Wisepreneurs | Independent Professionals Building Practice on Their Own Terms

Filip Dřímalka wrote The Future of No Work and now helps independent professionals become superpowered with AI. He returns for the Wisepreneurs Podcast's 100th episode after selling both companies he built.

Filip describes the parallel worlds now opening between professionals who work with the top AI models and everyone else, and walks through his PACT system (Projects, Agents, Context, Tools), why his 130 agents collapsed to a hand...

Alex Hayes, president of Boost Pricing, says independent professionals undercharge from fear of losing the relationship.

Alex trains sales teams at Boost Pricing to win deals at higher prices and hold that price when the buyer pushes back. 

She explains why solo practitioners cave: discounting is the easiest lever to pull, and a 5 per cent cut comes off profit, not revenue, so one handshake can erase a quarter of the year's marg...

Krystal Hille, founder of Hille House Publishing, helps experienced professionals turn expert positioning into a book.

A former theatre director, she reads authors the way she once read actors, through the body, the breath and the story. 

She explains how she draws out an author's onlyness, the one thing only they can write, through the void to value exercise and stream-of-consciousness prompts, and how she maps authors to the f...

Sarah Duran is a fractional COO who helps solo business owners extract their business from their own head and turn it into systems that scale. 

She never planned to run a business — she watched her parents do it her whole life and wanted none of the weight of other people's livelihoods — but contract work turned into a decade-long practice she now runs in under 40 hours a week.

Sarah explains why what got you to six ...

Liz Micik shows independent professionals what AI agents see when they read a website, after 28 years fixing broken ones.

Her framework puts four questions to a site: can an agent find you, understand you, trust you, and use you. 

The free Signal Check at lizmicik.com/signal-check asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini about your business three times each; Nigel scored +24, with 14 checkable facts from Perplexity and none f...

Kay Sargent makes the case that your workspace is part of your cognition, not a backdrop to it. 

Kay leads neuroinclusive design at global firm HOK and wrote Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces (Wiley). 

Her framework — six modalities of work, each needing a higher-stimulation and a lower-stimulation version — gives independent professionals a practical way to set up a home office that supports their best thinki...

Valentine Gatard built 15 years of career independence in Paris as a speaker, coach and host of the Work Narratives podcast. She has just completed a master's in organisational studies at La Sorbonne and is writing a book on workplace narratives and agency.

Valentine explains why French professionals increasingly refuse management roles, how two colleagues fell out because collaboration meant respond immediately to one and t...

Alisha Hook spent 25 years in talent acquisition and HR before founding Your Career Edge to coach professional reinvention. Her career coaching and fractional talent consultancy is based in Melbourne and works both sides of the hiring desk.

Alisha explains three trends reshaping the job market for experienced professionals: job hugging, where people hold onto roles out of fear rather than satisfaction; peek-a-boo jobs, where...

Johanna Rothman has worked as an independent consultant since 1994 and written 21 books on management, consulting, and professional writing, including Successful Independent Consulting.

Johanna uses the Consulting Role Grid from Champion, Kiel and McLendon (1990) to draw a distinction that matters for every experienced professional: hands-on experts who take no responsibility for client growth are really contractors, not con...

Bex Thomas spent 20 years in recruitment before an intentional career break became the catalyst for a portfolio career as a career transition coach, sabbatical coach, and podcast host of Sabbatical Stories.

Bex explains her five-question framework for planning intentional career breaks: why you are taking the break, when to take it, where to go, who to spend time with, and who you want to become afterwards. 

She covers t...

Margareta Křížová offers freelance advice for professional reinvention, sharing six questions that replace the business plan.

After co-founding a boutique M&A advisory firm in Prague in 1993, Margareta spent almost 30 years in dealmaking before selling her equity stake at 53 to rebuild as an independent freelancer. 

She now combines selective advisory work with entrepreneurship mentoring and runs the NEWTON University Busine...

Janine Garner helps women entrepreneurs over 50 turn accumulated expertise into independent consulting practices that charge what professional judgment is worth. After 20 years in corporate marketing, finishing as group marketing director for the Oroton Group overseeing Oroton and Ralph Lauren brands across Australia and Asia, Janine built a seven-figure mentoring business focused on expertise monetisation for experienced women lea...

Ella Zhang helps experienced professionals monetise hard-won expertise through inner operating systems that rebuild leadership capability from the inside out. 

From her Sydney consulting practice, she draws on neuroscience and Chinese medicine to design micro habits that make capability stick where one-off training programs fail.

Ella explains how four inner operating systems, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical, shape su...

Ben Legg helps experienced professionals monetise expertise as co-founder of The Portfolio Collective, a 16,000-member community for portfolio careers. 

Before that he was COO of Google Europe, led Coca-Cola's India turnaround, worked at McKinsey, and served in the British Army's Royal Engineers.

Ben explains why experienced professionals are leaving corporate careers for portfolio work, covering the practical mechanics of build...

Michael Zipursky studied 1,300 coaching engagements to show how experienced consultants build expertise-driven practices.

Building a consulting practice through relationships and conversations rather than marketing systems requires a specific set of mindset shifts that corporate experience does not prepare you for. 

For experienced independent professionals navigating this transition, Michael Zipursky maps the precise patterns h...

Experienced independent professionals building portfolio practices will find a practical operating model in this conversation with Dante St James. 

For generalists juggling multiple ventures, this episode maps the daily discipline and systemisation that lets diverse expertise run without you at the centre.

Dante traces how a failed startup, a pandemic-era cafe purchase, and a digital marketing exit became a self-running ...

Dr Miklós Pohl OAM at 78 shows how expertise sustains professional longevity across medicine, chamber music, and publishing

His Wisepreneurs conversation explores how sustained creative engagement supports professional longevity and cognitive vitality for experienced professionals who have no intention of retiring.

A Melbourne-based plastic surgeon, violinist, and founder of the Australian Doctors Orchestra, Miklós Pohl arrived in Au...

Darren Waldron, a Zurich carpenter-turned-solopreneur, built an independent AI automation practice with no coding background. 

A carpenter by trade, now based in Zurich, he developed AI-powered lead management systems after experiencing firsthand how slowly businesses follow up with potential customers.

His company DS Walden specialises in two services that independent professionals and small businesses can learn from. Database ...

Systematic business development for independent consultants who want predictable revenue without employees or feast-famine cycles. Melisa Liberman coaches experienced professionals to build consulting practices generating $500,000+ using quantifiable metrics rather than hope-based pipeline management.

A consultant for 13 years and now a coach for independent professionals, Melisa explains why consultants who think like CEOs rather t...