolutely. And so I just, I just signed a new client on Monday.

And one of the things that we talked about before he signed up with me was this wasn't having his own company, doing his own thing, having sort of that freedom had always been a dream of his. And he just had no clue how to get there and fear and uncertainty in it. Right. Which is so, so normal and so natural. And this is why, you know, my program is eight weeks and we really go through a very regimented process of defining the client, defining the method, packaging it and pricing it.

And then sort of starting to test the market so that by the end of the time, you really have something that is the start of a business. Right. And the first thing that we do, though, right, because that's just the mechanics of the work. The first thing we do, though, is that we talk about your 90 day goal in 90 days. I want to be at. And then we reverse engineer what that goal is, what those KPIs look like and where you are today versus that.

And then what are the three things that you have to do that give you an 80 percent likelihood of achieving that KPI? And then it's and then we have a discussion, you and I, about is this realistic given the constraints that you have in your life? Is this are these tradeoffs that you're willing to make or do we need to change the goal a little bit? And so that that exercise, it's more than a strategic plan, right, because plans sit on a shelf.

It's more than a KPI because, you know, we all we all declare our OKRs and nobody remembers them a year later. But it really makes it very, very tangible. It it helps you make sure that you are stacking the habits and the activities and you understand exactly it all along the way of the 90 days where you should be at and what you should be doing so that we can see whether it's working and whether we need to pivot. Right. And so it becomes it takes a want to I will, a will to I know what to do, and then I'm doing to I've succeeded.

And it's really it's it it it is a very powerful exercise because it makes it tangible what you didn't know was possible before. So, Betty, we can't shrink eight weeks of a program and only a 15, 20 minute podcast. How can folks get ahold of you and learn more? So I am on LinkedIn, Betsy Chong on LinkedIn. I'm the one with the big glasses. There are two others, but we don't talk about them. I was the first, the OG, Betsy Chong, but I have big glasses and a green sweater on and I am the authority architect.

All right. com. It is by tap the advisor bench where we bring folks together like you, Betsy, and bring them to the big vendors trying to sell stuff and give them insights. Great insights like the ones you learned today with Betsy, how to kind of make sure you have a future for your staff, even post layout in how you help to meet your own business needs. Betsy, thank you so much for joining the podcast. This has been a wealth of information.

I look forward to maybe even working with you on my business strategy. Love it. I'm here for you.