Last week, I announced the launch of First Principles Communications, my startup and executive comms agency. I got lots of encouragement in response, which was at once so profoundly lovely and wildly imposter syndrome-inducing. My brain, famously an endless well of anxiety, kept trying to convince myself that launching a business was a terrible idea, actually, and that I would of course fail and that by telling everyone about it, my enthusiasm was ultimately destined to take a big, ‘90s-movie nosedive from glee into humiliation.
Now, look: If I quiet my brain for a second, I actually believe this business is going to be successful. Not because I’m a raging narcissist, but because my intuition tells me that I’m riding the wave of a few swelling trends, including a diminished appetite for traditional agency pricing, the mounting importance of executive comms, and the blurring of all kinds of storytelling into a singular discipline.
But more importantly, I think that the downside risk is pretty low. In other words, I think I’m going to come out ahead of where I would have been in corporate even if this business fails.
This might sound radical to you. It certainly did to me when I quit my full-time job last year. The universe is supposed to have a certain karmic math to it, wherein risk and reward are inversely related.
Then I read a great piece by
called “Starting a Company is Less Risky Than You Think.” And something clicked: the realization that, for a certain kind of professional, particularly those whose experience or interests don’t quite color inside the lines, entrepreneurship can actually be a career accelerant.Here’s why:
Network
One of the absolute joys of launching First Principles has been the excuse to connect with so many brilliant people, from others who’ve launched their own agencies to in-house comms leaders to startup founders.
Despite being a hard-I introvert, I’ve always loved these kinds of conversations: the thrill of veering from brass tacks like pricing to wide-ranging predictions about the future of the industry, the challenge of untangling the root of someone’s business problem. But it was hard to fit these conversations into my schedule while working a full-time corporate job. Now my job is essentially to have these kinds of conversations all the time! (Well, and to do the actual work—but as any startup founder will tell you, much of the actual work is constantly selling.)
Those connections give me a much wider network of weak ties to supplement my strong ties from in-house work (and, eventually, from clients). And those connections don’t go anywhere if I fail.
Brand
Most entry- and mid-level roles are relatively standardized, making it easy to fill the holes left by former employees as they cycle in and out. Your product comms guy leaves, so you hire a product comms gal to plug the gap.
This assembly line model is great if you’re an employer, because it’s easy to assemble a decent pipeline of candidates that are more or less suited to the job because they are more or less the same. It’s way less great if you’re a potential candidate, particularly if you’re a square peg trying to convince a hiring manager to fit you into a round hole.
I’m decidedly a square peg. My background is weirder than that of most comms people I come across, because I didn’t come up doing media relations. Or, rather, I did a little bit of media relations, but I also did a whole lotta others things, like writing blogs and coming up with social campaigns and redesigning websites and drafting employee emails and coming up with talking points for meetings with privacy groups.
And I had a big ole chip on my shoulder about it. I was constantly trying to make up for this perceived weakness (which was really just a lack of pattern matching), instead of understanding that having a buncha arrows in my quiver was a strength.
The benefit of striking out on your own is that you don’t have to fill a hiring manager’s hole. You have to fill a business hole. And that’s something I’m historically good at doing—so good, in fact, that I’m hoping to build a business on the back of it. (Starting from business problems, not comms problems, is the root of the name First Principles.)
Moreover, while junior roles are often filled by interchangeable folks, senior roles tend to be filled by spikier ones. Even companies that hire generic “Communications Manager II”s look for more specific flavor in their Chief Communications Officers. Some companies need CCOs seasoned in regulatory and policy battles, others with a background in crafting sticky consumer brands or rebuilding internal culture. Yes, their teams will probably need to do a bit of everything and they will need to be great leaders of those multifaceted teams, but ultimately companies hire senior leaders who themselves are experts in their biggest pain points.
By spending this time refining my brand—a kind-of meh term for “what I like to do and can convince others I’m good at”—I’ll have a greater ability to shape my future opportunities to my differentiated skillset, to focus on what I do bring to the table rather than what I don’t.
Skills
I’m the kind of person who likes to be on learning curves so steep I’m worried about falling off (shoutout to
for this verbiage). The only in-house roles I’ve found steep enough were at rapidly scaling companies and campaigns where everyone was stretched way too thin and wore 8,000 hats. But most full-time roles want you to spend your days mostly doing the thing they hired you to do; stretch assignments are the exception, not the norm.I’m hoping that by working with a range of clients, most of whom are at inflection points of their own, I’ll replicate the experience of working at a fast-growing startup: working on projects that matter at moments that matter, and building my own skillset in the process.
I also expect to refine my soft skills. Working for yourself requires you to be proactive instead of reactive, to find real holes to fill to justify your fee. It also requires a high tolerance for risk and an agility to pivot as needed. (H/t to my coach Erika Gerdes for reminding me about the importance of these soft skills.)
All Together Now
Erik puts the case for entrepreneurship nicely:
[T]he potential upside is enormous, and the base case—improving your skills, network, and reputation—likely creates more optionality than working for a big company, making the decision worth it from a long-term career perspective.
This logic helps explain the proliferation of micro-agencies over the last few months. (Eleanor Hawkins of Axios Communicators has a great write-up of this trend here.) It’s entirely possible that these one-to-two person boutiques are here for the long haul. But my prediction is that they are largely a reaction to the current job market and the pervasive exhaustion many communicators have from layoffs, and that many practitioners will be eager to return to larger agencies or in-house work once the tech job market re-stabilizes.
This sounds like bad news. But using the reasoning above, even if there’s a mass extinction event on the way, spending time running your own shop can be beneficial.
Exit Options
Turning back to First Principles, I see a few possible outcomes:
First Principles becomes a rip-roaring success. I expand the agency with additional employees and a contractor network. Perhaps I acquire other micro-agencies; perhaps I get acquired. This is my job for a long, long time.
First Principles becomes a great lifestyle business for me. This could involve working with a few contractors to extend my capabilities and capacity but ultimately means I remain the sole full-time employee and retain the flexibility to turn down work I don’t find exciting or interesting. I can keep doing this forever or ultimately exit and decide to do something else, like go back in house at a rapidly scaling company in an industry I’m passionate about.
First Principles becomes an okay lifestyle business for me, which allows me time and flexibility to pursue things outside of work, like writing novels and investing in early-stage companies and embarrassing myself by starting new hobbies like comedy and OrangeTheory (power walkers unite!). Eventually I want to ramp back up my earning power and return in-house or join another consultancy, or one of my hobbies becomes my primary money-maker. (Not OrangeTheory. That’s solely money- and pride-losing.)
First Principles fails. Maybe I just can’t make the kind of money I’d like to make long-term, or I miss the consistency of a biweekly paycheck and free health insurance. Maybe I find myself really missing coworkers or office gossip (this is already happening, tbqh). Maybe my thesis is totally wrong and people don’t need the services I’m offering! In this version I flame out and return to working for someone else, with a keener sense of what I’m good at and what I want from work.
I’m gunning for (1) or (2), with some of the non-work elements of (3), but the point is that there are a lot of versions of “good” here. Some purely financial, some for the space they leave for other parts of my life. All of them allow me to home in on what I actually love to do, which sets me up to make a smart “next” move, whenever that may be.