Experimenting With Your Business Model with Jessica Lackey
Description
When you started your business, you probably imagined steady revenue growth under your original business model—only to discover that the only way to grow the way you want is by experimenting! Business Coach Jessica Lackey (a McKinsey and Nike alum) shares her year-by-year experience in crafting her ideal business model:
How she contracted for “bridge jobs” in Year 1 to ensure cash flow—and why she’d do it again.
Year 2: building a “whale” delivery model with enough whales so you’re not overly dependent on any one.
Why she pivoted from a 1-1 delivery model to group and membership options (and it wasn’t because she had a large email list).
The pros and cons of running multiple revenue models as you pivot vs. making a faster shift.
How building interchangeable assets allows you to leverage your authority faster.
LINKS
Jessica Lackey Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Jessica Lackey is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses.
With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or two about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line…at all costs.
Now, she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations leadership and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community.
BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE
RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.
Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.
The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.
TRANSCRIPT
Jessica Lackey: I had a social media team, but I actually dropped Instagram in 2023 and I stopped doing as much LinkedIn. And I really focused on those marketing platforms that took more time, but had a bigger result. So again, I write once a week, I guess teach once a month. And people are like, you do that for free? I'm like, well, yeah.
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm joined by soloist Jessica Lackey. She is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses. With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or 2 about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line at all costs. Now she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations
Rochelle Moulton: leadership, and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community. Jessica, welcome.
Jessica Lackey: Yay. I'm so glad to be here.
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I feel like we're kindred spirits here, like escaping from big firm consulting and evangelizing on building sustainable businesses without buying into hustle culture. So let's just dive in.
Jessica Lackey: Sounds Good. First, your
Rochelle Moulton: resume reads like a who's who of American business. Harvard, McKinsey, Nike. You even interned at Apple. What made you decide to leave all that to start your soloist business?
Jessica Lackey: When you work in firms like that, there's, as you know, there's a real upper out culture. And these are places that will suck the life out of you if you let them. And in my 20s, like I did, McKinsey and Company Consulting, I was on the road, as you know, you are Arthur Anderson, 4 days a week, sometimes 5 days a week. Like I gave up my Sundays, I gave up my Fridays. I didn't have roots in town. All my friends were working. And that kind of moved with me to business school and that moved with
Jessica Lackey: me to Nike. Nike, it's so cool as a campus, there's the gym, there's restaurants and beer on campus, but it's really kind of designed to keep you in the berm, as they call it. Literally, they have a track and things like that. I was working 12 hours a day. The 1 job I was in, I was working weekends. And I realized at some point I had a health crisis and I realized, I'm like, okay, I have no life. I was making good money, but I didn't want the next step up on the ladder. And so I
Jessica Lackey: hit kind of a wall in 2015 and decided, all right, it's time for me to do something different.
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, because it doesn't get any better when you go higher up the ladder. It usually gets harder.
Jessica Lackey: They tell you it gets better. And really, what's interesting is that you end up with more responsibility. But a lot of these places, you end up with more politics, you end up farther away from actually doing the work and much more Pushing powerpoints around and that wasn't I didn't want to play the politics I didn't want to be mucking around a PowerPoint our day I wanted to solve real problems in the the farther up the organization I got, the less I got to do that.
Rochelle Moulton: Well, preach, sister. That's exactly what it was like being a partner at a big firm. And the minute I got there, I was like, oh, finally, I've arrived. And then you look around and you go, oh, crap. It's like, now I have to do this every day. Yeah, it's a bit of a change, isn't it?
Jessica Lackey: Definitely. I'm thankful I had the experience, but at some point I was like, this is not the life for my second chapter in my professional career.
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, exactly. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is that you've done some really intriguing Experimenting with your business model as you've grown. It's it's like you've served as your own Petri dish Which I love especially for soloists. So year 1 if I have this right so you started coaching but you subcontracted to a consulting firm to keep the cash flowing. So talk us through how that worked and why you made the decisions you did.
Jessica Lackey: Yeah. So a little bit of backstory. I tried, I got certified as a life coach because I thought I wanted to be a life and leadership coach in 2018. And I tried to build a coaching business as a side hustle 2019, 2020. And yeah, I mean, you know, I was working 1 of those big jobs where I was, you know, I didn't have time. I didn't have the mental mind space. So in 2021, I knew I was going to leave. I hadn't really done any biz dev. I had connections, but I was like, I don't really
Jessica Lackey: know what I want to do for my personal business. I was like, I just don't want to be at my job anymore. And so I quit thinking, I was like, I don't know what I'll do. I'll figure it out. And so I did my first year was all the subcontracting through a bunch of those matching platforms and with another firm. So I was through some connections. I got connected with, again, I did project management for a rebranding company. I did sales and operations consulting through, I got matched on a platform. I didn't actually know the firm
Jessica Lackey: I was going into. It was 1 of those like a BTG or Catalan. I think I was with Graphite there. And then some of my former colleagues from Nike started up a consulting firm. They didn't have a huge book of business, but I got to be part of some of those projects, which was really great because I got to show up and be an analyst associate from a consulting perspective without having to do any biz dev. It certainly wasn't the top money, but it was a way for me to get paid in fractional
United States
