Jeff Barr rode Amazon’s coattails to craft a specialized platform that created his consulting firm of 11 and his escalating reputation as a sassy commentator on all things Amazon.

Today’s New York Times profiles Barr’s hopscotch career path that has been propelled by saying things that others don’t have the guts to say, about Amazon’s complicated cloud service and its tangled bills.

How’d he pull that off?

By latticing. Here’s how the Times summarizes Barr’s meandering career path: Mr. Quinn took a roundabout route to becoming a cloud computing influencer. In 2003, he dropped out of the University of Maine, where he studied computer science. He hopped from one dead-end job to another before working at technology consulting firms and start-ups. In 2015, he was working at a financial technology start-up when the investment firm BlackRock acquired it. He left that job a year later to start his own consulting company.

Like the complicated bills he now is an expert at deciphering, there’s underlying logic to Barr’s career progression. Let’s put it in Lattice terms:

• Qualifications: progress toward computer engineering degree – though abandoned, it at least verified his aptitude and equipped him with basic skills
• Entry-level jobs at technology consulting and start-up firms – working at small companies gives you a bird’s eye view of all business operations and an appreciation for accurate billing. Small companies can’t afford to pay for less than they’re getting. That’s now the heart of Barr’s consulting firm.
• Barr also picked up an overview of how to start a company, by working at start-ups. He intuitively used Career Lattice techniques to zero in on a small platform he knew would grow: Amazon’s cloud computing services. Inexplicably, Amazon created a market opportunity by spinning out opaque invoices. Its inability to clarify its own charges has taken on a life of its own, and enabled Barr to position his invoice-auditing service as a quick way for his clients to save money. No doubt, Barr tells clients that they’ll save money from the minute he starts working for them.

Takeaways for your career lattice, especially if you are considering transitioning from staff to self-employment:

Make the most of working at a small office or company. Learn how the business makes money.

Friction = opportunity. Frustration = solution = potential business. Anything that drives people nuts is a chance to provide highly focused services with immediate, urgent benefit to the client.

Use your personality to differentiate. Amazon’s cloud services division is a faceless monolith. It’s the perfect foil for Barr’s attitude. After all, he’s the one being profiled by the New York Times – not an AWS executive.

They’re talking about going back.

To the office. The real office.

As in, work with other people.

In the same space.

Probably by midsummer.

While your employer’s HR and facilities departments figure out who will sit where and how to enforce mask mandates and all that other good stuff, you have a few months to decide if and how you want to return. Here are three ways to use the “we’re going back” process to negotiate the kind of work arrangement you really want.

First, run a self-evaluation. How has working from home worked out for your career? How have you made the most of time freed up  by not commuting? Have you learned new skills? Made new relationships? Figured out better ways to accomplish some ongoing responsibilities, such as, communicating with clients or managing customer orders?

Next, document your self-improvements with a spreadsheet that shows problem/solution/location. 

Now you’ve got a summary of how you’re doing your current job better, from your home office.

You can use this information in several ways:

• If you want to continue working from home: Negotiate an ongoing remote work arrangement, either part time or full time. Use your spreadsheet to prove to your supervisor that you’ve continued to improve results regardless of location. And as location doesn’t matter, you’d like to decide where you work.

• If you want to win a promotion and don’t care where you work: Add a last column to the spreadsheet that shows how you will build on your productivity improvements. Make the case that you are the person to take the lead with these changes and develop your pitch for a promotion. If you don’t care where you work – office or remote – only reference location if it is relevant to the new job you want to win.

• If you want to transition to self-employment: Analyze your spreadsheet wins to detect exactly how you made them happen. What abilities did you use that you haven’t previously used? How did you win buy-in from others to make those changes come to fruition? Exactly what kind of a difference did the changes make to customer or clients? To your employer? To you? These are the dynamics that help you drill down to the services or tools that you can sell when you become self-employed.

Career Lattice courses equip you with an arsenal of tools to propel your career to the next level, through both self-employment and through traditional employment. Check out our menu of courses and choose the one that best fits your goals for continued career success!

A great way to identify your next lateral move is to think like your boss.

To think like your boss, read what your boss is reading.

What does your boss read?

Probably the Harvard Business Review.

And right here in the April 20 HBR digital digest, Alexandra Kalev, a management academic at the University of Tel Aviv, tees up latticing perfectly: “Think about what people can contribute, not just what jobs they hold.” (Read the entire article here.)

