Friends,

We’re back! I hope you are all rested, recovered and ready for a big 2026.

And guess what? It’s my birthday!

The present is for you though, because you asked and I’m delivering.

Last years ‘How to Become a HR Consultant’ article was well received. So I’m following up with a year two recap featuring the same level of depth and transparency as you’ve come to expect.

This also marks the start of something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while — turning that article into it’s own publication as a way to support the enormous amounts of HR professionals interested in exploring this space.

If you’re curious about becoming a consultant, or are one and are looking for answers, feel free to subscribe here for regular editions.

This weeks edition will therefore mark the last you’ll hear about my consultant/portfolio career exploits as a feature, and programming will be returning to Compensation and People practices going forward.

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

Interested in sponsoring the FNDN Series? Drop me a line!

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

And just like that, 2025 is in the books, concluding just my second year running a business and marking the start of a shift from consultant to owning a portfolio career.

When I wrote how year 1 went as a solopreneur, nothing could have prepared me for the influx of responses I received.

The fact that a simple reflection of my journey — something I used to process and document my shift from in-house to consultancy — could offer so much to others either living or contemplating the same journey, was inspiring. So after a year of thinking “I should write more about this experience”, I’m finally doing it. 

Consider this post the launch of How to Become a HR Consultant. A periodic newsletter, taking the title of the seminal piece, and aimed at sharing every experience I’ve had building my own consultancy, as transparently as possible — so anyone can try this.

In so many ways, year two couldn’t have looked more different than year one, which forms the first lesson of this piece — you really can make this career whatever you want. Nobody is here to tell you what to do, or why you should or shouldn’t try doing what you want when it comes to running your own business. Now let me detail how dramatic this looked in reality.

I started 2025 expecting to have all of January off. Afterall, I’d just capitalised on the freedom my new career afforded me, and moved from the city of Brisbane to the small seaside town of Pottsville (with the beach only a short walk away). But not long into this extended break, I started to get itchy feet. It only took an early-January email from a former client looking to work together again to give me the excuse I was looking for to dive back into things earlier than planned. A sign to me that, if you love what you do, you’ll absolutely wake up excited and motivated to do it.

But despite this earlier than anticipated start, I also had the chance to use that early January period to do some thinking, such as:

I mentioned that writing is a great means for helping me process my thinking, and so I took a written approach to structuring my thoughts for the year ahead. 

My focus areas centralised around three key themes:

Let’s take a look at how this showed up as a focus for the year.

One of the things that became abundantly clear to me in 2025, is that FNDN's current model ties revenue to hours. Those hours are limited, and so the only way to scale my revenue (to a height I haven’t really defined yet but which is more than today’s), is to work more hours. Now, I love my job, don’t get me wrong. But you can love something and it can still burn you out. Something I definitely flirted with in 2024, and again in 2025.

Secondly, is that I spend an inordinate amount of time marketing myself, through LinkedIn, a podcast, and a newsletter, at considerable time and expense. So in 2025 I wanted to recoup some of that cost and open those channels up to other brands I know and like.

Lastly, was that I wanted for health to become more of a focus, because I’d let it slide a bit too much the year prior.

This set the key themes of my focus for 2025.

All up, my goal was to earn $500k, a reasonable 16% increase on last year’s ~$430k revenue. I also broke down where I wanted that revenue to come from, with $450k of that coming from my core services, $45k from digital products, and $5k from brand activities.

I wanted to deliver a bunch of brand activities, as well as improve my marketing channel efforts, as a way to double down on my brand and really turbo-charge my ability to direct that awareness towards FNDN, digital products, or other revenue generating pursuits.

And I wanted to commit to a regular exercise routine, and stick to an intermittent fasting schedule that meant I’d hit my health goals.

How this showed up as goals were:

Now, I’ll go into detail on how all those things went, what worked well and what didn’t, or how things evolved over the year. I’m going to tackle Brand first because it provides important context ahead of its outcomes relating to revenue.

If you know me, you know brand is something I take seriously. Not least of all because my partner has her own branding agency, and much of her advice and wisdom has been instilled in my business from the start. Suffice to say, I spend lots of time and money building a brand that HR professionals I want to work with will look at and think: “that Matt guy seems to know what he’s doing, and I’m going to trust him with my money”. 

