The new safety net

For most of my career, security meant one thing. A good role, at a good company, with a clear path to the next one. One employer. One income. One identity.

I built 15 years on that model, and I believed in it. I'm now fairly sure it's the riskiest structure most senior professionals have.

Let's dive in.

The single-employer model concentrates everything you have into one bet. Your income, your status, your network, your sense of who you are, all riding on one organisation's decisions about its org chart.

When that organisation reorganises, and right now a lot of them are, you lose more than a job. You lose the whole structure at once.

Meanwhile a different structure has become normal. Fractional executive profiles have grown from around 2,000 to 110,000. Interim C-level demand is up 310%. 5.6 million US independents earn over $100,000 a year.

Gartner expects nearly a third of midsize firms to have a fractional executive by 2027. And of the people already working this way, only about 19% are using it as a bridge back to full-time. The rest chose it.

When I say optionality, a lot of senior professionals hear "side hustle." Something low-status and amateur, bolted onto a real job.

That's not it at all.

Optionality means having Plan A, Plan B and Plan C designed from day one, instead of discovered in a panic after the redundancy meeting.

Plan A might be a sharper, more aligned corporate role.

Plan B might be fractional or advisory work.

Plan C might be something you build.

The point is to have genuinely evaluated all 3, not to run them all at once, so your next move is a choice rather than a reaction.

The reason most people don't is that the single-track model trains it out of you. You spend 20 years optimising for the next rung, and the muscle for considering parallel paths goes unused.

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

Here's the bridge to my own situation, and why I'm writing about this in a career newsletter.

When my role was eliminated in January, I had the same instinct as everyone.

Find the next equivalent role, fast.

What changed it was sitting down and actually mapping the options, including ones I'd never have considered from inside a big company.

Building Zelova was Plan C. It then gained importance once I'd looked at it honestly next to the others.

The way I'm building the business runs on the same idea. One operator, a system of tools, far less dependence on any single structure. That's optionality applied to a company, not just a career.

I'm putting the approach into a simple tool, an Optionality Map, that walks you through your own Plan A, B and C.

It'll go out in a couple of weeks. The logic is the same one I used on myself: design the options before you need them.

If you've built any optionality into your own working life, deliberately or by accident, I'd like to hear how it's gone.

What did you design ahead of time, and what did you only discover once you were forced to.

Reply to this email or message me directly.

More soon.

David