Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional

That is Nick Sonnenberg, a serial entrepreneur, author, speaker, and consultant. Nick and a partner, Ari Meisel, founded Leverage, a high-end freelancer market place, and they built the business by using off-the-shelf tools such as Slack, Trello, and Zapier. Nick and Ari wrote a book about the experience titled Idea to Execution: How to Optimize, Automate, Outsource Everything in your Business. Ni...

Our guest today is Dave Nelson, who, if you've ever listened all the way through the credits of this show, you'll recognize as the audio engineer of Unleashed. Dave and I normally communicate by email, and this was the longest discussion we've had since we started working together 150 episodes ago. In this episode, Dave shares tips on audio equipment for podcasters and some process tips for workin...

March 4, 2019 was the 230th anniversary of the day that the United States started operating under the U.S. Constitution.   Which seemed like a good occasion to do a reading, out loud, of the full text of the Constitution and the 27 Amendments, something I had never done before.  

Our guest today is Tobin Slaven. Tobin helps entrepreneurs build email lists, conduct conversations at scale, and then monetize those lists. He is the host of a podcast that I've been enjoying: Stop Marketing Now, Do This Instead. Tobin emphasizes the importance of engaging in a conversation with potential customers and building a relationship. In explaining to me his approach to building remarkab...

Our guest today is Greg Albertyn, an expert in data governance, risk, and privacy compliance programs. In this episode, we discuss, among other topics, aspects of GDPR that independent consultants should be familiar with. (GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation enacted by the European Union) Among my questions to Greg was, "Can a person send an email to someone without their prior approval...

I'm often asked about the setup I use to record phone calls for the podcast, so I recorded this video. There are plenty of tools to record a call on your computer - I wasn't able to find a good guide on how to set up equipment to record two separate tracks when using a phone, so I had to figure this out through a bunch of trial and error. Here is a link to download the page illustrating the setup:...

Our guest today is Amy Gross, a performance psychology consultant who runs a coaching practice called Pillars4Performance.  Many of her clients are elite athletes, and that's where we focus our discussion.  In this episode we cover how to focus on the controllables (instead of fixating on things outside your control) how to using visioning exercises effectively how to identify and overcome self-de...

Our guest today is Umbrex member Kevin Terrell, a McKinsey alum and independent consultant based in Minneapolis St Paul. In addition to his consulting work, Kevin is the co-founder of Start Reading Now, Kevin read an article on how lower-income students tend to lose ground academically over the summer, and part of the reason is because they don't read as much, and part of the reason for that is th...

Our guest today is Jonathan Stern, a former partner at Bain and the CEO and Founder of SnapStrat. SnapStrat builds tools for its clients to bring prescriptive analytics and machine learning to the tasks of regularly recurring strategic decisions. In this episode, he shares a case example of SnapStrat's work with a top beauty products retailer, helping them use analytics to determine which free sam...

Our guest today is Mary Kate Scott, a McKinsey alum who has been running her own boutique healthcare consulting firm, Scott & Company, since 2002. She has been a close friend and mentor of mine for years, and in this episode we cover a wide range of topics including: - Three things MK does before every proposal, including her five-factor rule for evaluating potential projects - The three phases he...

Our guest today is Robin Albin, a brand strategist and brand sherpa based in the New York area. Robin has invented – or reinvented – over fifty brands for startups and major corporations across many categories, with particular expertise in cosmetics, health and wellness, and fashion. In our discussion Robin shares some case studies of how she works with clients to help them express the promise tha...

Our guest today is Jay Martin, who's got over 25 years of management consulting experience, including time at Arthur D. Little and IBM Global Services and nearly 18 years as an independent consultant. Jay has done a better job than anyone I've met at maintaining an exhaustive list of all his projects – the document is 18 pages long and includes the details on well over a hundred projects. In this...

Our guest today is Brad Clark, who is a former management consultant – he was a Principal at Oliver Wyman. Later, he was the Chief Marketing Officer at The Motley Fool, and he has now built a holistic financial planning and investment management service, where many of his clients are consultants. In our discussion, Brad describes the five financial planning tips he believes are essential for indep...

There are two types of products: Ones where we already know the story. Example: water. And ones where the customers needs to hear the story. Example: chicha. Are you selling water or chicha? The weekly Unleashed email includes a transcript of each episode, book recommendations, and consulting tips. Sign up at:  https://www.umbrex.com/unleashed-podcast/  

Our guest today is Michael Frankel who has an amazing background – he's been a corporate attorney at Skadden Arps, an investment banker, a private equity advisor, VP level business development roles at GE, LexisNexis, CFO of two companies, and held board positions. Michael is currently the Head of the Deloitte New-venture Accelerator. Michael shares his perspective on a range of topics including h...

Our guest today is Fredrik Thomassen, CEO and Co-Founder of Konsus.com, an on-demand creative outsourcing service. Fredrik shared his ideas on the future of work (hint: he says that it's remote work), as well as the way that he runs his own company using a hybrid structure where half his team is located in Oslo and the other half are based in San Francisco. We chatted about the tools he uses to co...

Our guest today is Alisa Cohn, an executive coach, a writer, and a member of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches.  Marshall Goldsmith is considered by many to be the leading executive coach in the world, and Alisa shares the story of how she got to know him and get selected to join this exclusive group. You can learn more about Alisa through her website, www.alisacohn.com , and while you're there you...

Today's guest is Lindsay McGregor, McKinsey alum and co-author of the book Primed to Perform. She and her co-author and former McKinsey Partner Neel Doshi created the concept of Total Motivation – or ToMo for short. Lindsay and Neel founded a consulting firm, Vega Factor, that works with clients to help implement the ToMo principles they describe in their book. In this episode, Lindsay talks about...

This episode concludes our six-part podcast miniseries on how to improve the client experience. In this episode, I share tips on how to provide a great client experience during the post-project Episodes 129-133 cover the five phases of a project lifecycle: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project I learned this five-part framework from David A. Fields, a...

This is part five in a six-part podcast miniseries on how to improve the client experience. In this episode, I share tips on how to provide a great client experience during the wrap-up phase. Episodes 129-133 cover the five phases of a project lifecycle: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project I learned this five-part framework from David A. Fields, and...

This is part four in a six-part podcast miniseries on how to improve the client experience. In this episode, I share tips on how to provide a great client experience during the project execution phase. Episodes 129-133 cover the five phases of a project lifecycle: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project I learned this five-part framework from David A. F...

This is part three in a six-part podcast miniseries on how to improve the client experience.  In this episode, I share tips on how to provide a great client experience during the onboarding / kickoff phase. Episodes 129-133 cover the five phases of a project lifecycle: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project I learned this five-part framework from David...

This is part 2 in a six-part podcast miniseries on how to improve the client experience. Episode 128 introduces the series. In this episode I discuss 29 suggestions for how to improve the client experience during the proposal phase. In Episodes 130-133, I'll be covering the next four phases in a project lifecycle: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project...

This episode introduces a six-part miniseries on steps consultants can take to improve the client's experience across the five phases of a consulting project: The proposal phase Onboarding / kickoff phase Project execution Wrap-up Post-project I learned this five-part framework from David A. Fields, and encourage everyone to visit his website: https://www.davidafields.com/ If you subscribe to the...

Our guest today is Ciaran Bossom, a digital marketing expert and independent consultant. Ciaran was the SVP of Strategy at VaynerMedia and most recently the Chief Digital Offier at Brown University. He has worked at several other digital agencies and held roles on the client side as well. Connect with Ciaran at:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaranbossom/ To receive the weekly Unleashed email that...