Fractional
Fractional
Elles Skony: The power of community
https://fractionalpeoplepeople.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellesskony/
https://organizedchaosconsulting.net/
We're kicking off a 4 part collaboration with the Fractional People People community. In this part 1 we interviewed Elles Skony about the FPP community and discussed the power of community in helping grow your business and dealing with loneliness.
Hello and welcome to season two of the fractional.fm podcast and kicking this off really excited because today we're starting a collaboration, a partnership, mini series event here. You can expect a handful of episodes following this one as fractional.fm partners here with the fractional people, people community. And our very first guest, the one and only Ellis Goni, the founder of that community and fractional professional. So Ellis. Great to have you here. Super excited for this conversation. Welcome. I'm going to kick it over to you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and about the Fractional People People community.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited for this collab. Yes, so I'm Ellis Scone. So my day job, I do fractional chief people officer work. I consult, I advise for startups, usually in the digital media advertising, tech, SaaS, or e-commerce space. And I also founded Fractional People People, which is a community on Slack of people just like me who are pursuing the HRpreneur journey as we call ourselves. So they have practiced HR their entire career, mostly or HR adjacent type of roles. And they are now out on their own doing, creating their own business. And that looks like fractional HR leadership. It looks like consulting, coaching, again, HRpreneur. So we're all kind of creating our portfolios of this new career together and cheering each other on. And the origin of it, if that's helpful, is not that exciting. Basically was talking to a lot of my peers a little over a year ago when I started FPP and recognized we were all having really similar conversations with the same people, like getting curious about what is fractional, how do you do it, asking the same questions. And so sent out a link to a Slack workspace to... I think it was about eight people one night. And since then, we've grown to over 1,200 all over the globe. And so it hit a niche, I think, of where community has been really impactful for people's journey.
SPEAKER_02:So before we go too far, who is this community for specifically? Who is the person that you want to join this community in the next week?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So anyone who has already started or is currently... doing HRpreneur work. So fractional HR being the core there. So if you are a fractional HR leader as a solopreneur, so it's you, yourself and you as an LLC or that's kind of the core. profile.
SPEAKER_02:Got it. So you've been rubbing shoulders with other HRpreneurs and I've been a member of the FPP for a while now. It's been hugely beneficial to me. So if you're listening and you're thinking, hmm, maybe I should join that. You totally should. But as you rub shoulders with all of your peers in this community, what are some of the conversations that you hear over and over again? What are the themes, like some really like key takeaways from your time running this community?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So yeah, thanks for asking it in that way because I am probably never going to claim to be an expert on fractional. I think that maybe doesn't even exist. Well, some people have been doing it a lot longer, so I am not the expert. But I think that the things that I hear the most often, just in terms of the journey of fractional HR, are reasons that people get into it. So you know, the flexibility, the ability to really have to learn, you know, is exciting and motivating to people that scratching that entrepreneurial itch, right? So I kind of have always felt that through my career. I've loved business and getting curious about the business and how to run it. And now I get to do that. And so that scratching that itch and really being able to do the work that you like doing. So the, you know, usually you have 80% of the work you like doing and And 20% you don't when you're in-house or in a specific role. And the ideal and the goal of being out on your own is you can actually do 100% of the work that you enjoy doing because you can seek out the right clients that fit that, or you can create a revenue stream from it. Whereas before it was kind of that box of the job description. So those are some of the reasons people love the work. I personally, the flexibility, people in companies or... other clients never really expecting you to be there unless they have a meeting on the calendar. And that's a whole new freedom that you don't know exists when you're in-house necessarily. And so no one expecting you at any time. And then Yeah, for me, it's been really fun. And this is certainly for some people like this and lots of people don't. But like for me, it's really fun to figure out just all the different ways you can make money, right? Like have all the conversations, networking, relationship building. That is how you market in this business because it's a very trust-based, relationship-based business. So I've enjoyed that. And there are also lots of things people don't like about it. If you want me to share those.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, let's go there. And then I've definitely got some work questions. But yeah, what are some of the things that aren't working for people?