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The forces driving layoffs have created an unexpected win-win for small businesses and corporate dropouts.
Here are two facts that almost never get reported together.
The first: a small business doing $2 million a year can now hire the caliber of operator who used to be reserved for the Fortune 500. Not as a $250,000 full-time hire with benefits, which was never happening. As twenty or thirty percent of that person, purchased in the amount they actually need, at a price that clears easily.
The second: the person on the other end of that arrangement is frequently making more money than they made on salary and, counterintuitively, sitting on more stability, because they’re no longer dependent on a single employer’s quarterly math.
Both of those things became true recently, and they became true because of each other. Most of the coverage of this moment reads like a eulogy. Layoffs, hiring freezes, applications vanishing into the void. All of it real. All of it missing that corporate releasing its most experienced people and small businesses gaining access to them are not two stories. They’re one, and it’s a trade where both sides come out ahead.
Brett Trainor has been watching these forces move toward each other for years. “It’s the perfect storm for small business owners,” he says on-demand expertise, plus AI, plus a go-to-market model built around the customer instead of the org chart.
He’d know. He’s living on both sides of it.
A career that turned out to be a portfolio
Brett Trainor spent decades in corporate before betting on himself. Now through The Time Rich Project he’s on a mission to help one million Gen Xers do the same. Trainor spent more than 25 years in corporate go-to-market roles, with a quirk that turned out to be an unexpected advantage. He worked for the same leader at four different companies, hired each time into whatever seat happened to be open: sales, marketing, operations. Most people spend a career deep inside one function. He got a working view of all of them.
At the time, it just looked like an unusual resume. In hindsight, it was inventory. Every problem he’d solved across those functions became something he could eventually sell on its own.
That realization didn’t arrive all at once. He left corporate, moved through consulting, then fractional leadership, which he liked, though he describes it as a smaller version of the thing he’d left. Along the way, he took a well-paid contract and, rather than building a practice on top of it, chose the more comfortable option and went back in-house. It’s the decision he now points to most often when people ask what slowed him down, and he’s generous about why it happens: comfort is a powerful thing, even when you’re unhappy. In a thousand conversations since, he’s found the same pattern almost every time. People aren’t staying because it’s good. They’re staying because it’s known.
The real unlock came when he stopped looking for a role and started asking a different question: how many ways could he monetize what he already knew? Last count, he’s found ten.
What’s actually changing
The backdrop is real, and Trainor doesn’t soften it. Roughly five million people were laid off last year, and by his research, something like four million are still hunting for a corporate seat. He points to revenue per employee as the metric quietly driving the squeeze—Nvidia generating several times more revenue per head than a comparably sized Meta, and shareholders everywhere asking why their company can’t do the same.
But he refuses to make it a grievance. “I’m not faulting corporate,” he says. “You just have to know what they’re doing.” Companies are optimizing for the quarter. That’s the game they’re playing, and it’s knowable.
What interests him far more is the arbitrage nobody’s pricing yet. All that experience being released has to go somewhere, and the businesses that need it most have been priced out of it for their entire existence.
The buyers nobody’s counting
Trainor focuses on businesses in the $500,000 to $10 million range, and his description of them explains everything.
They’re not startups. They have real revenue and real customers. What they don’t have is anyone who’s done this before, anyone who knows how to scale the thing they built. That person has always existed. They’ve just always cost a quarter-million a year plus benefits, which put them permanently out of reach.
The unlock is that these businesses no longer have to buy the whole person.
Trainor’s favorite proof point is Lettuce.co, whose CEO he interviewed on his own podcast. The company’s first 41 people were all fractional or contract. Zero full-time employees. The CEO’s reasoning came down to a phrase Trainor has borrowed ever since: talent density. Hiring everyone full-time was financially impossible and, more to the point, wasteful. Far better to have twenty or thirty percent of someone who can genuinely move the business. Some of those people later converted to full-time—by their own choice, never by requirement.
That model is spreading, and Trainor thinks the math makes it inevitable. His estimate: in a typical corporate job, spending 25 to 30 percent of your week on the work you were actually hired to do is a good week. The rest goes to fire drills and meetings. Companies currently pay for that 70 percent. Small businesses have figured out they don’t have to and they buy the 30 percent that matters and skip the rest.
The math on the other side
The assumption is that this is a trade: you swap income and security for freedom, and you eat the difference. Trainor’s experience says the trade isn’t what people think.
Start with the money, because that’s what everyone’s actually worried about. When he left, replacing his corporate income was the entire goal. “That was my sole motivation,” he says to match the number, then prove he could beat it. He beat it. He’s since helped more than 500 people build businesses in the $10,000 to $50,000 a month range, working from the same experience they were already being paid for. The arithmetic isn’t mysterious: when a small business buys 30 percent of your time, they’re paying for the 30 percent that produces value, not subsidizing the meetings. Sell that same slice three or four times over and the numbers move quickly.
But the more important thing is what happens to risk, and it requires flipping a definition most people never question.
Trainor’s reframe for anyone still weighing the move is deceptively simple: think of your corporate job as a customer. “It’s your only customer at the moment,” he says. “Would you fire them, or would you keep working with this customer?”
Sit with the first half of that sentence. A business with one customer is a fragile business. Everyone knows this, it’s the first thing any advisor would flag. And yet a salary is precisely that: a single customer providing 100 percent of revenue, with the unilateral right to end the relationship on a Tuesday morning, for reasons that may have nothing to do with performance. It only feels stable because the payment arrives on a schedule.
