Context
The beginning of 2024 was harder than I anticipated. I was worried as a solo founder.
A large number of software companies went crazy about optimizing their costs and layoffs. The demand for my educational and advisory services decreased.
My Mission is to create a mini Silicon Valley in Central Europe.
As a mentor, coach, and fractional advisor, I help software companies achieve 9x revenue and outpace competition by elevating their productivity, leaders, and systems.
Financials, August 2023–24
- 🟠 Overall revenue: ~ $270k USD. My goal was to hit USD 300k+.
- 🟢 Business costs: ~ $41k USD.
- 🟠 Gross profit: ~ $220k USD.
I’ve established 3 separate companies for each of my revenue streams. They work independently while allowing me to scale and share relevant stakes with powerful contributors.
Stream #1: Engineering Leaders Community (ELC)
Source: Engineering Leaders Community
ELC stream KPIs
With Any Kozuch, our fantastic community manager, we have set a couple of goals for 2024:
- 🟢 We’ll grow to 600 members in 2024. We hit an 800-member base milestone in August 2024.
- 🟢 We’ll facilitate 10 high-quality meetups in 2024. We made 12 meetups true.
- 🟠 We’ll bring meetups to 3 cities in Central Europe: Prague, Brno, and Bratislava. Bratislava is scheduled for September 2024.
- 🔴 We’ll be financially profitable. At this point, we have zero signed partnerships. We are in the final stages of contract arrangement with Ataccama and CodeNow. In parallel, we are advancing with Productboard, Microsoft Prague, Kiwi.com, and Wrike/Citrix.
Each meetup costs roughly $2k. Venue, catering, photos, videos, post-production, equipment, tooling, and a fantastic community management service are not cheap.
In parallel, the community is an excellent lead generator for mentoring and advisory services, as attendees distinguish the value we share. Companies require a precise improvement plan execution. No BS, no theory talks.
ELC stream review
I created a spin-off from my existing company just recently due to the necessity of
- having control over exploding costs,
- having the option to ask for potential future sponsorships,
- and having the option to share future company stakes with people who deserve it.
Building the community for engineering managers, directors, and CTOs in 2019 was one of the best decisions I’ve made.
Initially, I decided to run this group privately with a couple of chosen souls, as Covid kicked hard. I wanted to speak to someone about my situation while working remotely at Mews as a VP of Engineering.
Now, I am excited and still surprised to see the impact, allowing people to share their thoughts, meet together, and elevate their profession in leading software teams and companies.
Currently, we form a community core with Jakub Ruzicka, Any, and Nicola Zorkler.
The current member base of 800 physical individuals is growing exponentially, and rumors are spreading quickly.
We must continue to pay extreme attention to the quality of the meetups and the content. Attendees would rather give up fancy catering than content quality.
ELC stream plan
- By the end of 2025, we aim to reach 2048 unique members. The market is large, and the exponential curve works without compromise—it’s pure math. People who have the urge to get better and improve continuously will join. The wind will blow the rest away.
- We’ll find 4 supporting companies aligned with our mission.
- ELC will generate profit for the first time and become financially secure.
- We’ll ignite several monumental initiatives in our 2025 ELC strategy with Any. I’ll describe them in the next post.
Stream #2: Mentoring and Coaching
Source: Coaching and Training for Software Engineering Managers, Directors and CTOs
Mentoring stream KPIs
- 🟢 I helped an additional 27 mentees in the past 12 months, for a total of 92 billed mentees satisfied since 2019.
- 🟢 311 completed mentoring sessions in the in the past 12 months.
- 🟢 The average number of sessions per mentee: 17.
- 🟢 NPS score: 84 on the scale -100 .. 100.
- Composition: 45% 1st-level engineering managers, 19% 2nd-level managers, 22% CTOs, 14% others (Staff or Principal Engineers, CEOs, PMs, agile coaches).
Mentoring stream review
In 2023, I used to have a waiting pipeline of 4–7 mentees, which suddenly disappeared in 2024Q1 due to companies cutting costs.
Approximately 40% of clients scratched off mentoring from their list. On the other hand, 60% of companies continued benefiting from mentoring services, which turned out to be a wise long-term investment.
Since May 2024, my capacity to mentor 16 individuals two days a week on a bi-weekly basis has been full again. The ELC community helped a lot, or better to say, it rescued me.
I love mentoring very much, as it generates an addictive source of satisfaction. Physically, I witness how individual students grow and beat the world they’ve never dared to.
Junior leaders need continuous help to transform their perception from coder to leader. Senior managers seek value, a partner in crime, who helps them validate their thoughts, changes, and decisions.
Mentoring helps me grow with my clients.
I fear no more what questions my clients could come up with and whether I’ll have the right answer. Nowadays, I find myself on the opposite spectrum, being excited about questions I’ve never encountered before.
