Proving It Twice
Reflections on Career Independence, Personal Sovereignty, and Proving It Twice
Author’s Note: I’m writing this at the close of the year, looking back on 2025 as a second proof-of-concept of what I’ve been writing about for years.
Wow, what a year to wrap up.
Thanks for following along. And Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.
I write on X and Substack because journaling can be clarifying and grounding for me personally — a way to organize and reflect, to accelerate my moves forward by making sure I’m harvesting everything from both the past and present… make sure I don’t leave anything behind for the next leg of my journey… and I always suggest you do the same.
It’s also proven helpful or inspiring or perhaps nudging for others… so I write more long form from time to time.
The Anti-Course
Of course, I have an ongoing series I call The Anti-Course which chronicles the development of my ethos and worldview as I’ve progressed in my life and my career.
In the Anti-Course I started at the beginning, and the latest chapter covers in and around 2013–2014. Hopefully I’ll get to present day by the end of the year. After that, Junteau will shift its focus and themes somewhat as history finally catches up and runs parallel with the present.
The Anti-Course is just something I must do and complete for myself, my kids, and anyone else interested in the journey and how it might relate to their own.
But I wanted to take this opportunity to jump ahead to 2025 — a side bar review — because what 2025 represented for me was powerful and confirmatory… and offers lessons to others.
Leaving Wall Street and Wanting Independence
Long-time followers on X and readers here know my story. For those who don’t, in short, I resigned from my Wall Street career in 2020 and formally exited in early 2021.
Myriad reasons I’ve written about countless times, but important reasons as it relates to this reflection now were the yearning to prove I had what I call independent commercial value (ICV) versus relying on a single “intermediary” or “sole client” aka an employer in a W2 environment… and also to create my own universe in a way… to ram force sovereignty… to stop asking permission… to be completely free “from the matrix” as they say… live where I wanted with my wife and kids… travel anywhere… do anything… yet simultaneously build my own business… do the work I enjoyed and am good at… and build a brand around what I was doing.
And frankly just to spice things up… see what was possible… have an adventure.
It was actually having kids that brought this out in me even more… plus the idea of being a father and a husband… an ultimate symbol of adulthood… yet I wasn’t in control of my schedule and had to ask permission to do things? It’s wild to me now, was wild to me then but I sucked it up because I had to… needed to build skills and experience and a network. But by that time I didn’t need to suck it up anymore, I felt.
Goods Intelligence and M&A in Parallel
I left my job at Evercore in Feb 2021 and spent a few months in a nice much-needed and deserved extended paternity leave while networking and thinking deeply about what I would be doing next.
The rough idea was to get my RE license, hang with a business and commercial RE brokerage in NJ where I lived and grew up, and start marketing myself as a business broker or SMB M&A advisor… leveraging the relationships and career experience I had built over 10 years in the corporate and Wall Street world, combined with my small business upbringing in the construction space working for the family business my father started in 1975 (and still runs).
Simultaneously, however, I started a little consulting business I thought I’d call Goods Intelligence — a play on ideas like “every good business needs good intelligence” but adding “s” because my focus would be on consumer goods businesses… goods business, goods intelligence.
It would be my own shingle I’d hang out… but with a nice logo, website, email, etc… to brand my years of experience in consumer data analytics and insights, market research, and then financial modeling, strategy, investment analysis from my 6 years on Wall Street covering the consumer staples and restaurant sectors.
I would do both of these things at the same time, mainly because my thought process was that brokerage and M&A was longer sales cycle, bigger success fees but lower probability and longer processes meant cash flow would be wildly inconsistent. There is also not much busy work in brokerage/M&A (outside of bizdev and occasional crunch times) so I needed more granular roll-up-sleeves type work to fill in these time gap cracks.
The way I won clients was just seeding my network… telling everyone… personally, email, phone calls, LinkedIn posts, etc… that I had left Wall Street to go out on my own and what I generally planned to do.
My first client was a relative of an old Wall Street client who owned a construction business that turned into great sell-side M&A experience even though no deal ended up happening… but I learned a lot and it molded the way I developed my business model later.
Another was a buyside search engagement for an industrial products distributor in the Midwest… another great experience that lasted about a year… was brutal… found a target… lost the bid to a much larger competitor… but again was a wonderful experience.
Once I got my feet wet, built confidence, more leads would come in… this is a long story that I’ll save for the Anti-Course, but over a 2-year period I ended up selling nine companies ranging from tiny CPG asset sales to a ~$30 million revenue healthcare agency and almost everything in between — home services, software, industrial manufacturing, a fitness franchise, a small handful of CPG brands.
