22 Comments

It took Andy Dufresne 20 years to escape Shawshank. It'll take you 20 hours to escape corporate anon. Simulation winks

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author

20 hours will easily be enough to see results after a year

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Absolute banger and screams old school WallStreetPlayboys vibes…

Funny thing is (while still escaping Shawshank) I found myself doing nearly all of these thanks to the old blog.

Still clawing my way out but using these tactics in the meantime.

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Bull you’ve mentioned a lot on X about consulting as a side business. Can you write about it here?

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author

There is nothing to write, consulting is you put up your website with your name and what you offer.

It's not a business it's just a way to prove to yourself that you can earn money online. Unless it turns into some mega firm like McKinsey

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I mean, there’s a lot more that goes into it right? Advertising, managing client expectations, how to balance it with a day job, defining an appropriate scope of work, etc.

Even if you’re not doing the work yourself, maybe a business of managing consultants to do the work could be interesting.

Anyways, probably the wrong Substack to be asking these sort of questions, but great write up above either way.

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author

Will be more blunt then, if someone was actually sick enough and talented enough to compete with Bain or create a real major firm, the last person they are asking is a cartoon bull on the internet. It would quite literally be their job to know how to do that otherwise why would they think they can scale a large consulting firm

Majority with consulting, is just time for money exchange to prove they can make money on the internet since everyone seems scared to spend $500 on a website and $3,000 on ads for some reason. Despite it being best risk reward by a factor of a trillion

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founding

We actually touch parts of your question here -

https://bowtiedhippo.substack.com/p/on-consulting-part-i

Intended as a brief overview for someone to get started + collating a few Jungle resources (like: https://newsletter.bowtiedopossum.com/p/how-to-manufacture-a-real-service)

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Lmao 1p3a was my secret for years.

Did tech interviews for 200-250k comp packages as a junior engineer, where 50-100% of the questions were already on the forum.

Yes, there was a company where I literally memorized every question and got a 225k+ offer!

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author

Hahaha insane!

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We are all 2 or more raced Bi-Sexuals! Hah

All things being serious - had a “b!tch about everything that sucks” session with a C-Level, who was telling me how they were at the whims of the wants and needs of the CEO. Really hit the point as this is the ultimate “work my way up” type of person, still just having to jump to the needs of the founder.

If you work corporate - you are at the mercy of who you report to. Only founding the money machine liberates you fully from this dynamic.

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author

Yep true

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Oct 13·edited Oct 13

I know Bull will disagree, but for me, the morning hours before work are the best to get shit done (I am lucky to be in tech where nobody expects you at the office before 8:30-9AM).

If you can squeeze two hours to work on the most important stuff before leaving home for the day, you'll feel great. I never was a morning person, so consider giving it a shot even if you're not either!

With 4-5 hours each day of the weekend you get to the ~20 hours figure. Realistically for most people with a life, that's about the max you can do in a week if you want it to be sustainable.

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I am at an open-ended passive minority PE investor clearing $300k while working 20 hours weeks. The issue is that I am not liked much by the seniors and not given “important” work but also not to be fired as someone has to take care of the “useless” work, but there is no promo expected soon, maybe in 2-3 years. Shall I bother moving elsewhere given I am not liked/prioritised (the company never fired anyone but I am still not sure how secure I am) or lay low and build the side biz?

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author

This sounds perfect? You can work 40 hours a week on your own biz whats the issue?

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Good post, as always. Stoked you saw my repost on Brian Armstrong and my mention of BTB on X (the Viking's Code is my account).

In this article you said a skilled person should see some result after one year, can you define "skilled" person?

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founding

>Once you’ve developed some rapport with people in the office, create another automated product that fills in their calendar by simply clicking “accept” on their email screen. Be careful. Only do this about a month or two in once you’re *sure* they want to have it on their calendar. If they have to sign up for some seminar/call etc, just do it for them and send them the receipt. They will be thrilled. The trick is to avoid bombarding them.

I didn't really understand this too well. Are you saying make a product that helps them easy click accept on your emails and already sign them up to whatever is needed so they know they can just hit yes from you ? Do you tell them you have automated this for them? (I guess it's obvious that you did to save them time of having to deal with the minutiae of it) I wouldn't even know how to begin with this but I am curious about it.

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author

Every firm has all these meetings and stuff to remember, no one wants to organize it all themselves. Since you're forced to do it anyway, you do it for them and delete out the ones they don't care about. This saves them time and they will be happy simple

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I am new to BTB and am looking to begin building my first ecomm business, what blogs / posts would be recommend reading first?

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Oct 8Liked by BowTied Bull

Go to their monthly recaps and they have it all outlined at the bottom of every post.

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author

yep

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