The Time Rich Project (formerly the Corporate Escapee)

Janice Porter has been on LinkedIn since 2004, hosts the Relationships Rule podcast (368+ episodes), and has spent almost two decades teaching solo operators the part of business most of us got wrong in corporate: the relationship part. In this convers...

Episode Description Megan Collier (@megan_ugc, 300K+ on TikTok) is back on The Corporate Escapee for a Round 2 conversation, and the market has shifted under our feet. UGC, user-generated content, is now a real path to $2K to $15K a month for people wh...

Episode description: GenX is elite at overcomplicating making money. A Millennial gets a side hustle idea and is live by Sunday. A Gen Z is already filming the TikTok. A GenXer opens a Google Doc, then a spreadsheet, then researches LLC structure, then...

No one is coming to save you. Not your company. Not HR. Not the next reorg, promotion, or administration. That's not doom and gloom. That's actually the good news. Because once you accept it, you stop waiting. You stop hoping. And you start doing somet...

The Setup Six-plus years ago, when corporate quit on Brett, the goal was simple: make more money than corporate was paying him. That was it. Money, money, money. It took two years to realize money was never the real prize. What he was actually chasing ...

This one is personal. Brett flies solo to deliver the one thing he wishes someone had told him when he was still inside corporate grinding it out and telling himself it was the responsible thing to do. You already have permission. Permission to want so...

Most people leave corporate and immediately chase the familiar paths — consulting, coaching, fractional work. Those are valid. But they take time, runway, and a warm network. In this episode Brett breaks down three unexpected ways GenXers are generatin...

Kristen Hamborg is six weeks out of a 25-year corporate interior design career — and she's never looked back. In this episode Kristen shares how burnout, a pandemic pivot, and a coaching certification she pursued on the side slowly shifted everything. ...

Danielle Burken escaped corporate in September 2023 — but her journey started six years before that. In this episode Danielle shares how she went from a full-time agency job with two kids under two, to building a six-figure solopreneur business in unde...

Corporate is using AI to eliminate jobs. Escapees get to use it to multiply themselves. In this solo episode Brett pulls back the curtain on exactly how he runs his entire business with AI — the tools, the use cases, and the honest truth about what it ...

The 4 Real Paths to Replace Your Corporate Income Most corporate escapees think they only have two options: find another job or figure out how to start a business from scratch. But there are actually four legitimate paths to replacing your corporate in...

750 layoffs a day. No, that's not a typo — and it's not slowing down. Brett sits down with Steve Jaffe, marketing veteran and author of The Layoff Journey: From Dismissal to Discovery, to talk about what most career books completely skip: the emotional...

There's a Lit song that's been stuck in my head for weeks: "My Own Worst Enemy." And it's the perfect metaphor for my entire solo journey. I've blocked myself at every stage—consulting, fractional leadership, and now with The Escapee Collective. Not in...

Fractional work is exploding — and it’s still confusing for a lot of corporate escapees. In this Featured Speaker session inside the Escapee Collective, John Arms breaks down Fractional 101 in plain English: what fractional really is, who it’s for, how...

Jon the Escapee Collective! What keeps 79% of corporate professionals stuck isn't lack of skills or opportunity—it's something deeper. In this solo episode, Brett shares the story of landing his first client, making good money, and then doing something...

Corporate isn’t stabilizing—and that matters if your income still depends on it. In this solo episode, Brett breaks down three trends shaping the Escapee economy in 2026: a corporate metric that’s quietly driving layoffs, the rapid expansion of revenue...

Ashley Evenson returns for her third appearance on The Corporate Escapee Podcast — and this time it’s a real update from the field. Two years into her escape, she breaks down what actually helped her land fractional work, what surprised her, and the bi...

Corporate gives you an easy identity: your title, your company, your lane. But once you start building something outside corporate—consulting, fractional, content, a book, a business—that identity disappears fast. And that’s where most people get stuck...

Post Corporate Life with Brett Trainor & John Arms I recently had the chance to join John Arms on his podcast: Fractional Unfiltered Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0z9pQOOMZEVI4T2NvoOiqP?si=uJoycF4LRGyZQNB4MofrtQ John was kind enough to allow m...

Most people believe the ones who succeed after escaping corporate are the smartest, most experienced, or most credentialed. They’re not. In this solo episode, Brett breaks down a pattern he’s seen across hundreds—if not thousands—of conversations with ...

Michelle Warner took the “escapee avoidance” route — she planned to do the traditional MBA-to-consulting path… then graduated straight into the Great Recession (the day Lehman fell). That curveball pushed her into entrepreneurship early: a founder-for-...

If you’ve been thinking about leaving corporate but the risk feels too big, this episode gives you a smarter way to look at it. Brett sits down with Alex Smereczniak, a former EY consultant who left corporate early, built a high-growth business in the ...

Tom Mirabella left corporate at 30 and never looked back. Seventeen years later, he’s built Wingman into a 25-person business by doing what corporate rarely rewards: solving problems fast, betting on relationships, and staying obsessively close to cust...

What if scaling your business didn’t require hiring, hustling harder, or stacking endless clients? In this episode, Brett sits down with Pia Silva (No BS Mastery) to break down a simple model for building a highly profitable solo (or two-person) busine...

Why do so many people leave corporate… only to end up going back? In this solo episode, Brett breaks down the two core reasons most corporate escapees fail—and more importantly, how to avoid them. Failure here doesn’t mean experimenting and choosing co...