I’m incredibly proud of it, and incredibly protective of it.

Last year was no different, and I entered it with great expectations about how I’d grow my presence, and continue to build a brand that was both unique and impactful across the People profession. I chose to double down with my existing channels (LinkedIn, Newsletter, Podcast), and explore one new one; events.

A learning out of 2024 was that this focus on brand, while overwhelmingly positive, was not only a huge overhead from a financial perspective, it was an opportunity cost for delivering more services (the time investment).

Given how much incredible feedback I get on my brand, and the fact it has worked so well for me, I made a bet that other companies would like to have their brand positioned alongside mine, and achieve similar outcomes. That bet paid off, and in 2025 I had brand partnerships with some incredible businesses that I know and like.

2025 humbled me massively when it came to my goals for channel growth. As a reminder here’s what they were:

And look, to start off with, the year was going fine. 

Then sometime in the second half of the year, LinkedIn changed their algo, and the goals I’d set now felt completely out of reach. It was this that made me realise that the goals I’d set were complete and utter vanity metrics.

When I really thought about it, I questioned why I even set them. What does 25,000 followers get me that 12,000 doesn’t? What does more impressions mean? Aside from stroking my ego and pumping my brain full of dopamine, literally nothing.

What it made me realise I should have done, is focus on the impact those followers and impressions had. Namely, am I getting more and higher value leads because of those channels?

The funny thing is, it turns out you can’t really answer that question definitively, either. Or certainly not with my marketing capabilities.

Prospects say they primarily find me via LinkedIn, but the newsletter and podcast get mentioned a lot, and LinkedIn is often the easiest to recall. So while attribution to one specific channel is difficult, what I could do is measure whether or not my leads from social sources increased, as opposed to those made through referral. And they did.

All up, I went from 35 to 60 leads for the year, with social/brand contributing 12 more leads than the year before. Which tells me that, even in the midst of uncertainty, on what are ultimately borrowed platforms (LinkedIn), you can still see success if you’re defining it correctly.

I was somewhat similarly dismissive of my vanity goals for the newsletter and the podcast. Although I do think newsletter subscribers are more indicative of what you can charge for advertising, it doesn’t indicate an engaged audience that wants to buy from you. One major change I made on that front was running a re-engagement campaign that ultimately unsubscribed 800 people from my newsletter…. That was a tough pill to swallow (even if they never read it).

A focus area for me in 2026, is turbo-charging the newsletter and finding ways to help grow the size and engagement of that audience.

While overall, I ultimately stopped focusing on the original goals, I did still maintain the habits that continued to build them. This resulted in me closing out the year with ~21,000 LinkedIn followers, ~3,600 newsletter subscribers (a late surge) and about 2,000 podcast downloads (although 27,000 were YouTube Shorts views, which is crazy). Good numbers, but my focus has now shifted to just creating great content instead of the vanity stuff. Ironically a place I started this whole journey from.

This focus is important, because the other thing these brand building efforts enabled me to do was monetise them through brand partnerships.

I didn’t know where to start when I set out to do this; how to start attracting brands, how to work with them, or what to charge them, so let me talk you through my process.

I set out first by defining the channels I’d do brand partnerships through (LinkedIn, my newsletter, and my podcast) and what those engagements would look like. I referred to a lot of media I already consumed to help me establish this, and so I defined these engagements as simply as things like:

Interesting, with much larger newsletters and media companies, you can just ask them for a copy of their media kit and they’ll often supply it. This is a great place to see what others do, what they charge, and create your own version.

What ended up being incredibly helpful also, was engaging with brands I had a relationship with, and asking their marketing people how they benefit from these partnerships and what is important for them.

I owe a lot to those who took the time to walk me through how they worked with other creators, the kinds of things they look for, what they tend to spend, and the results they expect. And it continues to reaffirm one of my favourite rules in life “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”. So as with everything, use your network!