I proved to myself that I could earn independently… and gained experience on the fly, in the field.
Consulting, Investing, and the Goods Ecosystem
But remember I was also building Goods Intelligence in the background.
My first client here was a frozen food company that had just gone public via SPAC… and needed investor relations help… basically data-driven brand and product storytelling for investors to understand the growth opportunity. I was brought in by a friend who was doing fractional investor relations with whom I worked for years on Wall Street.
Around the same time, I was cold emailing a lot and posting on LinkedIn. The head of sales of a high-growth CPG brand reached out asking if I could help with a small data analysis project. This was 2021. I still work closely with executives from both of those companies on various projects… big and small.
In between there were countless other projects… a white space analysis for a leading baby products manufacturer, a women’s supplement brand, and others.
The intersection of my dual business pursuits — M&A advisory and strategy/data consulting — ultimately led to invitations or referrals into angel and venture rounds of emerging companies. So I then started writing small checks as an angel investor… so now there is a third “pillar” to my independent pursuits.
Predictably, these all started to generate synergies between the three “divisions” of what I was doing — M&A, consulting, and now angel or venture investing. It became clear I needed to rebrand.
So the idea of a Goods branded ecosystem came into sharper focus. I renegotiated my agreement with the business brokerage so that I could rebrand as Goods Advisors. Then I wrapped all of my private investing into the Goods Ventures brand.
My focus would shift subtly to mostly consumer and consumer goods related client work… and take generalist work on selectively or wrap that work in a different brand I’ve created called SMB Advisory either solo or with like-minded and motivated partners.
All of this took place between mid-2021 and mid-2023.
Blowing It Up Again and Moving Abroad
Because in mid-2023, my wife and I decided to blow it all up again… and pursue our lifelong dream and interest in living abroad.
The irony is that I always thought I’d work my way up the corporate ladder and be offered an overseas role at some point… be one of those Monocle-reading jet-setting corporate executives or Wall Street analysts… make mom and dad proud… but of course that never happened.
It was Manhattan for me for almost 10 years. Don’t get me wrong, it was an amazing experience. But we wanted more out of our lives and careers than commuting to and from the same place for, frankly, ever.
So it’s ironic because it was the newly found internalization of freedom, entrepreneurial freedom, the pulling up of our cognitive and psychological anchors around what’s possible to achieve… the building of the vehicle ourselves versus relying on one someone else built for us to ride in… that opened the aperture of what was possible.
There were however tailwinds and nudges. The stars had to align too.
I have had an Irish passport for almost 15 years… through my grandmother who was born in Roscommon and emigrated to the US as a teenager. I was right out of college and thought it was cool and could also boost my resume and help convince a future employer to send me overseas.
The other tailwind was my brother-in-law working overseas and getting a new job offer in Amsterdam. We’d visit a few times during COVID… once just my wife and I… another with our two kids… we fell in love with the city and said to ourselves… we’re going to make the leap and move. Sell everything, wife would leave her job, and head out.
Practical Reality and a Temporary Return to W2
However, it wasn’t that easy.
I reached out to a Dutch compliance and tax consultant for help with logistics… and was advised… “whatever you do, don’t move here as an independent business owner.”
The reason was that the Netherlands has a tax incentive for people who move there from overseas specifically if they are moving there to work for a Dutch company (including Dutch offices of American companies) and they have a certain high skill level. Most expats have this tax benefit.
There was also the problem of getting mortgage or landlord approvals. They don’t often approve seemingly random foreign “business owners”… businesses they can’t actually see and don’t understand. I sort of don’t blame them.
So, I was advised to just go “get a normal job.” It was like a logistical bridge.
But this was hard for me psychologically because I thought I had left that W2 world behind. Even though this would be a practical short-term move rather than a long-term career one… I selfishly considered how I’d handle the messaging both internally with new potential coworkers and my external network, friends, family, and those who had been following along my journey for the previous two years.
But I figured I’d deal with that somehow.
The big issue was actually finding a job… how impossible it seemed. In another country? I didn’t speak Dutch or any other language… zero network in the Netherlands aside from my brother-in-law but he too was new and worked in a different sector.
I ended up going back to networking mode… reaching out to mega-cap CPG companies I had covered on Wall Street… and that worked but the process was slow and the salaries incredibly low… 60–80K ranges… not workable.
I lucked out though, with an old employer… company I worked with at the start of my consumer career and stayed in touch with my old boss there… Jersey guy… great person and friend.
