I read a piece in The New York Times recently about professionals who are leaving traditional jobs to run their own businesses. Something clicked.
What it’s really describing is not a lifestyle trend. It’s a structural shift. A growing group of smart, experienced people choosing work built on ownership, trust, and repeat relationships instead of titles, ladders, or logos. This has been happening quietly for years, but it’s accelerating now, with talented operators, executives, creatives, and strategists choosing independence not as a fallback, but as a deliberate career shape.
What’s interesting is that this shift is visible from both sides of the table.
In enterprise environments, consulting is still something you buy from large firms. Deloitte and their peers serve a purpose. Ostensibly, expertise. Realistically, expertise plus insulation. An external recommendation you can point to when the stakes are high and the risk needs to be shared. That model works in certain contexts, especially where scale, governance, and internal politics demand it.
But startups and the midmarket are doing something different. More and more, they are starting to see the organization less like a machine and more like a biome. An ecosystem. A mix of full-time employees, fractional leaders, independent specialists, and long-term partners who may only work part-time, but are deeply integrated into how the business actually functions.
That integration is the key part.
Trust still matters. Context still matters. You cannot outsource understanding. It’s why I always go in person when starting work with a new client, and why I keep showing up in person over time. Not to perform presence, but to understand what’s said out loud and what’s left unsaid. How decisions get made. Where tension lives. What people care about but haven’t named yet.
Flexibility becomes a superpower only when it is paired with that kind of integration. When it allows a company to afford more experienced people than a single full-time hire ever could. When it brings in judgment, not just capacity.
From my side, the appeal of this model isn’t flexibility for its own sake. (If anything, job flexibility makes me nervous.) What matters more is being able to work where my energy and values are aligned. Supporting a nonprofit alongside a group of startups and mid-market businesses. Doing long-term, relational work instead of one-off projects. Spreading risk so that if one organization struggles, the whole system doesn’t collapse, and I can invest in fixing what’s broken without becoming a cost burden in the process.
This is not the gig economy.
The gig economy stripped trust and protections from work and called it freedom. It treated people as interchangeable labor and platforms as neutral intermediaries. What’s emerging now feels very different. It looks more like a re-forming professional class. Security through networks. Stability through reputation. Teams built on relationships rather than headcount alone.
In this model, you don’t “hire a team” once and lock it in. You assemble and tend an ecosystem. One that can adapt, contract, expand, and rebalance as the business evolves. One that rewards care, continuity, and mutual dependence rather than constant churn.
I think we are only at the beginning of this shift. The midmarket is seeing it first because it has to. It doesn’t have the luxury of over-hiring or over-insulating every decision. Enterprise will follow later, once the old models stop working as well as they used to.
When that happens, the companies that thrive will not be the ones with the biggest org charts or the most software. They will be the ones that understood early that work is not just something you staff. It’s something you cultivate.