- Paul Millerd left a six-figure consulting job in 2017 to work for himself.
- In his first full year as a solopreneur, he brought in about $48,000, mostly from freelance consulting gigs.
- Gradually, he has expanded his revenue streams and increased his income.
Feeling burned out after a decade of working for various consulting firms, Paul Millerd walked away from a stable, six-figure salary in 2017.
He had about $50,000 in savings and a loose plan to do freelance consulting. After all, Millerd was an experienced strategy consultant; up until that point in his career, it was the main way he knew how to make money.
The problem was that he didn't want to consult anymore.
In 2018, his first full year as a self-employed freelancer, he took a few consulting gigs and brought in about $48,000 in revenue. He spent most of his time doing "creative work," he told Business Insider: blogging, starting a podcast, and building an online course.
These projects made him tick, but they didn't generate any money for more than 18 months.
In 2019, Millerd's second full year as a freelancer, his total revenue dipped to about $36,000, but he finally started bringing in money from his creative projects. About 30% of his earnings in 2019 came from consulting, while the rest came from his consulting skills course, coaching, content, and affiliate marketing.
He didn't yet feel financial pressure to earn more, thanks to his cash runway and a significantly lower cost of living made possible after moving to Taiwan in 2018. While his monthly expenses in New York City, where he lived throughout his consulting career, were close to $6,500, in Asia, he spent about $1,500 a month.
Millerd, 39, says that his revenue has grown yearly since 2019. He's also continued to expand his income streams. In 2021, he hit six figures for the first time since transitioning to self-employment, mostly thanks to his online consulting skills class, which took off in response to the uptick in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Course sales made up the bulk — about 75% — of his earnings in 2020 and 2021.
In 2022, he surpassed the amount he was earning as a full-time consultant, and in 2023, he brought in more than $300,000, much of which came from his book "The Pathless Path." The rest came from his online course, consulting training workshops, content, and affiliate marketing.
The fact that he was able to create lucrative revenue streams outside a traditional day job "totally surprised me," he said. "I didn't grow up around entrepreneurs. I didn't grow up around anyone taking an unconventional path. Ninety-nine percent of people in my life got money through a paycheck from a job."
He shared the two-part strategy that helped him transition from working as an employee to working for himself.
1. Experiment with different ways to make money
"Before you take the leap, trying to make a dollar on the internet is something worth doing," said Millerd, who experimented with side gigs like career coaching and building an online course on resumes. "There are more ways to do that than ever before."
Get creative with it, added Millerd, who even experimented with hosting dinner parties and charging per person. He didn't profit, but he did break even.
Earning his first $1,000 online "felt like making $200,000 in terms of the confidence it gave me," he said.
It doesn't hurt to keep multiple balls in the air. One of Millerd's strategies was to "try to make money in a bunch of different ways, just so I could gain confidence that different things were possible," he said.
His methods included being a teaching assistant and writing a newsletter: "I did all these small things, and none of them were close to covering my cost of living compared to the consulting, but they were all seeds of possibilities and confidence that sprouted later in my path."
2. Shift from full-time work to freelance
"I think the smoothest transitions are what I did: Go from full-time work to freelance work, which is essentially doing full-time work, but you're just doing it in a more flexible contract way," said Millerd, who quit, picked up freelance consulting gigs — which he knew he could make money from — and pursued his creative projects in his extra free time.
Once his course took off, he could scale back on the consulting gigs. Freelance consulting, which started as the biggest percentage of his income in 2018, has gradually taken a back seat. Today, just 15% of his income comes from consulting training workshops.
Millerd encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to start by asking their employers about flexible, part-time work. "Go to your company and say, 'I don't want to quit. Would you be open to a pitch of me turning this into a four-day-a-week job? Could I do three days a week? Here's what I want to do. Here's how much I charge for this.'"
If your manager doesn't want to lose you, they may be more open than you think to part-time work, he noted. Then, use your newfound time to do what drives you. In Millerd's case, that's writing, sharing stories, and doing experiments online.
