The Time Rich Project (formerly the Corporate Escapee)

Almost every escapee story on this show starts with corporate going bad. This one doesn't. Jim Barke spent nearly twelve years at a company he genuinely liked, with what he calls the best team he's ever worked with, and six weeks of PTO. Nobody pushed him out. He wasn't burned out. He hired a career coach because he knew he was at a crossroad, and on their second or third meeting she told him he s...

Join the Escapee Collective: A Free Community for Gen X Most people stay stuck in corporate because they think there are only two options: find another job, or start a business that eats five years of your life before it pays you. There's a lot of room between those. This one is about how you actually make money after corporate, and the first thing to get straight is what you're aiming at. Replaci...

Hana Kim did almost everything you're not supposed to do. She spent seventeen years in corporate, all of it in insurance, and made VP. Then she took a bigger VP role that required moving her whole family from Southern California to Arizona during the pandemic. House to sell, house to buy, a dog, and her mom, who lives with them. She landed in mid-June when it was a hundred and fifteen degrees. The...

Join my Substack: https://bretttrainor.substack.com/ Episode Overview: Janet Tanguay got spitballed by her own colleagues in a corporate training for going off script. She lasted four days in her next job. Now she helps people build the life they actually want, and she has the most practical approach to it I've come across. Janet Tanguay is a serial entrepreneur who has run a record label and an a...

Join Brett’s Substack: Letters from an Escapee: : https://bretttrainor.substack.com/ Hans Weygoldt had everything on paper. Good money, job security, the family business, the life that looks right from the outside. And he was empty. He spent ten years trying to leave. Every time he sat down to build the plan, his mind went blank. As he puts it, the more he thought about it, the more self-doubt sho...

I've had north of a hundred authors on this show. This one stuck with me differently, and it's because of one word: Purgatory. Geoff Curtis spent nearly thirty years building a career in healthcare communications. Title, expertise, platform, the whole thing. Then the company was acquired, his role went redundant, and all of it disappeared at once. What followed wasn't a reinvention arc. It was the...

Megan Collier's first appearance is still one of my most downloaded episodes, so she's back. Quick version if you missed it. UGC is user generated content. Brands pay you to make short videos, and instead of posting them yourself, they use the footage in their own ads. No followers required. No production setup. Megan's been doing it four years and has taught more than 16,000 Gen X and Boomers how...

Shelley McIntyre is back on the show, and her first appearance is still one of the most downloaded episodes I've done. She was a grief counselor before she was a coach, which is why she talks about layoffs differently than anyone else I know. We opened on the Oracle news, because the math on it is ugly. Twenty years in, fifty or sixty hour weeks, and what shows up is an automated email at 6 a.m. t...

Somebody commented on one of my TikToks. He'd started his own solo business a couple years back, it's working, he's happy. Then he said "but it's not for everyone." I'd been repeating that exact line for years and never once dug into it. So this episode is two things. Why people still say entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, and why I think it's true about something almost nobody is actually doing...

Wes Wheless got laid off twice inside a few years. COVID, then the tech downturn. He wasn't angry about the second one. He just didn't have the energy to go attach himself to somebody else's mission again and wait for it to get taken away. He didn't have a plan. He took a couple months, picked up some contract work to hold him over, and then a light bulb went off: if he could find enough of these,...

This one's a step back to look at the big picture, because a lot of the Gen Xers I talk to are too busy living life to see it. Three things are colliding at once. Corporate is chaos. It's not your age, it's your expense. Somebody can do half your job for half the price, and that's who gets picked. Getting laid off is one thing. Getting back in is the real problem. Look around your own network if y...

Corporate quit on me just over six years ago. At the time I thought this was about one thing: replacing my income. Six years, 350 episodes, and a whole lot of experiments later, I've figured out it was never really about the money. This is the first solo episode under the new name, and I wanted to start by sharing the nine things I've learned on this quest so far. Not a playbook. Not a system. Jus...

Brett Trainor Unplugged is for Gen Xers who want to get one step closer to living the life they want—on their terms. After six years of building life beyond the default corporate playbook, thousands of conversations with Gen Xers, entrepreneurs, and experts, and features in Fortune, Fast Company, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Inc., Brett Trainor is still on the quest to build his ideal life...

You can always make more money. You can't make more time. This is the episode that ties the whole thing together: what a time rich life actually is, and why control of your time, not your income, is the key to the life you want. My first year out of corporate, I chased one thing: replace the paycheck and then some. I did it. And I wasn't much happier. This is the story of what I was actually missi...

Making money outside corporate is easier than landing your next corporate job. After a thousand-plus conversations with people leaving corporate, the blocker is almost never skill or experience. It's that we overcomplicate it. This one is all mechanics. If you're 45+ and trying to make your first dollar outside corporate, or just want to stop betting everything on one paycheck, this is the playboo...

Pro athletes know their career has an expiration date. Corporate never tells you yours has one too. Here's the part nobody says out loud: when corporate moves on from you, it usually isn't because your talent slipped. You just got too expensive. Gen X is the first generation facing this without a pension to catch us, and we're going to outlive the old retirement math by decades. So this episode bo...

"Work should feel good. Not a long, slow march to oblivion." That's Diana Alt, and it's the perfect line to open our first guest episode under The Time Rich Project. Diana is an executive and career coach who came out of tech. She works with people who are still in corporate and quietly wondering if this is it. Her take lines up with where this show is headed: corporate isn't the enemy. It's a cli...

For six years I thought I was running from corporate. Turns out I was chasing the wrong thing. Welcome to The Time Rich Project. Same host, evolved mission, new name. This is the first episode under it, and I get into why the change and why it matters if corporate has stopped working for you. Here's the shift: I wasn't escaping corporate. The real unlock was taking back control of my time. Once I...

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...