Consulting, fractional work, or a first product: three shapes after corporate

After a corporate job, working for yourself usually takes one of three shapes: consulting, where you sell your expertise project by project; fractional work, where you hold a part-time version of your old seat at one or a few companies; or a first product, where you build something that can be bought without you in the room. They differ in how fast the first invoice arrives, how much selling they demand, and how much of the result depends on your calendar. This page compares the three honestly, including the grind each one hides, and how people sequence them.

What actually changed when you left?

Not your competence. What you left behind is the machine that surrounded it: a brand that opened doors, a pipeline someone else filled, and a back office that handled contracts, invoices and IT. Working for yourself means doing your old craft plus rebuilding a small version of that machine, and the rebuild is the same four jobs every start goes through: set up, build the offer, find what sells, grow the customer base. The full walkthrough is in our guide, starting a business with no experience: the four jobs. The three shapes below are three different answers to the same question: how much of that machine do you want to rebuild, and how fast?

What is consulting, really?

Selling what you already know, by the project, usually to companies like the one you left. It is the fastest of the three to a first invoice, because your first clients almost always come from people who have already seen your work: former colleagues, former vendors, the manager who left a year before you did. It is also the cheapest to test, since one project is a complete experiment.

The honest parts. The pipeline is yours now, and it empties while you are busy delivering, which is why consulting income arrives in waves. You are the product, so there is no version of this where selling stops. And the gravitational pull is real: enough back-to-back projects for one client and you have rebuilt your old job without the parts of employment you actually liked. Consulting works when you treat the pipeline as a weekly job, not as a thing you do when a project ends.

What is fractional work?

A real seat, part time: the fractional CFO, CMO or head of operations who runs the function two days a week across one or a few companies. It suits people who liked the operator's chair but not the full-time version of it, and it pays in retainers, which smooths the waves consulting rides.

The honest parts. It asks for seniority that references can vouch for, because a company handing you its function part time is buying judgment, not hours. Scope creep is the standing tax: the two days that quietly become four are the fractional version of the job coming back. And with few, deep clients, each one lost is a real hole. Fractional work rewards people who can write a scope and hold it, which is a skill corporate rarely taught.

What about a first product?

The most autonomy on paper: something people buy that is not your calendar. In practice, the honest first version for most corporate leavers is a productized service, one outcome at a fixed scope and fixed price, sold the same way every time, because it starts proving demand in weeks rather than quarters.

The honest parts. This shape has the longest version of job 3, finding out what people will actually pay for, and no tool compresses it, ours included. We tested that on ourselves this summer and published everything: the storefront existed in five days, the humans still made every decision about what it was for and what it cost, and the money was the slowest part: we built a real business in 7 days with baget If you pick this shape, pick it with patience already budgeted.

How do you choose between the three?

Choose by what you left to get, and by how many months of floor you have. If what you want most is control of your time, consulting gives it soonest. If you want the operator seat without the full-time job, fractional is that, at the price of scope discipline. If you want to build something that outlives your hours, the product path is the only one that gets there, and the only one that makes you wait for proof. Your runway sets how much waiting you can afford; if you have not written that number down yet, the three questions on our decision page apply to a corporate exit exactly as they do to any other break: after a career break, job or business?

Can you sequence them?

Most people do, and it is usually the right call. Consulting funds the product months. A fractional retainer becomes the anchor that makes the rest of the week experimental. The one failure mode to decide against in advance is the anchor that quietly expands until it is a job again; the fix is the same rule that governs doing anything alongside anything: decide on purpose which shape gets your best hours this quarter, and give the other the leftovers deliberately.

What do all three demand that corporate never did?

Selling, weekly, without a brand behind you. That is the part that shakes people who ran teams and budgets for fifteen years, and it is not a character flaw; it is a muscle corporate never asked them to build.

The other shared demand is the setup grind: registering something, contracts, invoices, and a page where a client can see the offer, book time and pay. That last part is the part baget does, for any of the three shapes: describe the offer in one sentence, a consulting engagement, a fractional retainer or a productized service, and a team builds the page, the booking and the checkout. What it does not do is the selling, the scoping or the judgment. Those were always going to be yours; they are also the reason a client hires you and not the machine.

Whichever shape you pick, the offer page, booking and payment can exist this week. Describe the offer in one sentence and see. It costs nothing to look.