Working out what to charge was ultimately formed via some triangulation of:

A post from my LinkedIn could often land 50,000 impressions. That’s 50k eyeballs on a brand. Whereas the newsletter is much less, but arguably higher trust and more dialled in as an audience. So I approached this from the perspective of starting (very) low, seeing what happened, and moving the price up as I got more interest. With things like newsletter placements, you’re ultimately limited by stock. If you only send 1 newsletter a week and that edition has 1 ad slot, you’re able to sell 52(ish) ads. The more those spaces are booked, the more you can push that price up as it increases in demand. The same works for other items like LinkedIn posts.

So how did I get those brands to spend money with me? Well the above (i.e. asking) formed a great initial content partnership with some of those brands. However, a secondary way that I picked up clients was by just writing about them. For example, sometimes I would write a post about a gated article or report, it would do well and result in lots of downloads for that company. They would then reach out (or I would) and we struck up a relationship I could then turn into a brand partnership.

Eventually, I got to a point where I developed a whole brand partnerships page, that I now share with prospects to help them see how we can work together and the investment to do so.

One thing I grappled with in this fledgling service was knowing when to work with a brand vs when not to. There were times where I turned down engagements because I didn’t feel confident or comfortable in the relationship, or with what they wanted me to promote.

I set myself the following three criteria for the kinds of brands I would work with and the kinds of content I would develop with them:

These guiding principles helped give me certainty that I wasn’t just cashing at the cost of trust with my audience.

Some more tips I’ll share around my experience with brand partnerships:

While this is still an exploratory space for me, it’s an exciting one, especially because it’s so new, and because who ever thought they would be in a position to sell stuff from writing on the internet? That being said, I don’t want to become a professional content creator, helping to sell other people’s products. While I enjoy the variety brand partnerships bring, I’m excited for my brands to support my pursuits in consulting, events and products.

Startup People Summit (SPS) was the pièce de résistance of 2025, and gosh, I don’t even know where to start with writing about what was one of the most significant parts of the year for me.

So let me start with why.

Originally, my vision for this started out as being a small online event that could be a way to grow my brand, and my subscriber list. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I had an opportunity to do something a bit different (plus I’m a sucker for big bold visions and the scope creep they create).

A lot of people asked me why I ran Startup People Summit, and to me the answer was clear. My entire career as a People professional had been based in Brisbane (on the smaller side of Australian capital cities), yet I’ve worked for global technology companies. As a result, I saw (and often attended) all the incredible conferences that existed in the US or Europe, and the communities formed from them. But when I looked closer to home, I couldn’t see anything similar. I’ve always aspired to be a strong networker, and every time I asked the people I met where they’d go for this kind of thing, they never had an answer. 

So after years of seeing nothing that spoke to the People professionals scaling tech startups in a big (and growing) part of the Australian and APAC ecosystems, I decided this “little” event would fill the gap.

And that vision became a mammoth 1-day online summit, featuring 800+ attendee’s, 45+ speakers from across the APAC region, and dozens of hours of the most incredible content I’ve ever seen delivered for the APAC startup People community.

(You can still access all of that amazing content btw)

Now, I’m eventually going to write a longer piece about how SPS was built from the ground up, so I’ll just speed run some of the lessons that stood out to me in doing all of this.

First, I want to talk about what was a key design principle of SPS. Before building, I thought long and hard about what problem this was solving. The one above, yes, but also the kind of person this was serving. One of the big principles that came out of that was accessibility. The core audience was the person running the People function at a tech startup. I both know and have been that person, and I know how hard it can be to get approval for a conference ticket, let alone flights and accommodation to attend. So I knew immediately that the event had to be online (to prevent travel and to also appeal broadly to an APAC audience) and a portion of the tickets had to be free (so there was no barrier to entry for those who truly couldn’t afford it). Given this, 500 tickets were free.

This also meant that my costs had to be covered in other ways. With sponsors. This was another new experience for me as it meant shifting from the comfort of inbound sales, to the cold yuck of outbound. To do so I came up with a sponsors page for prospects (like a real conference), and to give myself a way to help convey the value they might get from investing their money in an event like SPS. Again, this was simply informed by what I’d seen elsewhere, and a little bit of ‘winging it’. I priced it low enough that it made no sense not to do it, and made it incredibly generous for brands to participate. To be fair, most of this part was done in concert with ChatGPT.