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's had three top reasons when I see FPPers choose that maybe it's not the career for them and they want to go into an in-house role. Some of it is just brass tacks like benefits and income instability, right? So you don't have your company benefits anymore. The package isn't there and the income stability is also not there in terms of consistency. I think stability is probably the wrong word because nothing's stable in this market anymore, even when you're full-time, but the consistency and ability to kind of forecast what your income looks like obviously becomes a little more unknown. I think some other reasons are the work that it takes to actually own and run your own business. There's a whole other learning curve to that. You are not You're an expert in HR or whatever field you're in, and you now have to become an expert in small business ownership. So start your LLC, file your taxes. Do you use QuickBooks or Gusto? There's a ton of stuff you have to do for that. And so if you don't like it and you find, oh, I don't like the journey of that, or I don't actually like learning about that stuff, that's another kind of barrier to enjoying it. And if you don't like learning, definitely not the career for you. You are learning all the time. That's one of the reasons I absolutely love it because I am forced to learn. I have to know what's going on with the future of work. I have to know what the new tools are I should refer my clients to. You become that much more valuable if you can bring forward thinking ideas, tools, and referrals to your clients. So learning and growing and constantly knowing what's going on in the industry is part of it.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I was listening to a podcast of someone else who was describing what if he got this offer for a huge bucket of money to go take a full-time job. And he described that in his current stage of life, he couldn't because how much he would want to get and how much they would offer are not the same anymore. And so he continues to be independent and run his business. And he did mention, you know, there may come a point in my life where that no longer matches up. Maybe my business starts to fail and I need income. And then suddenly the numbers are much closer. Like I'll take anything. But I love that. you know, in talking to fractionals over the last couple of years and also being on that journey myself before that there is no ceiling to your worth. There's also no floor. So except for zero, one negative zero in theory.
SPEAKER_00:Real down there.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. But there is a lot of freedom and you can kind of take it as far as you can. And for some people, that's amazing. And then also you might be in a stage of your life where you say, actually, I'll just take the paycheck and the benefits at the moment because I need to make a transition So yeah, I kind of love how you laid that out there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm really passionate that there's no right answer, like in-house, fractional, part-time consultant advisor, like all of these things are needed in the spirit of abundance, which is our main core value in FPP. There's plenty for everyone. And so it's very much just reflecting on what you need at this time in your life and recognizing that nothing is permanent. So yeah. If you choose to go back in-house next year and that's what your family needs, amazing that you can pursue that and do it. And if you want to go back out the next year, you can do that too. Nothing is permanent and change is the only constant is my motto of life pretty much.
SPEAKER_01:And one thing I'll just add in interviewing people, and I'd be curious with yourself and others as we continue to do this, sometimes people who went fractional, they had a partner or a runway of fine or savings or some had nothing and they just dove in and it worked out. There's so many different stories that we've seen of people who've made it work and not make it work So if you're having a hard time, like just know you're not alone. There's many other people going through the same thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, we have a channel. It's called For Those Kind of Days in the Slack community. And it's active, you know, and it's very real. You get in the slumps and you wonder like, why am I doing this to myself? And that's what the power of the community does is supporting them and either getting out of the slump and getting excited again about the business they're trying to build and why they decided to do that. Or coaching them on maybe this wasn't the right path and that's fine too.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm hearing this value of abundance and I heard you say something earlier about not claiming to be the expert. It sounds like FPP is a community where there's a lot of people who have a lot of experiences and wealth of knowledge to share and there's opportunity to do that. And same here, right? Just because we host a podcast called fractional doesn't mean that we're experts at running fractional businesses, right? We wanted to, the reason why we did this similar sounds like to you is like, we wanted a place to talk about what we're going through with our peers, learn from somebody else, interview people who are doing this better than we were, and, you know, have a platform for learning and growing together. So
SPEAKER_01:yeah, just we're experts at mistakes. And I can't tell you how many times we'll get off the recording. And then the having this struggle with this client like I'm not even sure what the future is going to look like but I'm still trying and I just like to point out at some point we'll have fractional after dark we'll just keep the recording running but not everyone is shiny and perfect like we're all having different struggles
SPEAKER_00:no honestly like my favorite conversation is talking about how everybody is making it up and doing their best you know like everybody and I think that social media and LinkedIn and websites and all those things they show what... what people want them to show. But when you get on the phone with people and when you get into the safe space of community, you're recognizing like you are definitely not alone. I think that especially in the solopreneur journey, you lose your team, right? So you've been, you know, I was in house for 15 plus years. I had my team. They knew my kids. They knew what was going on in my life. Like you have your internal team and you lose that because you now are on many teams or none if you're doing just project work. And so that's really where the power of FPP has been critical for me and my journey of feeling like I have my team to go to. If I see something funny happen, I share it with them. It's your go-to team. So having that in this new way of working has been really awesome to explore and experience.