To identify a strategic lateral move in this chaotic time of COVID-19 economic confusion, apply Kalev’s insight to your career ambitions.

What are you doing now, just to help your company get through this crisis, that is outside your job description? Crystallize these new tasks, responsibilities and accomplishments as line items for your next performance review.

What could you do that is outside your job description? What skills would you like to gain, that would qualify you for your next big move up? If you’re not sure, this is the perfect time for internal networking. If your company clearly outlines qualifications for each job or level of responsibility, review those qualifications to see what gaps you can fill with a bit of online training or by pitching in on a team that introduces you to new people within the company or within your industry. If your company doesn’t offer transparent career paths, talk with someone who’s a couple steps ahead of you, or whom you’d work with in your destination position, to fill in the stepping stones.

This is the perfect time for showing initiative and self-direction. Explore Skillshare, Udemy and other online class platforms to gain skills that help you bridge to a new position.

And diary all this so you can show your boss, that you stayed a step ahead of the company’s needs even in a crisis. The very ability of anticipating needs and positioning yourself as the right person at the right time is a career skill in itself.

Working past the traditional retirement age of 65 is completely different when you engineer a sustainable position. Career latticing techniques support sustainable work, and ongoing income, that can help ensure the money you need for the life you deserve.

Veteran business journalist Kathy Kristof started SideHusl to help people of all ages vet gig opportunities. With all the scams out there, the littered landscape of “work from home” and similar offers needs a trained eye to sort fact from fiction.

The Career Lattice was featured recently at the SideHusl blog. I’m glad we’re in sync with Kathy’s vision of senior workers transitioning to positions that bring them one last burst of career satisfaction.

Looks idyllic, right?

Who doesn’t want to work from home, if their job allows?

Nobody, which is why so many people are so giddy with the prospect of starting the day in pajamas, working all day in pajamas, and working from bed in the same pajamas. Every publication, online and in print, is rife with advice on managing your time, not eating at your desk, communicating with co-workers via teleconference and Slack, and wearing pants.

Mastering your time, taming the refrigerator, maintaining boundaries with family, neighbors and pets: that’s half the battle of working from home, right?

No. It’s not.

If you’re working a traditional day job from home, you are transferring your corporate culture to your personal space. You will learn invaluable skills for virtual collaboration, managing by results, and prioritizing tasks.

But you will not be tackling the single most important thing you must have to be self-employed, and that is, winning clients.

To be self-employed, you have to have clients. It’s that simple and that scary.

Clients are great. I love mine. But they can harsh the mellow of working from home. Deadlines, and all that. Invoicing. Calls. Finding new ones. Keeping old ones. They’re high-maintenance.

By all means, make the most of your time at home. But don’t think that you can expense your pajamas as a start-up cost. To be successfully self-employed, you’re going to have to put on pants. And leave the house. And get clients.

You can do it! The upcoming Career Lattice online course, Staff to Self-Employment, will show you how.

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Do you have what it takes to start a company or employ yourself? You can “try before you buy” by taking on a self-contained side hustle.

Making fancy cakes just for graduation season or dog-sitting as a backup to an overbooked dog caretaker forces you to think like an entrepreneur. If your Career Lattice skills inventory turned up worrisome weaknesses, a small, short-term side hustle will make you backfill those weaknesses. Hate bookkeeping? You’ll get over it quick when you realize you won’t get paid for your side hustle unless you invoice and manage the related paperwork.

Side Husl is a terrific source for pickup work that can enlighten you about your entrepreneurial abilities and potential gaps you need to fill. It’s run by a longtime business journalist whose no-nonsense approach to work, career and income is a real-life as it gets. Use the Side Husl tools to zero in on a gig you’d like to date before you commit to entrepreneurship as your sole occupation.

How much power do you have, really, over your time when you are an employee?

You don’t set deadlines. You often report to more than one boss (thanks a lot, “flat management structure,” for all those dotted lines on the org chart that mean you have to get sign-off from people who technically aren’t your boss but somehow have veto power over your work, amirite?) .  Often, deadlines are set by outsiders – clients, customers, the IRS. 

All these forces can collide in your calendar.  But to free up time for a side-step that can give you new skills and help you meet people essential to networking to a new job, you’ll need to master time management skills that prove you can handle the lattice assignment.

Here are three ways to do that.