On top of that, it helps me to create strong friendships.
Besides regular mentoring topics, people come with unique situations I haven’t anticipated: I help them decide the right move in their career and make them do it in real, help them land their new role like a pro, or help them overcome their inner fears.
On the other hand, individual coaching sessions are considerably time-consuming and drain energy more than expected. A magnificent mentoring session is as exhaustive as a great interview.
I aim to offer an excellent experience, making big leaps with my mentees and including mini homework.
All that takes dedication, which translates to energy.
Mentoring stream plan
Coaching and mentoring generate ~ 50% of my revenue. In 2025, I plan to decrease my involvement by 15%, reducing the number of session slots I provide and delegate that piece to my raising partners. Currently, one coaching session is worth 330 EUR.
Besides mentoring, I want to steer my focus on quarterly 2-day workshops designed for Engineering Leaders.
Currently, software companies are hungry for workshops tailored to their specific needs, values, and aspirations. This need has increased, especially after the post-COVID era, which was followed by a series of internal optimizations and layoffs.
In 2024, 5 companies have reached out to request a tailored on-site workshop to boost their Engineering Managers.
That is why I invested $15k in building a new Engineering Leaders Training Academy site with Margi Fries. We’ll expose the details in a couple of weeks. The fifth run of the Academy, dedicated to junior engineering managers, will take place in October 2024.
Stream #3: Fractional Advisory
Source: Fractional and Execute Board Adviser
Fractional stream KPIs
- 🟠 79 man-days billed for my fractional advisory. Expectation: 90 days.
- 🟢 The number of software companies I’ve helped and can publicly acknowledge has expanded to 35.
Fractional stream review
For two consecutive months in 2024Q1, I had no fractional contract. I fought with a self-regretting tone.
While this break worried me, I took it as an opportunity to invest my free time into building a new revenue stream.
Fractional stream plan
In contrast, in August 2024, the demand for fractional services exceeded my capacity. I plan to delegate some of it to my partners.
Companies value a combined expertise in software development, architecture, leadership, and business.
I’m capable of doing deep dives, such as investigating the code, debugging, exploring the process pipelines, or reviewing individual efficiency and skills.
In 2025, I plan to allocate more of my effort to advisory services. I see a substantial impact there that is larger than individual mentoring.
Imagine the magnitude of helping a company to ace their situation:
- Precise productivity boost for development teams: Development teams missing hard their quarterly roadmap goals for the 3rd quarter. After 12 days of consultancy, they deliver 80+% of each quarter continuously. Teams aim to get from a 4/10 efficiency score to 7/10 in 6 months and 8/10 in a year, guided by a clear improvement roadmap. Make your development teams trusted.
- Transparent real-time productivity metrics: CTOs having no clue about the maturity of their 10+ teams. After 12 consultancy days, they have real-time team efficiency dashboards tied to compensation.
- Optimized organizational structure: The CEO is doing a cross-company reorg on paper. After 8 days of consultancy, we choose the right structure, including a roles and skills matrix and objectives-to-tasks alignment.
- Software architecture quality audit for strategic investment: A company has been developing its product for 10+ years, with a technical roadmap in place that, as they’ve been told, will hopefully wipe out the technical debt in 2 years of investment. After 12 days of consultancy, they have a reviewed technical architecture roadmap based on data and external experience, saving 9 months of waste equal to $3 Mio.
- Strong talent and brand: Companies ask to establish their technical brand to attract more engineering leadership talent. Start from your end and enable a real education budget, career levels, innovation, and talent management. You can only start worrying about your brand, development blog posts, meetups, hackathons, or podcasts.
- Talent and skill review: Talent assessment is tedious, and it involves laser-cutting work. I conduct interviews with internal employees to assess their skills and potential. After we’re done, we have a crystal-clear detox plan that strengthens the true company talent.
- Objectives alignment: Closing the gap between product discovery, delivery, and adoption, and moving from projects and deadlines to products. Now, the company has a new deal leadership organization, development flow, opportunity assessment, lean canvas, and some new faces replacing people who consistently rejected the purpose of transparent priority planning.
I promote all the use cases with detailed content and price tags on my fractional website.
Deloitte, PWC, or McKinsey’s days in the software engineering field are over, not to mention their 10x pricing policy for 40 PowerPoint slides.
On top of that, in mid-2024, I made a considerable leap in this revenue stream:
- I’m a long-term Tech and Product Executive Committee member, talking directly to the Board in a company that generates $3bn+ in turnover annually.
- Following two successful advisory initiatives, I’m set to sign a long-term advisory contract with a mid-size Central European bank in September 2024. My role will involve reviewing their technical decisions, enhancing efficiency, and effectively communicating technology strategies to the Executive Board and the Bank board.