Four clients is not a riskier version of that. It’s a diversified version. Lose one and income dips. Lose the salary and income goes to zero. Trainor learned the distinction by accident and by removing it. When he decided to go all in on building the Corporate Escapee, he cut back the other revenue streams to focus. It’s the decision he flags now as his own instructive misstep, because those streams were what had made him both successful and comfortable in the first place. He’s since reopened them. Multiple income sources weren’t a distraction from the business. They were the stability.
Then there’s the part almost nobody anticipates, which is that the freedom turns out to be structural rather than emotional. You choose the clients. You choose the volume. Hit your number and you can stop taking work, or keep going, or trade a client you’ve outgrown for one you want. None of those levers exist inside a salary.
Trainor’s own version of this is that his motivation didn’t survive contact with the reality. He left to make more money, and did and then discovered what he’d actually bought was time. His health came back. So did a sense of proportion. “Life is way too short,” he says, and the point isn’t sentimental: do this well and you can do it as long as you want, on your terms, rather than chasing a role that gets you two years closer to something you haven’t examined lately.
The professionals on the other side of this trade tend to notice one more thing: the 30 percent they’re now being paid for is the part they liked in the first place.
AI makes experience more valuable, not less
The assumption is that AI erodes the value of a long career. Trainor argues almost the exact opposite, and it’s the most counterintuitive thing he says.
“AI without experience is just going to run you to the most popular answer,” he says “and it may not be what that business needs.” Elaborating later, he sharpened it: for AI to work, you need experience and, more importantly, wisdom. Without that, you get the popular answer instead of the right one.
He adds a second limitation anyone who’s worked inside a real company will recognize immediately. AI doesn’t understand tribal knowledge, the undocumented nuance most businesses are actually built on. Which leads him somewhere genuinely optimistic: in an age of automation, he believes human-to-human connection becomes more valuable, not less.
For someone with twenty or thirty years of pattern recognition, that’s not a threat. It’s the thing that makes them worth hiring. AI handles the foundational work that used to require headcount; judgment about what to point it at is the part that can’t be automated. Which is exactly what a long career produces.
Problems travel better than titles
A corporate career gets defined by a job description: director of this, head of that. Small business owners don’t speak that language. “They don’t even know what it means,” he says. What they care about is whether a problem goes away.
So he has people run their history back through a different filter: not what were your titles, but what have you actually solved? “You’d be shocked at the number of things that you’ve actually done.” Then narrow it to four questions: can you save them time, make them money, save them money, or reduce their risk? Hit one, and they’ll pay, because they want the problem gone.
The relief in that reframe is that foundational problems small businesses face are ones a corporate veteran can solve in their sleep, because they’re not operating at the scale or complexity that made those problems hard in the first place.
And the identity part resolves faster than people fear. Trainor is candid that it took him a while for his first couple of years out, he barely told anyone what he was doing. Now he sometimes opens with TikTok influencer, purely for the whiplash. What he found on the other side is that the work stops being what you did and starts being who you are. He also found something he didn’t expect: a lot of people with decades in corporate turn out to be closet creatives, people who had no idea how much they’d enjoy making things until the box came off.
The visibility multiplier
Trainor’s expertise wasn’t enough on its own, and this is the part of his story that matters most.
He rebranded his podcast, committed to helping people find the exit, and for six months got nothing. LinkedIn didn’t surface him. “I started to believe I was literally the only person that felt that way about corporate.”
Then he tried TikTok with no strategy—he’s clear about that. He started talking honestly about corporate, and an account with five followers, three of them his daughters, climbed to roughly 78,000. It didn’t create the frustration. It proved the frustration was universal. He’s now near 100,000 across platforms, with a newsletter, a podcast, and a paid community, the Escapee Collective, running about 150 members.
Nothing about his experience changed in those six months. His visibility did.
That’s the quiet mechanism under the whole talent-glut story. The professionals converting experience into a business aren’t necessarily the most experienced ones. They’re the ones who are findable. The expertise is the product; visibility is the distribution.
Start absurdly small
Trainor’s advice is deliberately unglamorous because he thinks the grandeur is what stops people.
Don’t wait for the fractional role that’s twelve months out. Go make the first dollar. Sell something for fifty, a hundred, five hundred, not for the money, but to prove the thing works. Newly laid off? Tell your network you’re open to part-time. That single sentence, he says, creates opportunities that never appear otherwise, because if all people hear is full-time, that’s all they’ll offer.
And if the network route feels too exposed, look down the street. He counts roughly 150 small businesses in his own suburban Chicago town. Introduce yourself. Say you’re building something. Ask what’s broken. “So many people just never have that first conversation.”
He’s also blunt that the ceiling isn’t the point. Some people in his community want $25K a month and something scalable. Some want $3K and their afternoons back. Both are wins, and the flexibility to pick is itself part of the return. He built a personal scorecard to stay honest about it — the financial F, plus fitness, fun, and family. His argument: the financial score is the one corporate optimizes for. It’s rarely the only one that matters.
What he’s describing isn’t just an escape. It’s a market correction, and it happens to pay both sides. Millions of people are carrying expertise that corporate has decided it doesn’t want to pay full freight for. Millions of businesses have wanted exactly that expertise all along and could never reach it. One side gets senior talent it was priced out of. The other gets paid for the work that actually produces value, from several customers instead of one, on terms it sets. The infrastructure to connect them with fractional models, AI absorbing the foundational layer, platforms that make people findable only recently got good enough.
“It’s easier to find the first customer than the next job,” Trainor stands ten toes down on. For a growing number of people, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the better deal.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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