500 of you have found your way to The Portfolio Method Notes, practical notes from inside a portfolio career on pricing, energy, visibility, and building work across multiple roles. That happened in a week, with zero paid marketing.
That tells me one thing: there is a real hunger for honest data on portfolio careers. Not inspiration content. Not hustle culture. Actual numbers.
So this week, I am sharing what we have found. Because you deserve to see it. And because nobody else is publishing this.
Over the past 11 weeks, 296 senior professionals across 20+ countries submitted detailed financial data through the Portfolio Method audit and Money Method tool, with zero paid spend.
Here is who they are:
- 79% have 10+ years of professional experience
- 59% held Director, VP, C-suite, MD or Partner roles before going independent
- 77% identify as women. This is a women-led movement
- Consulting is the primary income stream for the largest group, with speaking the fastest-growing and the most underpriced
- Respondents span 20+ countries, including the US, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Nigeria and across Europe
This is not a side-hustle audience. These are senior professionals making a deliberate, structural choice about how they work. And they are ahead of the curve.
1. Almost nobody knows their effective hourly rate.
65% of respondents do not know what they actually earn per hour across all their streams, and that finding held across two completely separate datasets. 51% have never calculated it. Only 14% actively track it.
Think about what that means. Senior professionals who would never accept opacity in a corporate salary negotiation are running multi-stream businesses with no clear picture of whether they are pricing themselves right.
That is not a personal failing. That is a structural gap. And it is exactly what we are here to close.
2. Speaking is the most systematically underpriced stream.
When we asked people to name their most underpriced income stream, speaking came up unprompted more than anything else. Our rate benchmarking data shows speakers earning anywhere from £2k to £25k per engagement. Most people are anchoring at the bottom without knowing it.
You cannot charge what you are worth if you do not know what the market pays. Now you will.
3. Overwhelm is structural, not personal.
37% of respondents feel overwhelmed daily or almost daily. These are not people who cannot cope. These are people running sophisticated, multi-stream careers without any infrastructure built for that reality.
The problem is not them. The problem is that no operating system for portfolio careers existed. Until now.
This is where it gets exciting. The ambition in this dataset is real:
- 59% are targeting £100k+ revenue this year
- 47% are targeting £250k+. Nearly half of all respondents.
And yet the infrastructure to get there did not exist anywhere before this. No Glassdoor for fractional work. No benchmark for what a fractional CMO should charge in 2026. No data on whether your speaking rate is competitive or whether your advisory day rate is 40% below your peers.
These professionals are not behind. They are pioneering a way of working that the rest of the world is only just catching up to. They just needed the tools.
This week I was reviewing a company running 20 AI agents instead of a human team to protect AI model security. Another portfolio company can now test 1 million drug combinations per experiment, something that used to take 18 months.
The task layer of work is being automated faster than most people realise. What survives is judgment, relationships, lived expertise and trust. That is exactly the raw material of a portfolio career.
I also spoke this week with someone who spent 15 years at one of the tech giants, and recently walked away from £250k+ compensation because he had lost passion working 12 to 16 hour days without reward. He is not unusual. He is early.
The professionals in our community spotted this before the mainstream did. That is what makes them ahead of the curve.
Portfolio careers are not a future trend. They are being built right now, across every generation.
One professional I spoke to, documented her life on Instagram and gained 20,000 followers in 4 weeks. She is now a fractional advisor, public speaker and building a startup, all simultaneously.
The next generation of leaders is not waiting for a linear path. They are designing their own. And the data tells us that experienced senior professionals, with 10+ years behind them, are arriving at exactly the same conclusion from a completely different direction.
This is not a Gen Z trend. This is where work is going. And the people in this community are already there.
Here is why I am sharing all of this publicly.
We are building Glassdoor for portfolio careers: a living benchmark that becomes more valuable with every person who contributes to it. The dataset we have is the only one of its kind in the world. Our newsletter open rate sits at 66%, against an industry average of around 21%. The audience is real. The data is real. And we are at the moment where the right voices can help shape what this category becomes.
We are looking for 10 to 15 Founding Ambassadors: senior portfolio professionals on LinkedIn who want to help build the category, not just observe it.
Who we are looking for:
- Senior professionals at Director level and above, or with equivalent independent experience
- Publicly active on LinkedIn around career reinvention, fractional work, pay transparency or squiggly careers
- Willing to take the free audit and share their honest reaction with their network
What you get:
- First access to the full benchmarking dataset before anyone else
- A permanent founding role in the category, properly credited and structured
- Content equity for ongoing contributions: equity and modest cash, formally documented
- A seat at the table on the Money Method, the pay transparency tool we are building next
If this sounds like you, or like someone you know, reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. I would love to talk.
Haven’t taken the audit yet? 205 people across 20 countries already have, with zero paid marketing. It takes 10 minutes and shows you exactly where your Energy, Money and Visibility stand.
Until next week,
June