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that feels like a key part right there about It can be really lonely as a solopreneur, an HRpreneur, whatever kind of business you're starting. In the next several episodes, we're talking about HR and people-type focused stuff because that's the experience that FPP brings to this channel. But I think everything we're talking about, and I just want to say this out loud, is that it applies to entrepreneurs and business owners across the board. So if part of you is like, oh, HR for the next however many episodes I'm tuning out, really, we're talking about... individuals trying to get a business going and running a business. And I think that's really key. And so I'd be curious, what do you see inside the walls or behind the scenes at an FPP community platform that is making a difference for people who maybe don't have a team and they're just just starting out on this.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And honestly, like we don't even have to title this HR if we don't want to. Sure. Right. Yeah. In the end, because I have, I also have a group of women I get together with on a quarterly basis and we're all fractional, but in different expertises and we're, We're called ladies. We call ourselves ladies fractional group because it's LFG, of course, the acronym, but it's the same across expertise. It doesn't matter if you're a CTO, CMO, CEO, CHRO, like you're building a business. And I think that's the unique, probably piece of FPP compared to other HR communities is that our conversations look very different because we're talking about how we're building our business, the contracts we're doing, our pricing, how we're filing taxes. You know, there's a lot of HR Because we are dealing with our clients all day, every day who have HR problems. And so we helped to solution, but the community really is focused on the entrepreneurial building a business side of it. And, you know, I find so much joy when members unsolicited just ping me and say, I've learned, you know, my business has escalated. I don't know if that's the word, but escalated in the last like two weeks of being in this group more than last four months of me trying to figure it out on my own. So it's just resources and support. And again, everyone has the same question. Like, why are we recreating the wheel? Let's use the power of the community to figure
SPEAKER_01:it out faster. It's loneliness all around, so you got to find your people. But I just love the differences there. And I know for Lance and I, that's part of why we just started this podcast, because it was an extension of, I'm actually really struggling with this client. Is this unique? Well, maybe it is. Or no, actually, I dealt with that myself recently. And I think that community is so critical.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And another, there's been a ton that's just occurred organically since... Fractional people, people really interest in general has been organic and community collaborations is happening. And I'm like finding so much positive energy in it because, you know, like startup experts is a community for HR people. Their conversations are really different than in FPP. And so there's just this, like, we are all trying to help organizations to become better people, first thoughtful companies. And so like, collaborating and collaboration over competition every time, especially with communities, because there's plenty of communities for everyone and every community is not for everyone. And that's totally fine. But how are we helping the industry together progress. And so that's where HR specific in this case is a great place to be able to collaborate.
SPEAKER_02:Love it. There are so many more things that we want to talk about. So I can't wait for the next and the next and the next episode here. We're going to hear from a number of, we'll call them experts, right? But people in the trenches, FPP experts who are really building their businesses and coming here on Fractional FM to share their experiences. So Ellis, thanks so much for joining us and for opening the doors and sharing your community with our community and creating a place for us to keep learning together and put more value out there for everybody and yeah, be abundant and share. This is great. I'm excited about what's coming down.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. And I mean, I'll see Lance in Slack cause he's an FPP, but no, it's been so great. I know we said to, we said micro sessions, we can keep going for a long time. I really appreciate the collaboration and all you're doing to educate the market on fractional as well. It's awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Great. And before we sign off, then what's the best way for someone to find you? If there's someone who's listening who's either A, thinking, I've got to join FPP or B, thinking, Ellis really sounds like the kind of person that I want to help my organization from a fractional HR leadership perspective. Where do people find you and learn about you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So for fractional people, people, you can just go to the website and apply. It's www.fractionalpeoplepeople.com. And for me, I can be found on LinkedIn is probably the best place. And Organized Chaos Consulting is my consulting LLC where I do my client work.
SPEAKER_02:Great. We'll have all those links in the show notes so you can find them there.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Perfect. And if you have any feedback for us on this episode, feel free to email us, email at fractional.fm. And also just, yeah, just reach out. We love to hear feedback. We may be building toward a feedback episode at the end of this miniseries, depending on how feedback comes, if there's enough of it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And that if we get enough feedback kind of sounded like a challenge to our communities here.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I think an AMA is definitely in the cards too.
SPEAKER_02:Let's see if the FPP community shows up.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Love it. Yes. Also, have a wonderful, we'll see when we get this out, but probably have a wonderful holidays and new year. We'll see when this ships. All right. Thanks so much.