They had just acquired a company in Germany and they told me they needed someone physically in the EU to help with some biz dev, product development, and integration.
We had an understanding that I wouldn’t entirely mothball or shut down the business I was building, but practically speaking I did need to slow it down. I also genuinely looked forward to the work. It was two dreams colliding… to be some overseas corporate executive type, and to be an independent business owner.
In any event, it was one of those situations where I was just hired on the spot essentially, since they already knew me and I had left a positive mark there.
Keeping the Lights On
Eight weeks after the email telling me about the opportunity — I was down in Orlando at a consumer conference… actually trying to close the biggest CPG M&A transaction so far… in the pickle category — I was in Connecticut for onboarding.
And 3 months after that, I landed in Amsterdam with my family. One way flight.
I worked for that company in Europe… closing deals, managing clients, developing new products… from the summer of 2023 to the spring of 2024 when the integration work was finished and all of my work was moved back to NYC (where I would not be going).
I was no longer needed, so I entered a nice long garden leave and enjoyed the summer and fall of 2024 with my family.
I had kept a few lights on within the Goods ecosystem… smaller client engagements, continued investing, etc. I needed to… because the plan was to restart Goods in a big way after we got settled in Europe — immigration logistics, kids in school, apartment secured, admin, business formation, and tax matters handled. So the timing was perfect.
It’s much easier to go from 1 to 2 or 10 than to restart something from 0.
That was critical.
2025: Doing It Again
So now we enter 2025.
I have a ~$40-50k revenue run rate with Goods Intelligence from those client relationships I retained despite working in corporate… paid a big chunk of the rent but obviously not survivable with a family in one of the more expensive cities in Europe.
I had to get to work in a massive way… not only that, I needed to get the consulting revenue to a run rate above any level it previously achieved in years 1 and 2… because I wasn’t going to pursue M&A work as aggressively for practical reasons… not yet at least.
I had to develop Goods Intelligence into a robust standalone consulting business.
The first thing I did was pitch existing smaller relationships on larger scopes of work given the fact that I was back 100% independent and no longer working on the corporate integration work as a W2… but would be staying in Europe… and in fact the time difference is a huge benefit for both me personally and my clients in the US and Canada.
Then I went back to bizdev mode… networking… calls… reconnected with old friends… benefit of always staying in touch with people and keeping the network fresh.
I landed a great client engagement in the ice cream category… a few months later I was tapped to lead insights and analytics work for a high-growth sparkling water brand through a referral from an industry friend… and had a couple of nice ad-hoc modeling and strategy engagements that each took a couple of months.
Suddenly, 8 or 9 months into 2025 the revenue run rate 5x’d… through that mix of expanded scopes, referrals, and new engagements.
Of course, I have expenses. During that time I also hired a part-time contractor who is like-minded and highly skilled in the space.
I’m also investing a lot in the business and the future.
I wrote about this the other day on X… but my approach is to pay myself what I need to pay myself to pay my bills and make sure we are comfortable. Any surplus is being routed to asset building — software and tooling, application development, branding assets, business development like attending conferences, developing a small staff that can one day grow much larger.
I’m thinking long term.
The only people who care what I’m earning are landlords and banks… who much more prefer I had a nice clean high salary at a nice safe large multinational corporation. Because of course in Europe it’s almost impossible to be fired. So it actually makes sense why that’s favored!
The Lesson
In any event, 2025 was a great year. Of course, plenty of epicurean pursuits too… global travel with the family and lots of adventure… stories for another piece perhaps.
But the lesson is that… what I learned… I can do it again.
I can slow down, speed up, build, rebuild… because what I am building is me, my ideas, my vision, my experience, my perspective, my team who I can assemble who are likeminded and equally up to the task.
I exist. I am mobile. I move forward. I work hard and I play hard.
This is what I’m selling. Whatever the form is largely irrelevant.
You are likely no different.
You are you. You Inc.
Your commercial value can take any form you want… an executive or W2 role somewhere… a product… an idea… a service… a “shingle”.
I just want to be independent at the moment. Proved my commercial value can live outside of water… outside of any single system… multidexterous and multilayered.
Doing it the first time — leaving my job to go solo and build income from scratch — was quite a confidence booster and opened a universe of what’s possible.
Doing it effectively a second time… is hard to describe in words.
All I can say is that I’ve never been more excited about the upcoming year in my life.
No exaggeration.
Stay healthy, everyone.
Cheers,
Kevin