The five types of portfolio career-ists

Which one are you?

Finding the links connecting each part of you.

I’ve always been good at making sense of the world. Throw a million seemingly random bits of information at me and eventually I’ll uncover patterns and see how things link up.

This skill has come in mighty handy over the last few months as I’ve been surveying many of you about entering a work style and lifestyle that frankly, breaks most peoples’ brains. Many of us are trying to make order of the chaos, and we’re all asking:

• Who am I, when I’m made up of many parts?

• What do I do, when I can (and want to) do multiple things?

• How do I add value to the world, when I’m able to in endless ways?

• How do I communicate this value clearly when someone asks what I do, so that they’re not left scratching their head when I walk away?

These are all valid questions but ones that send most of us portfolio-people into a tizzy, because we believe that to create a one person business centred around our unique skills, experience and interests, we must follow the process outlined by every marketing textbook under the sun: identify a gap we’re uniquely placed to serve, define our positioning, hone our message and own our niche.

We try dutifully following these rules, forgetting that a portfolio career is about breaking them apart. It’s about defining a new way of thinking, being and operating. It’s not about fitting into a marketer’s box, it’s about building one of our own.

The Portfolio Career Continuum

A portfolio of many projects, clients and income streams can take shape in a multitude of different ways, and the first step in defining your value and communicating it confidently is to understand what type of portfolio-person you are.

The Portfolio Career continuum

1. The True Specialist

A True Specialist operates in a niche, offering a specific skillset to a specific industry, in a way that drives a specific outcome. They have similar clients and work on similar types of projects.

Their value centres around unique knowledge, skills and experience and can be defined by the following formula:

I help [specific target customer or industry] with [specific service] to achieve [specific outcome]

For example:

• I help early stage beauty brands with expanding into mass-market retail, to drive top line revenue growth

• I help B2B tech startups with designing and delivering Meta ad campaigns, to increase leads the top of their buying funnel

• I help Pre-Seed to Series A founders with developing crisis management skills, to build their personal and business resilience

2. The General Specialist

The General Specialist operates in a less nichey niche, offering a specific skillset to all customers in any industry.

Value centres around their unique skillset and can be defined as:

I help [broad target customer or industry] with [specific service] to achieve [specific outcome]

For example:

• I help all consumer brands with expanding their footprint in mass-market retail, to drive top line revenue growth

• I help all startups with designing and delivering Meta Ad campaigns, to increase leads at the top of their buying funnel

• I help all leaders with developing crisis management skills, to build their personal and business resilience

3. The Special Generalist

The Special Generalist has broad expertise within a particular industry. Think someone who has spent their entire career within fashion or beauty.

Their value centres around industry knowledge and can be defined as:

I help [specific target customer or industry] with anything and everything

For example:

• I help early stage beauty brands, with anything and everything

• I help B2B tech startups, with anything and everything

• I help Pre-Seed to Series A founders, with anything and everything

4. The True Generalist

We’re squarely out of niche-ville now. The True Generalist offers a broad skillset across all industries.

Their value can be defined as:

I help [broad target customer or industry] with anything and everything

For example:

• I help consumer brands with anything and everything

• I help startups with anything and everything

• I help leaders with anything and everything

5. The Multi-Hyphenate

Lastly, we have the Multi-Hyphenate. These people may be specialists in some areas and generalists in others. They likely have disparate streams of work that have nothing to do with one another.

Defining their value is tricky because it looks different depending on the context in which they’re operating.

I consider myself a Multi-Hyphenate:

• I help beauty brands expand into retail and grow internationally

• I work fractionally with B2B tech startups across sales and operations

• I mentor those looking to make the move from full time work into a portfolio career

• I pour my heart and soul into this newsletter every week

• I’m in the early stages of building something else

I know first hand how confusing it is to try and position yourself in market and clearly articulate the value you bring especially when your skillsets and interests are broad. Up until recently, I avoided the question “what do you do?” like it was the plague.

But I’m starting to get clear on how value for different portfolio profiles is defined, and this is my working thesis:

How value is defined on the niche-broad continuum

On the specialised end of the continuum value is defined by output. Clients or customers want a job to be done, and they need someone with special skills and deep industry knowledge to do it.

On the generalist end of the continuum, value isn’t wholly defined by output. I believe it’s largely defined by your inputs. Your strategic mind, your creative ideas, your unique perspective, your direct experience, your approach to solving problems, your methodology for getting things done.

If you’re a Generalist or Multi-Hyphenate like me, your value proposition is YOU. Your niche is YOU. People are buying YOU. You don’t need to search out there *gestures wildly* for something else to connect your unique strengths, random projects, diverse clients and multiple interests.

The link between them all is YOU.

The strongest link

You might be reading this while tangled up, trying desperately to put yourself neatly in a box. You might be beating yourself up, thinking that being drawn to many things is a fault.

But that you want to create a life of colouring outside the lines is not a weakness. That you’re willing to let go of one way of thinking to make room for another is not a weakness. That you’re open to a new way of living, working and being is not a weakness. In fact, in a portfolio career there’s no such thing as the weakest link.

The strongest and only one is you.

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🎙️ My POV on the why personal brand building in the portfolio career space is make or break:

• Why I’ve been wrestling with how to position my own skills and experience over the last 18 months [2:33]

• Am I a Special Generalist, a True Generalist, a Multi-Hyphenate, or all of the above? [3:25]

• You don’t always need to search for an external thread that connects everything you do [5:37]

• You are the selling point, so you need to be visible [8:21]

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