Jim Barke: His First 2 Years Going Solo, Unfiltered & Honest

Almost every escapee story on this show starts with corporate going bad. This one doesn't.

Jim Barke spent nearly twelve years at a company he genuinely liked, with what he calls the best team he's ever worked with, and six weeks of PTO. Nobody pushed him out. He wasn't burned out. He hired a career coach because he knew he was at a crossroad, and on their second or third meeting she told him he should quit his job.

He laughed at her. He was divorced, single income, with his oldest headed to college.

Then he came back to the next meeting and said he was going to do it.

What flipped it happened on a walk. He was spinning on how am I going to make money, and realized money isn't actually his top value. Being a present dad is. Being a decent neighbor is. What he wanted was the ability to say yes. And he has the receipts. When a local father went missing and the community put out a call to search, he moved his one meeting and went. During a local emergency he spent about forty hours delivering groceries in a month.

Two years in, this is the most useful kind of guest, because he still remembers the numbers.

He set written goals before he left. Three months to momentum. Six months to a first client. Twelve months to sustainability, which he's careful to say does not mean replacing his corporate income. It means seeing a path.

His first client came from announcing on LinkedIn that he'd left. A guy he used to train for triathlons with had just become chief legal officer at a nonprofit and had a project. His best client over two years came from an email somebody in the Collective sent him about Catalant, a marketplace for consulting work with private equity backed companies. He bid, won it in three days, did good work, and ended up flown to San Francisco to present to the PE firm's leadership. His words: that one email changed the trajectory of my business.

He's also honest about the parts that are hard. The loneliness of a basement office after a team he loved. Three kids in college. Income that moves up and down. And the two hundred thousand dollar question nobody in this space answers well: how do you build enough trust in a networking group to actually refer someone's work when you've never seen their work?

He doesn't know. He says so.

And when I asked whether he'd ever go back to corporate, he didn't give me the usual answer. He said maybe. Under specific conditions. But that he'd be running away rather than running toward, and he doesn't like that feeling.

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