Neil Metzler  0:00  
Hey, so good to be with you, Deb. Thanks for sitting down with me. Yeah.

Deborah Sgro  0:07  
My pleasure. Yeah, yeah. And thank you for speaking with me about your journey from being a full time employee to starting your own business. Before we get started, let me introduce myself, and then I'll ask you to introduce yourself. I'm Debra Sgro. I am the Mentoring Director for Women in Big Data, a professional association that is available worldwide. I'm also a certified career coach, and a professional from the tech finance world for over 40 years. So it's my pleasure to speak with you today, Neil, and get your story as we prepare for a mentoring program, a new mentoring program focused on technology solopreneurs. So why don't we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself and introducing who you are?

Neil Metzler  1:10  
Yeah, I'd love to, and always good to catch up with you, Deb, very excited about the W IBD. Mentoring program development. So I just wanted to say quick hello to all of this current and future cohorts who might be listening in. So my name is Neil Metzler. And I've been a career sales professional in tech. I worked at Amazon for close to 10 years, before launching my own coaching practice full time. And I'm now in year three of that practice. And in an interesting twist, I've also stepped back into a full time role earlier this year, while maintaining and growing and cultivating my coaching practice, in addition to that, so I'm sure we'll dive into that later in the story. But I wanted to focus today on folks who may be thinking about taking a leap, and going full time with what they've been thinking about. I know you've got some great questions prepared. So I'm excited to see where this conversation takes us.

Speaker 2  2:17  
Neil, let's start with you telling us about the company that you created. I'm interested in hearing about the mission, and the objective that you set out for yourself. Tell us a little bit about who your clients are the ones that you chose to serve, and what service you're providing.

Neil Metzler  2:37  
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I founded cloud champions coaching to provide trusted and inspiring coaching for high performance teams in tech. I wanted to start with my tribe, so to speak. And these are the teams that I've worked with. And alongside that I've been a part of that I've grown with, and that I also face challenges and celebrated wins in myself. So as I got curious about what I might like to offer in this space, or where I could make, you know, make use of my talents and my gifts, there are two use cases that I've been tackling recently. So one is around. For leaders, there are these two use cases, one is around retention, especially retention for difficult to hire and retain teams and roles that are prone to burnout risk. So thinking of you know, technical or technical plus business crossover rules where expertise, ramp time, specialized knowledge, specialized hard skills are extremely difficult to hire and retain for. I've found that those teams are very difficult to keep staffed at full productivity. So for leaders, there is an opportunity to get get a pulse on what's happening with the team understand the temperature of the team and the individual visuals on that team in order to detect and really mitigate burnout, risk and churn before it's too late. So, you know, burnout and turnover and lost productivity due to burnout is estimated at 322 billion globally. And that accounts for 15 to 20% of payroll in this kind of voluntary turnover due to burnout. And those numbers are from Gallup. So I became very interested in this space. And the second use case is around owning your career. So I look at teams that are facing facing serious headwinds. There may have been a reorg. There may have been a pivot. There may have been, you know, layoffs, things affecting those teams and leaders are interested to avoid and disrupt stagnation on the team and really foster a sense of ownership. So I deliver this by equipping managers and individual contributors to have more productive career conversations, using a success framework that I've built and grown over time called the Five Pillars career progression framework. So with these two use cases, I'm really felt focused on helping leaders and teams reach and maintain healthy high performance and tech.

Speaker 2  5:28  
So it sounds like you're addressing a problem from two areas, one or two perspectives, one from the perspective of the hiring manager, or the Performance Manager, retaining teams retaining on individuals, or also, of course, securing that talent. And I also like that you're looking at that same problem from the perspective of the employee, how they advance through their career. So that sounds like a really strong strategy that you develop to have that have an perspective and understanding of the problem. And the the variety of people who are affected by that problem.

Neil Metzler  6:18  
Yeah, it's been a process. So I really think that it was a process of getting curious, it was a process of asking a lot of you no follow ups and asking why very often, because I certainly didn't set out with crystallized vision of exactly who I could serve and how it was more what I found myself reading about what I found myself spending my free time on what I what I found myself caught up in, in conversations outside of work and outside of the business plan, they were starting to go more and more in this direction around, well being at work, healthy, high performance, and owning your career in a time of you no disruption, and in change that we find ourselves in. So I would really credit the role of feedback providers, friends, mentors, and sparring partners. Through that time, who, you know, by having those exchanges by having those conversations I was able to build, build closer to that value point where I can now go out and deliver.

Speaker 2  7:36  
So you're beginning to introduce a bit of our next question, which is what inspired you and your interest in developing this company? Can you say a little bit more about what was the motivation for you to start on this journey?

