Betting on Yourself, What It Takes to Fly Solo

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: Women are betting on themselves by starting businesses at a 69% higher rate than five years ago. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe, host of the Marketing Moms podcast. Today’s episode is called Betting on Yourself, What It Takes to Fly Solo, with Sue Kirchner.

Sue is the founder and CEO of Brand Strong Marketing, a brand strategy firm helping small and mid-sized businesses find what makes them unique and own it. With 25+ years of experience, she helps business owners stop stumbling over their story and start attracting the right clients. Welcome, Sue.

Sue Kirchner: I’m so excited to be here, Kelly. Thank you.

Kelly: Well, I love this topic because it’s very relevant to me. When someone in advertising or marketing says they want to go out on their own, what is the real menu of options?

Sue: That was one of the first things I learned when I decided to go out on my own. I was working in corporate America with this dream of starting my own business, and then the company I was working with suddenly decided they were going to move our whole group to Florida. I thought, great, I’m going to do my own thing. And I was lucky enough to have a professor who was a mentor of mine while I was getting my MBA, and he said, “You want to go out on your own? Let me help you get started.”

He was the first person who helped me see that there’s a variety of opportunities. The first model is what I’d call a strategic alliance: aligning yourself with another company. My professor had an arrangement with a product ideation firm called Herbst-Lazar Bell. He was a market research expert who appeared on their team whenever they needed that expertise, while still running his own business. He encouraged me to do the same, and I started working with marketing agencies that didn’t have brand strategy or voice-of-customer research in-house. They’d bring me in as the expert. It’s a great model because you have more feet on the street selling your services, which matters when it’s just you and you’re splitting your time between client work and business development.

The second model is getting a license or joining a fractional community, groups like Sales Accelerator, B2B CFO, or Chiefs for marketing. You sign on, gain instant credibility, get frameworks, mentorship, access to tools, and sometimes even leads. It gives you a jumpstart and a community while you find your footing.

Then there’s the third option: building your own agency from day one. That’s for people who want to work on bigger clients and bigger projects, build something they could potentially sell, or create legacy wealth. But it means you’ll spend more time running the business than doing the work, and that’s an important distinction to get clear on before you jump.

Kelly: How do you know which model fits who you are? A lot of women might not choose wrong because they lack the skills, but because they haven’t thought through their working style, what they want their days to look like, or how much independence they actually want.

Sue: Part of it is self-reflection: what do you want, what do you enjoy, what’s your vision? And the other thing is: you can start with one model and change. You’re not pigeonholed. That’s the freedom of going out on your own.

I always recommend reading The E-Myth before you make this leap. It walks you through the difference between wanting to build a business and wanting to do the work independently. If you’re going to build a boutique agency, you have to take on three roles: visionary and primary salesperson, manager, and technical expert. A lot of people love doing the work, and if that’s you, you may not want a team and all the HR and management issues that come with it. That’s what I ultimately chose: the solopreneur expert-advisor route. I had several decision points in my career where I asked, do I want to build an agency and hire people, or do I just want to keep doing the work for my clients? And I chose the work.

Kelly: So you’re moving from corporate or agency life. You have a title, an org chart, people reporting to you, budgets, clients that are already yours. What does that psychological shift actually feel like when everything is suddenly on you?

Sue: There are positives and negatives. The thing that hit me hardest was: you no longer have an IT person. When your computer breaks down, who do you call? But beyond the logistics, there are two psychological realities that catch people off guard.

The first is losing your support system. You don’t have someone fixing your computer, managing your accounting, making sure there’s paper in the printer. You have to decide which of those things you want to tackle yourself versus outsource, and there’s an enormous industry designed to support small business owners. The lesson I learned the hard way with an e-commerce business I started? I thought I could do my own bookkeeping. Huge mistake. Every hour I spent on accounting was an hour I wasn’t selling. Know your strengths, and just pay for the rest.

The second is loneliness, and it comes in two forms. There’s social loneliness: the loss of someone to grab lunch with, someone who knows your clients and your environment and is just there. I made a point to schedule lunch with someone once a week: a former colleague, a new networking contact, anyone. And there are so many women’s business owner groups out there: NAWBO, SCORE, local women’s business development networks. I was a member of a group through a local bank in Chicago for ten years. Free, monthly, and invaluable.