Speaking of fractional advisory, many people I encounter believe that technical expertise alone is enough to excel as a solopreneur architect.
Success requires a compelling introduction and implementation strategy, the ability to navigate high-pressure Board Exec meetings, and the finesse to balance transparency with office politics. It’s crucial to distinguish what people say and what they mean to say, identify and motivate key supporters, and deliver recommendations and execution with precision.
Stream #4: Backoffice
In addition to the three financial streams, there’s a significant amount of work that often goes unnoticed: operations. This stream doesn’t directly generate revenue but costs.
To ensure all the pillars mentioned above function seamlessly, I need to dedicate considerable effort to learning, reading, writing blog posts, speaking at meetups and on podcasts, meeting new people, and expanding my network and influence.
Although this stream looks fun, it’s tedious work, which, if I’m not paying attention, can eat my revenue-generating streams for breakfast.
I do my best to think of operational cost positively, as a future investment.
I ask myself:
- How much work or money will I save in the future by investing work or money in Y?
- What is the cost of delay, meaning what does it cost me each month not to have service X, feature, tool, or automation?
- What potential stream can I open or strengthen from talking to person X? Decline chit-chats politely. Stay organized. Be a machine. I’m not a machine. This one is hard.
2024 Rollercoaster Highlights
- Adopt or die: I changed my business to the newly discovered needs. I reviewed my strategy, course-corrected, and stayed focused. Sticking to a well-defined strategy and knowing what to do and what not to do proved crucial to my success.
- Positive constraints: I have shit to do. Part of a grand strategy is knowing what to exclude. I will not get famous on Instagram or LinkedIn. I will not write four superficial posts a day. I will not create a new fancy agile methodology. I will not write a book about it or sell certificates.
- Growing recognition: My personal brand is gaining traction. In 2024, I’ve been invited to speak or moderate at 16+ various meetups, podcasts, and conferences.
- CTO mentoring course: Together with the TechExecs community, we launched a brilliant 10-session mentoring program for CTOs.
- Community partnerships: We successfully partnered with 3 other communities, namely Smitio, ProductTank, and TechFellows. These collaborations have resulted in on-site meetups with 100+ attendees.
- Community management: I found my professional mate, Any, who leads our ELC community. I’m grateful for her.
- Engineering Leadership Academy: We are launching the fifth training run with proper branding. The idea and content have already been validated four times.
- MBA program: With Ota Novotny and Milan Nidl from the University of Economics in the Czech Republic, we agreed to launch an MBA program called “Leaders in IT” in 2025, with me as the guarantee and lecturer.
- Engineering leaders hub: I’m transforming the business model and seeking partners, not employees. I envision the Engineering Leaders Hub as a network of trusted professionals from diverse fields who actively support one another. I plan to offer considerable equity stakes to key contributors to ensure alignment and lasting collaboration.
2025 Prediction
Expected revenue in 2025: $440k.
I am optimistic.
I see signs of recovery in the market. New Amazons and Googles are rising. Self-proclaimed 4-week BootCamp senior developers are moving away from the software development area. I witnessed excellent people getting excellent offers that no one could have imagined before. I see the impact, and it’s monumental. I believe our ELC community will become an invaluable asset—one we must continue to earn. Companies are returning and eager to support our mission.
People and companies are completely okay with paying a higher fair price for true value. They need proper help and adopted improvements, not slides or PDFs of corporate Big Four jargon.
The combination of technical background, leadership experience, individual mentoring, fractional on-site advisory, learning, impactful writing, and a growing community with high-quality meetups is a powerful combo.
We’re building a mini Silicon Valley in Central Europe. By elevating the Engineering Leadership talent pool, we’ll catch up with the startup scenes in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. Adding more trees to the forest isn’t helpful anymore.
Conclusion
Am I buying the new Porsche? Nope. After covering living expenses, I reinvest profits into my existing ventures while exploring and developing new ones. I diversify. I go for 20x.
In 2025, I plan to further expand my business portfolio with 3 more businesses: one larger substream, spinning off one more venture, and building a startup product.
If you want to stay in the loop, join our community or subscribe to our newsletter. I’d be pleased to meet you on-site at the meetup and chat, or you can follow me and our community on LinkedIn.
Let’s connect and discuss potential partnerships for our businesses or communities.
About Marian
Marian provides coaching and mentoring to engineering managers and leaders at all levels, empowering organizations to build successful products.
He leads the Engineering Leaders Community, organizing 10 annual meetups for Engineering Leaders, Managers, Tribe leads, VPEs, and CTOs in Central Europe.
Read more about Marian’s mission.
Following the principle of transparency, all data is exposed at https://www.kamenistak.com/data-flow-profit/.
Kudos to my wonderful wife, Kate, for supporting me on this rollercoaster journey. Behind every successful man, a strong woman stands.
