The Restructure You Didn't See Coming

Something is happening to the 40-something professional and most people are only telling half the story.

The restructures are real. The layer that sat between leadership and execution is being reorganised, and in many cases removed. It is expensive enough to question, and experienced enough to be difficult to replace cleanly. Someone recently told me they had survived multiple re-orgs by being a "B+ on purpose" and are waiting to be aged out. I have heard a version of this many times in the past few months.

What is more interesting is what happens next. Fractional and advisory roles have doubled in two years. Demand for senior independent operators continues to grow across creative, marketing and finance. The people stepping into that work are not junior. They are the ones who know how things actually run, who have built teams, can navigate internal politics, and make tough decisions when it matters.

The conversation I keep having with people in this position is rarely about capability. It is about structure and positioning. How to take fifteen or twenty years of experience and translate it into something that is not dependent on a single company, a single role, or a single salary. How to make it legible to other people. How to position it so that it is understood and valued in a different context.

Most people start by trying to package what they have already done. The ones who seem to land on their feet quickly tend to rethink how they want to work entirely. I am one year into building that in my own way. Watching others do the same is one of the more interesting professional shifts I have seen in a long time.

It is not a lack of experience or capability that slows people down. It is the difficulty of seeing their own work clearly enough to reposition and promote it. Most people are closer than they think. It is just not often obvious from the inside.

If this is you, a 20-minute intro call is a good place to start.