PICA Member Spotlights

Q&A with independent consultants who successfully “made the leap” and created the consulting career of their dreams

 

Q: Please introduce yourself and tell us about your business.

A: My name is Kevin Hagemoser and I am a solopreneur.  My focus is operations consulting and coaching as a Fractional Integrator for businesses that use Operating Systems.  One of those systems is the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS®), popularized by Gino Wickman in the book Traction.

Q: How long have you been independent?

A: Since 2015 I have been doing integrator work, in 2017 I adopted the title Integrator to better describe what my work includes. 

Q: Why did you decide to go independent?

A: I had a job loss that prompted me to start looking for opportunities. About the same time, I had a business friend who had just bought a business and she needed to scale up. The business had gotten some venture funding, so it needed to scale.  My friend knew I was open for work. What originally looked like a project for maybe a month turned into a three year consulting gig. After that gig concluded I found a client that was officing out of the same building who also needed operations help installing a new workflow software for their bookkeeping firm.  Since 2015 I’ve worked with more than 10 businesses needing integrator work.

Q: How did you get started with the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®)? Was that as a result of that first project?

A: No, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) became attractive to me after starting with my first few consulting clients. In 2011, a mentor I respected was reading the book Traction that was written in 2008 and I knew other companies in my immediate network talking about running on that system. The book became popular and you think, “I’m sure I’ve read something like it” and that’s true, you probably have. Traction is an amalgamation of about half a dozen key books that you would know as leadership books. But the impetus for me to adopt the methodology and the title of Integrator was when I realized I was struggling with client conversations about what we should do strategically to grow their businesses and how to do it tactically. 

With entrepreneurs there’s always a lot of back and forth about how to run the business, entrepreneurship is far more of an art than a science.  When I finally internalized Traction in earnest I realized it was a structure that keeps people between the guard rails of the art of business. That’s when I really started being connected to EOS®. Once the concept sinks in to an organization we all know what game we’re playing instead of debating the “how” and “why” and my clients can move forward faster toward growth. EOS® helped us have a shared language and better conversations when speaking to each.  We spent much less time on what game we were playing and we could talk deeply about how to get the most from the strategy we were using. 

Q: Do you consider yourself a consultant, a coach or mentor?

A: That's a great question. I used to think I would never want to be called a consultant.  That fear goes away when you join a group like PICA and you see so many great people doing fantastic work for clients, they take pride as I do now in being considered a consultant.  Sometimes I think the business world is suspect of the word “coach” especially when too many people use it for so many things. There are people that are truly trained as Certified coaches with a capital “C” and I’m not that.

I think now the things that fuel me are helping people do things that clients wouldn't be able to do on their own.  So maybe by definition, I would lean more towards considering myself a coach to a very specific kind of business Visionary. I wouldn’t have said that five years ago.

Q: What's one thing you know now that you wish you had known seven years ago when you started?

A: I was just talking about this with an Integrator friend. I would like to tell myself from seven years ago to be more real. I would love people early in their journey of being independent consultants to be more honest with their clients about what will work and what their experience tells them about what is being considered. I know clients really are seeking authenticity.  Plenty of people are just telling the client what they think the client wants to hear. So how do we get past that and actually give them what they need to hear? By asking good questions informed by experience allows a consultant to be a type of coach to guide clients to see what they can't see themselves.

Q: Is there a particular story or incident that makes you reflect on this?

A: I started using an analogy on client discovery calls that best describes how I arrived here but it’s not just one experience, it’s conversations with hundreds of business Visionaries. 

I would say, “I'm your best mirror. I'm not your employee and I'm not your spouse. I am somebody without bias that can just be a mirror of your business actions and reflect back what's happening in a way that I'm not afraid of losing my job, offending you, or ruining our relationship if you don't agree with what I say.  And the Visionary doesn’t have to fear losing face because they don’t have all the answers, there is no need to pretend when you work with an Integrator. If I ask a question about your industry, I can play the dumb card. “I don’t know, please explain to me why you do this and not this.” The Visionary should be free to also not know things, but the work we do together gets the business closer to the goal than either the Integrator or the Visionary on their own.

Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to figure out as an independent consultant?

A: Being a solopreneur, the first one that comes to mind is personal. It was a challenge to help my spouse understand that the business of entrepreneurship isn't linear, like a job at a corporation. As an employee, you start, you continue your employment, you slowly gain income and status, you depend on those 40 hours, and there's a paycheck.  

As an independent consultant, there can be wild swings, which is why PICA is so helpful. People need to know the things they don't know in the first weeks, months, or years of their independent consulting journey. They need to know the struggle isn’t forever. The journey is hard, but the peaks and valleys are not forever. I wish I had a better way to help consultants on this path to communicate with their family. It would be awesome to meaningfully help other solopreneurs with who are on this path. Having been an entrepreneur, worked for entrepreneurs, and excited about that entrepreneurship world, I realize that not everyone understands it like I might. 

Consulting not being like a W-2 job at a fortune 5000 business can create a lot of personal friction in relationships, whether it be family, friends, or colleagues. Being patient with those who don’t yet know what they don’t know is the job of the consultant. So when your family asks “Why don’t you have a job?” you might realize they just don’t know how to ask in the right way.  As a consultant having a “script” prepared to explain what you do for a living to the people around you will pay dividends for many years.  

Q:  What's next for you and your work as an Integrator?

A: I’m realizing that though I'm in my late 40’s, I need to be thinking about my retirement in ways that are different than my friends who work for big companies. I need to understand how to get out of just trading my time for money so that I’m productizing my current service. I have a service that I can sell so many hours a week to a client for a price on retainer.  Now I’m thinking, how do I productize my offering so that I can leverage all of the things I've done and my experiences in a way that makes it possible to give my clients as much or more value faster without being limited to an hourly fee structure. To do that I am investing in really learning what  my Ideal Client Profile looks like.  The other component is how to create a work product and sell it at scale. How can I think like a franchisor, but behave like a small business? That’s what I’ll be working on for the next twelve months.

Q: If people want to learn more about you and or what you do, what would be the best way to do that?

A: My LinkedIn profile is my landing place.  And I’d like to give Liz Steblay and PICA a huge thank you for helping me improve my LinkedIn profile and my messaging in 2022.


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