Then I made a huge list of all the companies I thought sold to an audience of startup People professionals, and got to work contacting as many as possible. All up, I had a lot of brands turn me down, which is understandable given that the Startup People Summit was unproven. Although it also kinda surprised me how many established companies had no idea who their target audience was and ummed and ahhed over their sponsorship. That tells me I probably self-selected out many companies who I thought wouldn't want to sponsor, but actually might have. It also meant I contravened one of my favourite rules in life (you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take).

But that rejection also strengthened my resolve to make this first SPS incredible, and turn it into a destination that brands sought out in 2026 (and you better believe there’ll be a 2026).

The final takeaway I’ll leave you with is that SPS was by no means a 1-person show, or something I could have done solo. It leads into one of the most important lessons I took from 2025, which is that even when you’re building your own thing, there’s times where your investment is better made in others who can do a better job than you, vs you spending the time trying to learn or fumble your way through it. I know as HR people we can be hardwired to “just figure it out”, often on a shoestring. When things were either well out of my depth, or I literally didn’t have the time/headspace, the investment was always better off in getting the support from someone who did. So learn your strengths and weaknesses and work to them. Because if there’s something I learned about myself, it’s that while I’m good at coming up with big, bold ideas, I’m only questionably good at delivering them.

To put this into perspective:

So it was an amazing team effort, and something I’ll expand more on in a longer form piece (hit reply and let me know what you’d be interested in learning about).

What this exercise proved to me though, is there’s a massive appetite for SPS (both here and abroad), and I’m doubly committed to making round two (and three, four etc.) an even greater success.

A major part of the reason why I do what I do — and why I’m such an advocate of this path to others — is because it affords me the financial freedom to be where I want and afford the things I want. So let’s dive into how that was supported by this year's revenue goals.

I won’t spend a lot of time talking about my core services here because, for the most part, I did very similar things to 2024. I received plenty of inbound work from my marketing efforts, and I delivered similar kinds of work to what I did in 2024 — nothing new. I’m also a sucker for shiny object syndrome, and I lose interest in things after doing them once. So naturally, the most exciting part of 2025 for me was not what I already did well last year, but the new things: digital products, SPS and brand partnerships.

Suffice to say, some lessons I came away from 2025 with when it comes to service delivery were:

Something I grappled with a lot in 2025 was whether I should go from a solopreneur to an agency. I toss and turn constantly on whether to build an agency and hire people. For now the answer is no, but who knows what the future holds. Someone I look up to a lot is my former boss, Mark Frein (who is himself an incredible fractional executive), and his questions and wisdom (as always) were sage:

(I’m paraphrasing here): 

And honestly, my answer to all three is yes. I had more work than I could handle, I actually love the sales side of things, and the idea of building a thing that is bigger than me and can help more companies, absolutely excites me.

But it also scares the shit out of me. 

So who knows what the future will hold, but for now the answer is yeah, nah (which is Australian for no).

Ok, so where did I land on my revenue goals?

Overall, I exceeded my revenue goal, which still feels crazy to think about. I ended the year with $522k in sales — $90k more than 2024. My biggest month ever also jumped from $67k to just shy of $100k. Pinch me 🤏

Service delivery did what I’d hoped and carried the ship. But what surprised me more than anything was just how much the brand side of things took off (incl SPS). This, for me, is the future of my business, and my path towards generating an income that isn’t tied to the hour of day, or the place of work. True freedom and autonomy.

I came into 2025 thinking I’d be building all of these amazing tools and resources that I could sell as digital products through my media channels. And while no, I didn’t, what I did do is create a product in the form of Startup People Summit. And look, that, too, didn’t deliver quite what I’d hoped in a financial sense (although it did in every other), but my goals for it also shifted from ‘make a free thing without sponsors and just try to get the highest attendance possible’, to ‘make this thing and make it make money’.

So my revenue here ended up being:

As I said, SPS is a big growth opportunity for me, and the response locally, not to mention the appetite abroad, makes me think this one has a big future. Time will tell.

