Hi, everyone.
My name is Kathleen, and I have spent 15 years working in the entertainment, marketing, and impact sectors. The past eight years of that, I’ve spent working for myself and running my own business.
I started this Substack (and this subsequent Substack podcast) to help pass along the hard-earned insights and lessons I’ve learned along the way.
When I started working for myself eight years ago, I didn’t really know anyone who was doing it yet. I was 28, almost 29 at the time, was leaving a really toxic work environment and decided to try my hand at freelancing to see if it could buy me a little bit more time to find the next right job.
And within six months, I was making more than I had before. I doubled revenue year over year for the first four to five years. And I ended up working for myself longer than I ever planned to from the from the get go.
I what I had planned to be a three to six month stopgap turned into the best career decision I’ve ever made.
I am now in my mid to late 30s and I have so many friends that are facing their own career fork in the road decisions. So many millennials who have spent their careers climbing the corporate ladder, doing all of the things we were told to do to get ahead and finding themselves up against a glass ceiling of possibility due to the current economic realities, the looming threats of AI, the contracting and consolidation of wealth and power to the very few hands at the top, the lack of corporate turnover in terms of leadership and a whole number of factors that leave us burnt out, overwhelmed, overworked and unsatisfied.
So many people are thinking about what it looks like to take on consulting projects or work for themselves, and I personally love it because I think taking your career and your work into your own hands and stepping into that level of empowerment is one of the best decisions you can make for yourself. I also know that it’s risky—when I did it I did not have kids, I was not married, I had a roommate. My degree of responsibility was a little bit different than what a lot of people are considering now, and my hope and my goal is that some of this content can help de-risk the decision.
That it can help make you feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more secure in how to put the pieces together and structure moving forward.
The reality is that working for yourself, yes, it comes with a lot of freedom. I’ve done many a work days abroad and on trips that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
But it also means doing every part of running a business.
It means paying taxes.
It means figuring out retirement and health insurance.
It means planning ahead.
It means forecasting.
It means business development.
Etc.
And that can that can be overwhelming.
And so many people are used to their companies handling so many of the logistics and back end systems that make a business run and just being responsible for doing their particular job function. And suddenly you’re facing having to do a lot more.
So my whole goal with this Substack and with this podcast is to share some of the lessons and insights I’ve learned along the way. Probably share some stories from people that are walking through it right now or have navigated it differently or in different industries than I have.
And to use it as a space to reflect on what it means to rethink work in this current moment when we’re all facing such big looming questions about our futures and the future of work in general.
I also want to share the business lessons and insights I learned from working in an industry—entertainment and culture and impact—that have tremendous impact on the world and in the way that we understand things.
So this podcast, though not really a traditional podcast, more of a place to have conversations from another human being, is where I hope to do that.
So thank you for listening, for coming along to this somewhat crazy experiment that I’m running as someone who doesn’t like being in the spotlight. But I do really want to help people navigate these really big looming questions and make it seem a little less scary, a little less overwhelming, from the perspective of someone who’s done it for almost a decade.
So thank you for listening to Exit Interview, where we get honest about the realities of work and power and culture and have some of the conversations you can only have when you walk out the door.
I’m Kathleen, and thank you so much for listening along!
Exit Interview is the honest debrief on work, power, and culture. I'm Kathleen—I've spent 15 years working in entertainment, advocacy, and strategy, and the past eight building a business on my own terms. This is where I say the quiet part out loud: how power actually moves, how careers really evolve, and what I've learned since stepping off the corporate ladder.
