There’s More Than Just Corporate OR Entrepreneurship:

For a long time, we were taught to think about careers in terms of “either - or”:

You can either go up or down the ladder.
You can either be a Corporate Baddie or an entrepreneurial founder with a business to pitch on Shark Tank.
You can either succeed or fail.

But, after eight years in corporate HR + going on five years of entrepreneurship–  in multiple forms, across multiple income models– I don’t see careers that way anymore.

I see careers as a spectrum with tons of variability between Corporate + Entrepreneurship.

And when you’re trying to design a career that actually fits your life (not just your résumé), two variables come up again and again:

1. What you’re actually exchanging for money (your time or your insights)

2. How predictable your income is
   

Once you look at your career through those two lenses, a lot of confusion suddenly becomes… data.

Let’s map it. I present to you my latest brainchild: The Career Model Matrix©.

The Career Model Matrix ©

⏳ 🔁  Time for Money × More Predictable Income

These roles trade the time you actually spend working (aka “butt in seat”)-- and your output during that time– for relatively stable pay. You pretty much know when that direct deposit is going to hit, but you’re still tracking a timesheet.

The career models in this quadrant are (but not limited to):

• 9–5 Employee: Self-explanatory. You’re paid for availability, output, and consistency.

• Independent Consultant : Still time-based, but with higher autonomy and usually higher upside.

• Freelancer: Project-based execution work. Flexibility goes up, predictability varies by pipeline.

• Portfolio Careerist: A blend of several time-for-money streams at once (part-time roles, retainers, contracts). Stability comes from diversification, not one employer.

⏳ 🎲  Time for Money × Less Predictable Income

This is where volatility starts to show up. People are still paying you for the time you spend with them or on solving their challenges, but retainer (long-term, consistent) clients are less common, so you’re constantly trying to sign new ones.

• Online Coach: Speaking from experience, this can feel like feast or famine, depending on how often you “sell” your coaching offer, client demand cycles, and your emotional stamina as much as your skill. I burnt out from this model within one year, but there are many folks for whom this works perfectly, because they genuinely like + are good at the sales/lead generation component.

🧠 🔁 Insights for Money × More Predictable Income

Here, you’re not necessarily paid for the number of hours you work, but for your expertise, leadership, judgement, scar tissue, and skill in communicating all of that to benefit others.

• Fractional Leader: You’re brought in for strategic insight at a senior level, without full-time attachment. Common Fractional titles right now are Fractional CMO, COO, Head of HR/Talent Acquisition.

• Digital Product Creator: You build and sell courses, templates, frameworks, and other digital tools. You typically only create them once (so you can cap your working time), and, depending on what challenges they solve for your customers, can be high-leverage and offer more predictable income once you find consistent customers. The competition here is extremely high (think Etsy sellers, Notion template sellers), so most success stories have either an existing large audience to sell to or use ads to drive traffic to their products.

🧠 🎲 Insights for Money × Less Predictable Income

High upside, but high uncertainty.

• IP Licensing: You’re monetizing your ideas, frameworks, or intellectual property. Revenue can be meaningful, but highly irregular. Maybe one or two clients can be enough for your annual revenue, but the sales cycle in landing those clients can be long and intense, and there is no guarantee that they’ll sign after all that courting. Other career coaches can pay me to license my Pivot With Purpose IP/ coaching framework to use in helping their own clients.
  

• Educational Creator: I see this as different from a traditional influencer in that education content (like the kind I create) is often the top of the funnel for a more robust business model that includes consulting, speaking, brand deals, or products. Some of that work quietly pulls you back into the time-for-money quadrants.
  

• Influencer: In my view, an influencer is different than a content creator is that their main goal is to influence you to click on/buy something that turns into a commission for them, whereas a content creator’s main goal might be to build a portfolio of content whose individual, discreet aims are not to convert to sales, but to build a larger audience that can then be monetized B2B (brand deals, consulting, etc).

How to Use This Matrix

After 14 years coaching millennial professionals, I’ve gathered that most career dissatisfaction comes from misalignment: 

You might crave predictability, but your career model is volatile.
Or maybe you want leverage and freedom, but you’re stuck in time-based work.

When people say, “I don’t know what my next move is,” what they often mean is:

“I don’t know which trade-offs I’m actually willing to make.”

This spectrum helps you answer that honestly, without shame, hustle rhetoric, or one-size-fits-all advice.

Do you need to tell your boss about your side hustle? And if so, when and how should you do it? Here’s my take, as a former HR professional, who also started her own side business while working full-time:

Love the newsletter but want more? Did you know I put together an entire course called Pivot with Purpose? Think of it like a supercharged version of all the best content from this newsletter, tailored to help you nail your career goals.