Neil Metzler  7:54  
Yeah, it it crept up on the dad, it was really interesting, I started volunteering in my full time job for more projects having to do with the general space of employee engagement and and career progression. So even though I'm, you know, a career sales professional, I was then able to partner with leadership partner with HR and go deeper. The company I worked at also collected daily survey feedback, and built more and more robust reporting on these data. And I was able to explore and go deeper and build initiatives around some of the trends that we're seeing in that data. And before I knew it, I was one of several people working on these initiatives for about a 200 person department in London. And I think I never, you know, asked permission to be doing that work. I did apply for the work stream. I did, I think I was interviewed for that. But it was a project on top of what I was already doing. So as I as I looked back, I found also signals from earlier been also in high school and university, my interest in kind of coaching and different types of topics around supporting people to reach healthy, high performance, and all kinds of settings. So it started to crystallize for me that if I wanted to design a life that was not primarily run by my Monday through Friday, nine to five, could I take an opportunity to design a life that would involve me doing something as a solopreneur and working with these topics that I was finding myself more and more interested in?

Speaker 2  9:51  
gray, gray, and so the idea started to form and then you realized, oh my goodness, this applies to things that I was interested in previous times of my life. And then there came a moment no doubt or you realization that hey, can I do this? Is it possible? Tell us about some of the questions and concerns that you considered when making this decision to start your new business?

Neil Metzler  10:21  
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'll be upfront that at first, I certainly needed to fight against these, the inertia of imposter syndrome. Like, you know, I needed to expand my idea of what maybe was possible. And so I needed to read a few books and have a few conversations to really do that. So one of them that I, you know, I appreciate it enjoyed was called the $100 startup. And this was a very approachable, it wasn't yet that I was actively choosing to become an entrepreneur, Deb, it was more like dipping a toe in the idea. It was less, less.

Unknown Speaker  11:02  
Yeah, let me see what other people, you know,

Neil Metzler  11:05  
commitment. Yeah, let me see what other people are doing. So this, this conversation with someone who was sort of like a prototype client of mine, right, who I'd done some resume and LinkedIn updates with one day after work over a beer was like, You should really read this book, you know, you, you might want to think about working with one person a month or two or three people a quarter, you're not a professional yet, but find those use cases, you know, sit down with those clients start getting curious. And this was so important, because I think I did about six to 12 months of of that in my full time role. Before I got to some of those big milestones, I'm glad that you and I know for being a solopreneur, like standing up your your own website, getting your first paid client engagement, beginning to maybe blog and publish and do more, do more content. So in the end of in the six months before I plan to leave my role, I really ramped up the the coaching engagements and the investment and content. And it was something I was spending my evenings and weekends on, like, quite passionately.

Speaker 2  12:27  
So we're talking about transition you you were speaking about how a casual encounter with a colleague of yours, you were helping that person, polish up their resume material, and then taking on a slight informal goal of oh, let me do this all volunteer for one person a month or whatever, you know, you had set out? You were talking about a transition? What was what was that transition like for you? Because not only were you transitioning the type of work you'd be doing? You were also transitioning your income stream, and some other aspects of a professional life. What were you thinking? What thoughts did you have? What questions did you have to solve during that during that time?

Neil Metzler  13:27  
Yeah, I love I love that question. And so as I reflect back on that I, as I said, I was not the I was not so brave at that point to say, Yeah, I'm gonna jump in with both feet full time with this solo business. I, I really was thinking more about the kind of life design and setup that I that I wanted to explore. And I, I needed to sort of decouple the idea of stopping full time work with the idea of launching the business. So I did have that kind of six month test, pilot phase. But when I stopped my full time job, I took about a month just to really reset and rebuild a new schedule with new habits and structure to my day, because this is can be an underappreciated part that isn't as glamorous as the, you know, going on to win awards part. It's really important to actually rebuild that psyche rebuild those habits and structures. And I did so and for maybe like 30 to 60 days time, you know, then I softly started to do some coffee chats again. I saw and started to look at some coach training programs. And I found that after I had kind of done the processing of exiting the corporate career giving myself space to do that processing. I was then really clear and and motivated and enthusiastic about experimenting with, with building the business. So I'd love to say it was a clean cut immediate ramp or something. But I really needed there's a human underneath that armor, right? So that's one of the messages in my coaching. And I definitely felt that myself.

Speaker 2  15:30  
Yeah, yeah, I got the image of a period of incubation, so that you could nurture that new self or that new direction that you were setting out on. And that you were giving yourself the time and this way, I similarly did something where I remember sitting in my, on my porch for a couple, a couple of days, it might have been a couple of weeks, and just reading, reading novels reading newspaper just sitting being still before because I didn't know which way I was gonna go with my idea. So I was really just waiting for I think the parts to come together. Yeah, that that is an important point, that we have to allow ourselves at time to transition in many aspects of our lives. Neil, you had mentioned at the start of this interview, that recently you introduced some additional work to complement your, your coaching, would you like to say a little bit about that? Tell us more