1. Group like work and functions together. The temptation is to tackle the project for Client A, finish it (or, at least get it far enough along to dump it on somebody else’s desk), then pick up work for Client B. Look under the lid to find similarities so you can do similar work in a single pass. For instance, if you have to get signoff on a few paragraphs from legal, bring legal all the sign-offs at once. You’ll have more leverage to push to the top of legal’s priority list when you’re doing so on behalf of three clients, not just one, and you’ll move ahead with all the projects at once while driving for the first deadline.

2. Analyze your “flow state” so you can protect productive time.  The “flow state” is your groove: when you’re clicking along, ignoring the clock, getting the coding or writing or analyzing or calculating done in a glorious, sparkling steam of productivity. Some people can turn their flow on like a tap  (I’m one of those lucky ones). Others find their flow in a quiet office before others have arrived or after others have left. Chances are you love the work you od in the flow. Treat yourself and block out the flow on your calendar for uninterrupted, closed-door, flow. Save the petty, annoying, paperwork and inbox-pecking for your door-open time.

3. Track your time so you can identify bottlenecks and barriers, both human and technical. Your boss(es) gives you work to do so she doesn’t have to do it. Build trust by documenting the amount of time you spend on each task. An easy way to do this is to use a time-tracking app designed for freelancers who charge clients by the hour.

If the time reports don’t seem to line up with your boss’s priorities, review the reports with her. She may not realize how much of your time is taken up by those doted-line relationships or by technical problems you have to work around. Let her run interference in blocking and tackling the barriers – that’s why she’s paid more than you are. And – bonus! – if you are thinking of transitioning to self-employment, you will become conversant with time-tracking so you can more accurately estimate how long it takes to do key elements of the job you envision creating for yourself.

People quit the corporate grind to start their own companies for a lot of reasons.

Positioning themselves to re-enter the grind is not one of them.

Maybe it should be.

A Berkeley researcher, Gustavo Manso,  has found that the entrepreneurial experience of “experimenting with new ideas”adds so much value to your management abilities that even if your venture fails, you are likely to move back to a corporate job with minimal losses. In fact, he found that a stretch of self-employment can actually boost your salary if you go back to traditional employment.

That is…if you bail on a failed venture within two years.

This validates part of the premise of  The Career Lattice, in which I position self-employment as one career lane, not as a one-way ticket out of the corporate world.

The key implication for entrepreneurs is to see their experiences – wins, losses and draws – as evidence of learning new leadership and business skills. Developing short stories and anecdotes about your adventures in startup land are key to developing relationships with partners, suppliers, lenders, and customers, anyway. With potential employers added to the mix, you’ve got one more reason to cultivate a variety of narratives about how you’ve become better at what you do and how you think by being a business owner.

Temporary work isn’t.

Oh, it’s work. But it’s not all that temporary.

A new report from Workmarket.com finds that 59% of companies that use freelancers contract with them for at least six months at a time.

And 42% of companies use the same contract workers over and over.

When you know why companies are keeping you on contract, you can turn the advantages you bring them to build your career.

And – surprise! – saving money isn’t the main reason why companies use contract workers. Workmarket found that 64% of employers rely on contractors for flexibility. Then comes money, at 45%, then, expanding geographically, at 38%, and finally, tied at 24%, to generate additional revnue and to improve work quality.

Flip those stats over and here’s how to use your clients’ motivations to your advantage:

• Flexibility goes both ways. Keep your clients in the loop about your availability. They want flexibility, but that’s also why you’re a free agent. Ask about their project schedules, anticipated staff shortages, and crunch times. Find out if they’d like you to block out time when they are most likely to need you.
• They save by buying quality. Stipulating that you’re charging at least market rates, prove your worth by delivering polished, ready-to-go work on time or early. It only takes one round with an inexperienced, unorganized, error-prone contractor to m reinforce the total value of working with a pro.
• Support expansion. Your know others like you. Your network is a hidden value to your client. Offer to refer your client to other contractors located where your client wants to be – and vice versa. You’ll build relationships in both directions.
• Revenue doesn’t generate itself. Neither do ideas for new clients, new projects and new efficiencies. Make strategic introductions for your clients. In other words: trickle up.
• Quality is the biggest reason why businesses don’t use contract workers as much as they might: 31%, according to Workmarket, say that quality is their biggest obstacle to using more ‘on-demand professionals,’ as it terms us contractors. So validate your quality by joining top-level professional associations; by asking for and using references when pitching clients; and by having an up-to-date and rich portfolio that illustrates the scope and depth of your work.

Freelancing is a career of its own. With more employers realizing the advantages of working with freelancers, the benefits can go both ways.