Going independent after a VP seat: the part nobody writes about.

I'd been in B2B SEO for twelve years. The last three were at VP level, which in practice means more time managing stakeholders and headcount than doing the work that got me the role. That's not a complaint. It's the job. But somewhere around year two in the role, I noticed that I was most useful to my team in the thirty-minute windows where I could get close to the actual problem: the architecture question, the content brief, the audit finding that didn't quite make sense. The rest of the week was coordination overhead.

The honest reason I left is that I wanted to spend 80% of my time in those thirty-minute windows instead of 20%. That's it. It's not a more interesting story than that.

The timing also mattered. AI search was reshaping the discipline faster than most in-house teams could adapt to, and I had a point of view I wanted to develop without the institutional constraints of a single company's roadmap. Going independent was the fastest way to work across enough different companies to understand what was actually happening versus what the LinkedIn consensus said was happening.

The announcement post did well. I knew it would. Twelve years of professional relationships, a reasonably visible role, a space (AI search) that people were actively trying to understand. The first few inquiries came within days. Two converted to paid work within the first month.

What nobody told me about: the administrative weight. Not the taxes or the invoicing. I knew those were coming. The cognitive load of being responsible for your own pipeline, your own reputation, and your own quality assurance simultaneously, with no institutional scaffolding, is heavier than I expected. When something goes wrong in a corporate role, the organisation absorbs some of the weight. When something goes wrong independently, it lands entirely on you. This is also true of the upside, but the asymmetry feels more pronounced in the difficult moments.

Month two was the hardest. The novelty had worn off, the initial engagements were in the messy middle of delivery, and I hadn't yet built the routines that make independent work sustainable. I worked too many hours. I took a client who wasn't quite the right fit because I was anxious about the pipeline. I learned more from that engagement than from the ones that went smoothly.

I capped myself at six concurrent clients from day one and held the line. This is the single best decision I made. The pressure to fill every available slot is real, particularly in the early months when you don't yet have the track record to be selective. I resisted it because I'd watched enough agencies and consultants compromise their quality and their reputation by taking on more than they could do well. At six clients, I can be present and useful. Beyond that, I'd be managing, and I didn't leave a management role to manage more people remotely.

I also decided early that I would only take B2B work, only in categories I understood, and only with companies serious enough about SEO and AI search to have a budget and a measurement framework. Turning down inquiries that don't fit that brief felt uncomfortable in month two. By month six it felt like the most important quality control mechanism I had.

I underestimated how long it takes to develop the writing habit. I knew from the start that publishing was important: both for visibility and for clarifying my own thinking. What I didn't appreciate is that writing consistently while delivering client work requires protecting time in a way that feels aggressive until it becomes routine. For the first four months, my writing was reactive. I'd get an idea, try to capture it quickly between client work, and end up with half-finished drafts that weren't good enough to publish. The archive on this site now reflects what I should have been doing from month one: one properly developed piece per month, written slowly over a week rather than quickly in an afternoon.

I also underestimated the value of saying clearly what I don't do. Every time I've updated my positioning to be more specific about the kind of work I take (B2B only, no affiliate, no filler content, no vague "rank for X" briefs) the quality of inbound inquiries has improved. Specificity repels the wrong clients faster than any vetting process.

The work is better. The clients are more interesting problems. The income has stabilised at a level I'm comfortable with. I have more autonomy over what I work on, how I work on it, and which findings I publish publicly, and that autonomy compounds in ways I didn't fully appreciate before I had it.

What I miss about in-house: the team. Not the meetings. The team. The specific satisfaction of watching someone you hired figure something out and run with it. That's not something you get as an independent, and I notice its absence more than I expected to.

If you're considering the same move: the transition is harder than the announcement posts suggest, the right-fit-client bar is worth holding even when it's uncomfortable, and the administrative weight is real but manageable once you've built the systems. It takes about six months to feel like you know what you're doing. That's not long.