Neil Metzler  16:53  
short? Yeah. Yeah. So I think that this, I see this now I frame this as an example where, you know, you can continue to design your mix is not a binary choice about full time work, or growing your solo partnership, right. So I did, I was working exclusively on my solo partnership for a period of two, two years. And then then my life circumstances also started to change show or pivot herself, and was starting a really exciting retraining and rescaling process to get into the climate economy, and the future of sustainability for for large organizations. So, you know, really practical things, Deb, like, you know, how are we doing our family's health insurance? Or what are the financial goals like in the next two to five years, you know, these type of things. With reevaluating that I decided to make a shortlist of companies that if I did want to go back to work like these would be maybe four companies that seemed exciting to me. And I went ahead and made very targeted applications to those in q4. And I signed with one of them and in q1. And I think I did it very differently, though, than my previous experience. So one is, I mean, I went in with the idea of how can this role actually serve me for the long term as growing as a solopreneur. And it is a role that gives me much more depth and breadth of contacts and events, and basically helps me build and develop my network and in a really direct way. And it also provides, you know, things like learning and development, budget and stable healthcare and all that kind of thing. So I've kind of redesigned and tweaked, taking the offers that I built in the in that two year period, I still deliver those offers, but they're not my main income stream, they're not my main time commit right now. So I rather kind of steward them and nurture them forwards. And that's good enough for right now. I'm happy with that for right now. But of course, I do have certain ideas about possible choices or forks in the road, you know, a few years from now as well.

Speaker 2  19:29  
You know, your story highlights a very essential skill in modern employment and that's agility, agility and also resiliency and your examples of how you parts together, that you are brought together. Well, this opportunity can give me healthcare and a learning budget and this other opportunity can give me some other goals. that I'm trying to accomplish, and that you brought those together to serve your needs. I think that that's a really very clear story of how we we are creating our careers and how we're aware, crafting our future. So, Neil, let me just enclosing ask you. Maybe we started on this a little bit, but looking from the lessons learned perspective, what did you learn? And what would you recommend others who are just starting on this journey for themselves? What would you do? What What would you do differently?

Neil Metzler  20:46  
Yeah, definitely, I think one thing that was a learning for, for me was focus more on product and less on like, profit revenue type targets and goals. So I, I found that in year one, I was really working backwards from how could I hit a certain revenue milestone, or what type of offers or solutions do I think would be exciting for other people? So I'm going to go and build them, right? So I got into long build cycles with high price offers, that didn't turn out to actually serve real, real clients. In year two, I really took a more product development focused approach. And I'm sure that we have some folks in the audience who have product experience. But for me, this book, the build trap, have was really influential. Because it It describes a way I just want to make sure I get the author's name, right. Yeah. Yeah, escaping the build, trap, how effective product management creates real value by Melissa Perry. So this encouraged me to actually stop with this kind of like revenue forecasting approach, I mean, still useful from like an annual quarterly perspective to keep in mind, but really focused on people and real pain points and getting really curious about that, and falling in love with problems and challenges before jumping into solutions. So I think overall, from these two and a half years, this has been my biggest takeaway.

Speaker 2  22:35  
Really understanding the problem that you're trying to serve? Am I understanding this correctly, the problem that you're trying to serve and the target audience that you're trying to serve? Is that the takeaway that you're speaking about?

Neil Metzler  22:53  
Exactly, yeah. Like who are? Who are the personas in the organizations that I'm trying to serve? Like, what are the current challenges that they're facing? How are they serving those challenges now? And then, could I build a solution? Or could I design an offering that would really squarely addressed that in an exciting and compelling way, and then only then starting, you know, with more kind of lean approach, to really, then develop product offerings, and not be afraid to test them not, don't be afraid to run test batches, or really, really take things properly through a cycle. So I think what I to draw a line under it in year one, I was trying to skip steps and go directly to the most compelling offer, and really bring that offer to market. And, of course, I'm a sales professional. So that's what I do by training. But I needed to take a more holistic product mindset, because in your three, I have kind of really rebooted my offerings for organizations. And I've really seen that message land. And these particular offers are converting very well, in conversations with the personas that I've done a better job of identifying. Yeah.

Speaker 2  24:19  
It sounds like you had to wear many hats. You were first storing the salesman hat because that was really comfortable. You knew that oral but then it's then you discovered that well, I've got to do, I've got to wear the hat of the product designer, I have to wear the hat of the project manager. So it sounds like as a solopreneur. You know, who was doing it all. You found yourself understanding those other demands in in providing a service to your clients. That's a great story, Neil. Thank you. Um, let me just, in closing, just ask you any last words of encouragement or thoughts for the people who are attending our cohort?

Neil Metzler  25:13  
Yeah, thank you, Deb. This has been a really nice conversation. I just want to encourage the cohort members to remember that you're not in this alone, even though the idea that you're exploring right now is the solopreneur. Ship. You're doing it with a cohort. So, you know, lean into each other, be there for each other, and enjoy the journey together. Thanks. Great.

Speaker 2  25:35  
Great, great, thank you so much, Neil, for this wonderful conversation and for your support in developing this idea. I really did enjoy our early conversation. So thank you.

Neil Metzler  25:50  
Thank you. Yes, likewise, and speak with you soon.

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