Then there’s collaboration loneliness: missing the brainstorming. When a client project comes in and you’re working alone, you can start to doubt yourself. My solution: I find people I trust and admire, take them to dinner, and ask if I can bounce ideas off them. I’ve even paid people to sit with me for two hours and give input. Or I do a swap with other marketers. The support doesn’t disappear. You just have to be intentional and proactive about building it.

Kelly: One of the big challenges I found is that when you’re working for a company or agency, you’re selling their story. Now you’re selling yourself, stepping out from behind the curtain. That can be a mental challenge even for people whose whole career has been built on marketing.

Sue: Absolutely. When my business partner and I first went out on our own, we kept saying, “We hate selling ourselves.” But here’s the truth: when you’re starting out, you are the only person who can sell your business, because you are the product. Clients aren’t just buying a service. They’re buying you. So you have to know your unique value in order to articulate it.

And it’s very hard to see yourself objectively, which is literally the work I do for companies, and even I need outside help to do it for myself. I get lost in my own thoughts, I fall in love with my own ideas. So when I was just starting, I went and interviewed former clients and colleagues: what am I good at? How do you see me? If you were going to recommend me to someone, what would you say? I used their language. As you build, you keep asking clients what value you provided, what you gave them that they couldn’t find elsewhere.

Your brand is not what you think you are. It lives in the minds of your clients and stakeholders. It’s their perception. So go find out what that perception actually is, and build from there.

Kelly: Let’s switch to the positives. What are the biggest surprises about going independent?

Sue: The biggest surprise was the variety. When you’re in corporate, your career follows a lane: work hard, make VP of Marketing, check. When you go out on your own and raise your hand as an expert, all these unexpected opportunities appear, and you get to say yes or no to them.

My MBA professor asked if I’d ever done focus groups. I hadn’t. He paid me to learn. Then someone else asked if I’d teach an MBA course on international marketing, and for two and a half years, I taught it, and took students to Latin America for an intensive three-week course. I got asked to speak about branding in ways that never would have happened inside a corporate lane. Every one of those experiences taught me more about what I’m good at and what I truly enjoy. It helped me find my zone of genius and focus my business. And all of it was because I was open and talking to as many people as possible.

Kelly: Talk about work-life balance and managing your own schedule. That’s the thing I love most, I’m not a morning person, I don’t record before 11 AM.

Sue: There’s so much joy and independence in being on your own and having that flexibility. When my kids were young, I worked around daycare hours and nap times. I can take my daughter to a doctor’s appointment without asking permission from anyone. I just rearrange my schedule.

But I want to be honest: you still have to get the work done. If a client needs something by a certain date, one way or another, you’re getting it done. I don’t like working late evenings, but sometimes the deadline requires it. The difference is that I committed to it, I’m in control of it, and I schedule my hardest work during my peak hours, 8 AM to 3 PM. Phone calls and follow-up happen when I’m not at 100%.

And the thing you said, Kelly, about lighting your own fire, that’s exactly it. You’re working harder because it’s yours. The success is yours. You want to push yourself. Going on vacation is genuinely hard when it’s just you. There’s no one covering the phones or fixing a client problem while you’re gone, but that just means you plan for it. I have people I trust and bring in on certain projects who help me do more, even if they’re not employees. And even with all of that, after 25+ years, I would not trade it for the world.

Kelly: Any final thoughts for women who are thinking about flying solo? Because a lot of women I talk to were laid off or let go. It wasn’t always a choice. And the data says founders over 50 are nearly twice as successful as founders in their 30s. What’s driving that?

Sue: When you’re in your 20s, you have fearlessness and energy. But when you’re in your 50s, you have something more powerful: a network. You have people you can call for an introduction, advice on proposals, a referral to the right lawyer. You have a track record you can show: real case stories of businesses you’ve helped grow. You’re credible in a way you simply can’t manufacture at 22.

And you know how to speak to your client, how to meet them where they are. I once worked alongside a brilliant young couple starting a social media firm. They knew the technical side cold: platforms, hashtags, graphics, all of it. But when they sat in a room with a CEO, they struggled to speak the language of business, to understand pain points, to create content that truly connected. They brought me along as the business expert so they could focus on the technical. That’s the advantage experience gives you: you know the craft, you have the confidence, and you can communicate and relate to your client. That’s what makes founders over 50 succeed.

Kelly: I love that. Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights today, Sue. I learned a lot, including different avenues I’m looking to explore myself. We’re going to provide links to your website and contact information in the transcript. Don’t forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.

Sue Kirchner: Thank you, Kelly.