I also think I need to do some more discovery with my ideal client to further validate the value of the digital products and whether I make the time to pursue those. So far I’ve been basing it on the assumption that people would buy it vs the knowledge it’s a genuine problem people want to solve for themselves vs employ someone to solve.

Health made it onto this list for me in 2025 because it took a back seat in 2024. And amidst the stress, uncertainty and massive hours of trying to make my business work that first year, diet and exercise went out the window. I truly believe when I’m at my healthiest, my energy and work is better, and I’m of course less prone to illness/injury disruptions. So there were two big ways I wanted to change that in 2025, one was to make diet and exercise a priority, another was to holiday in Europe.

After setting the goal of losing a few kilo’s, I really imagined I’d be writing this year in review saying how taking this from a personal goal to a business was enough for me to deliver on it.. But imagination doesn’t achieve goals, actions do, and I didn’t do nearly enough to make this one come true. Instead, I worked stupid long hours again, let myself eat bad food ‘just this once’ (over and over again), let my exercise slide, and just copped the guilt once a month as I reviewed my goals and saw that this one didn’t move.

I really want this to work, but I’m clearly not a strong enough person to make it happen with willpower alone. So in December I started PT 3x a week (forcing myself to carve out the time and do the work), and am now exploring how to get a meal service or something that means I don’t have to let present-Matt decide the meals that goal-setting-Matt doesn’t agree with. Let’s see what this looks like in my 2026 year in review.

My other big goal was to take a massive break at the end of the year and head to Europe for the turn of the season (not too hot, not too cold). That ended up being Mid-October to late November, and boy oh boy, did everything teach me a lesson this year. 

First, wow. Great holiday. I literally couldn’t recommend a better time of year to travel as a tourist. The season is lovely (in Spain, Portugal and Italy at least), there’s fewer tourists and it’s naturally a bit cheaper.

But dang it if I didn’t just head off during what turned into a busy period for inbound leads.

I had some incredible logo’s knocking on my door to work with me, at a time where I (painfully) told them I couldn’t help. And look, I wouldn’t have traded that holiday for anything, but it sure did make me realise I need to better pick the time I take a break going forward.

So I need to spend some time working out when it makes the most sense to take my next break, but also maybe this problem solves itself a little, because the other learning for me was that I left it way too late in the year to take a break.

By the time mid-October rolled around, I was utterly toasted from the year that was. I went into it knowing I had a big break, and so thought to myself “yeah I can forgo any other break until then”. Shouldn’t have done that. I’ll be absolutely going into 2026 being more diligent on more breaks.

Returning from a 5-week break in late November is always weirdly juxtapositioned (glad I got to sneak that word in there) with the rest of the world. I came back refreshed, excited to think about the year ahead and motivated to get cracking, while the rest of the world was crawling to the finish line of 2025. Not a biggy, but felt odd.

While this goal was achieved (I did the holiday), I lost some decent work as a result of it. But then again, the silver lining is that I was even considered for it anyway, so I take that from the experience.

As I look towards the coming year, I’m fortunate to have had so many rich reflections as I continue down the path of building a business that gives me the time, place and financial freedom I’m pursuing.

I continue to remind myself that its a marathon, not a sprint. And even though everyday feels like a sprint—and that sometimes I'm spinning my wheels—when I take the chance to look up during moments like this, or during my monthly goal review, I have to pinch myself at the progress I’ve made. I made a new friend this year (hey Millie) that made a comment that I find myself reflecting on a lot. She said “sometimes you’ve gotta realise you’re living everyone else’s dream”, and it’s made me a lot more appreciative of the highs as well as the lows of this journey.

Now I’m excited to have kicked off this publication, and to help others achieve some/all/more of the benefits I have. If you ever have any big questions about some part of the experience I’ve had, let me know. I won’t pretend to have the answer, but I can at the very least share my experience in the hope it helps yours be a little smoother.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to sharing more of these experiences with you over future editions.

Until then,

Matt ✌️

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
I run FNDN, a global comp consultancy that builds compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive for startups.

3. Startup People Summit
I run the Startup People Summit, a one day annual event focused on creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to the newsletter to join the next event.