In this business roundtable, Veronica LLorca‑Smith introduces the concept of portfolio careers—building multiple, complementary income streams based on one’s passions, skills, and audience. She shares her three‑year‑plus evolution of Lemon Tree Mindset, beginning with a newsletter and digital products, then expanding to books, higher‑priced courses, one‑to‑one coaching, group coaching cohorts, and finally corporate B2B speaking engagements. Veronica emphasizes the importance of multi‑passionate identities, avoiding burnout by scaling coaching, and leveraging corporate experience for higher‑value offers. After her overview, she invites participants to share their own journeys. Steve, a change‑management expert, recounts his transition from adjunct professor to author and corporate trainer, highlighting how Veronica’s public‑speaking cohort enabled him to design and deliver four successful workshops for clients. The discussion underscores practical steps for diversifying revenue, scaling services, and building a community around one’s expertise.
Chapters
Business roundtables every month, and it's a great opportunity for us to get together, to brainstorm, to talk about challenges, discuss ideas with, with other people, get inspiration, and hopefully you can get some new partners to collaborate from this group of people. And the topic for this roundtable is going to be portfolio careers. As you know, in the past few weeks, I've been sending a weekly post related to portfolio careers. And the whole idea is that based on your passions and based on your skills and on what you want to do, you build a business that is sustainable and that doesn't rely only on one thing, that doesn't rely only on one income stream. Because the whole idea is that I believe that we're all multi-passionate. I'm not a niche person, and I think we all have different interests, different passions, but also different ways of, of doing things and different, even different audiences. And so the whole point is how do you build from what you have and from who you are, and you start to scale and you start to expand and you start to build new products and services so that you can really serve your audience, or as I like to call it, your community. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of where I am today in regards to portfolio careers, and then because we have so much experience in the room, I'm gonna ask a few of you to share your own experience, and then we're going to open for questions, we're going to open for best practices, challenges, and so on. So to give you an overview of where I am today, so I started the Lemon Tree Mindset in February 2023, so it's been 3 years and a half now, and it's been going so fast. I also have the Spanish one, by the way, which some of you who speak Spanish of course are members, like Rosemary. And I only started writing, and I started with my newsletter, and I started with digital products. But what I realized is that especially at the beginning when I had a small community, it was difficult to scale. And so I started to look at different ways of growing my business. So I went from writing to publishing books Then I added digital products, specifically courses, which I thought was a really nice way of elevating the same content that I was already doing but positioning in a higher, in a higher price point, in a higher perception for, for my readers. And then from there, I started the coaching one-to-one, but I found— I don't know how many coaches we have here— that it was quite draining. So I still do coaching, but I don't do as much as I used to when I started 2 years ago. I scaled the coaching to group coaching, and I do some cohorts. Some of you were actually in my previous cohort of public speaking, like Steve, for example, which is happening— Karen as well, which is happening again next, next week. And that was a wonderful way to scale. For those of you who are doing one-to-one coaching and finding that you're burning out, it's a really nice way to see how you can make a bigger impact and impact more people. And then the last piece that for me has become actually the, the biggest piece in terms of business is B2B. For those of you who come from the corporate world, I did find that it was really a shame not to leverage all those years of experience of different skills that I had developed during my corporate years. And so I turned that into an offer of speaking engagements, whether it's webinars or it can be things like masterclasses, for example, or even keynotes. And so because I started to target businesses and corporates, so that allowed me to really scale because obviously corporates have much deeper wallets than usually individuals have. So this is where I am today, and everyone's portfolio career is going to be and look very different depending on your background, depending on your skills, depending on what you want to achieve. So first thing is, I'm going to ask a few of you that I had already asked previously to share a little bit of where you are today because I find that your journeys have been super exciting. So I'm going to start with Steve. And to give a little bit of background about Steve, Steve is our change management expert. He has many, many years of experience in that field. He has a book, he writes a lot on change management, but recently he joined the public speaking cohort. And so I got to know him much better. And since then, he actually started having his own workshop. So Steve, maybe you can tell us a little bit like how your own journey has been unfolding.
Yeah, it's been great. So A few years ago, I, I was an adjunct professor on the side and beside my day job, and I enjoyed the training piece. I love seeing the light bulbs kick, you know, come on, the haha moments, and that's part of the Substack as well. But anyway, from that, the, the students was always asking, how can I find something that puts this all together? So came up with Governing the Chaos of Project Management, my first book, Governing the Chaos of Managing Change, the second book that I'm working on. So all of those will tie together in a series. But my portfolio has been really about around teaching and training, corporate training and all of that. When I took the class from Veronica, um, the, this, the public speaking class, I mean, I thought I had some experience, but I uncovered so much more. Um, and then shortly after that, I was able to, uh, set up 4 workshops for my client, and it was, it turned out really good. It turned out fantastic. First one was just kind of getting through the nuts and bolts of all of it. But by the second, third, by the fourth one, it was smooth. It went really good, really well, and got a lot of kudos out of it. So, you know, my hat's off to Veronica for that course. It was incredible. So thank you.
