Elite Edge | Vol 2 Week 6

Quick note before we start:
This issue is a little longer than my usual Elite Edge drops — intentionally.
This topic deserves more depth, more context, and more precision than a soundbite.

If you’ve ever wondered what comes next after peak success in your role, this one is worth the read.

Let me name something I’m seeing quietly accelerate across the market.

Not on LinkedIn headlines.
Not in job descriptions.
And not in the “quit your job and consult” corner of the internet.

It’s showing up in how experienced operators — Directors, VPs, senior ICs, former execs — are rethinking how they deploy their expertise.

Not because they can’t succeed in corporate.
But because once you reach a certain level, a different question emerges:

Is relying on a single employer, a single title, and a single income stream still rational?

That question is no longer theoretical.

🌍 What’s Happening Macro-Economically (And Why This Matters)

Zoom out for a moment.

Across industries, we’re seeing:

• Persistent layoffs and restructures

• Hiring freezes disguised as “recalibration”

• Fewer backfills for senior roles

• Growing unease about long-term W-2 security

At the same time, the work hasn’t disappeared.

It still needs to get done.
Companies just don’t want to hire more full-time employees to do it.

This is the tension reshaping the labor market.

Organizations are under pressure to:

• Reduce fixed costs

• Stay flexible

• Avoid long-term headcount commitments

• Move fast in uncertain conditions

So instead of hiring replacements, they’re buying outcomes.

That shift is structural — not cyclical.

🤖 How AI Broke the Old Consulting Model

AI didn’t just change productivity.
It changed how work gets packaged, delivered, and priced.

Traditional consulting firms were built for a world where:

• Analysis was slow

• Coordination was expensive

• Large teams were required

AI collapsed those assumptions.

Today:

• Research, synthesis, and first drafts are cheap

• Coordination layers are disappearing

• Small teams can outperform entire departments

We’re already seeing 30–40% productivity gains in lean, AI-enabled teams — not because people are working harder, but because humans are only doing what humans are uniquely good at:

Judgment. Decisions. Accountability.

This has quietly broken the economics of big consulting.

Clients still want strategy + execution.
They just don’t want the overhead, latency, or politics that come with it.

🧠 Why Professionals Are Choosing This Path — Not Just Being Forced Into It

What’s different this time is choice.

Yes, some people are being pushed into fractional, advisory, or consulting work by layoffs.

But many others are choosing optionality before they need it.

After watching:

• Entire teams disappear overnight

• Long-tenured leaders exited with little warning

• Loyalty discounted faster than expected

Smart professionals are asking better questions earlier:

What if my role disappears?
What if my expertise outgrows my title?
What if I want to work on problems — not internal politics?

For many, the answer isn’t quitting corporate.

It’s layering.

Consulting.
Advisory.
Fractional roles.
And increasingly — consulting collectives.

⚡ What a Consulting Collective Actually Is

A consulting collective isn’t freelancing.
And it’s not an agency.

It’s a small group of independent operators, each running their own business, who come together for larger, more complex client work.

You keep:

• Your own LLC

• Your own rates

• Your own clients

But when multi-disciplinary work appears:
You bid together.
You deliver together.
You split revenue.

Think Avengers — but intentional, professional, and disciplined.

The power isn’t in going solo.
It’s in assembling the right team at the right moment.

⚖️ Why This Model Wins for Clients and Professionals

From the client side:

• Senior expertise without permanent headcount

• Defined scope and faster execution

• Lower cost than big consulting

• Ability to scale up or down

From the professional side:

• Optionality without isolation

• Income diversification

• Work aligned to expertise

• Freedom with leverage

This isn’t a workaround.

It’s the new normal for how work gets done in a lean, AI-augmented economy.

🔧 If You’re Thinking About Starting a Consulting Collective, Start Here

Most people think this starts with structure.

It doesn’t. It starts with people.

🧠 The A / B / C Player Reality

In most organizations, A players are surrounded by B and C players.

Not because they chose it — but because scale demands tolerance.

Over time, A players:

• Carry disproportionate load

• Slow down to compensate

• Spend more time buffering than building

Eventually, they realize the friction isn’t the work.

It’s the talent mix.

Consulting collectives appeal to A players because they allow you to:

• Work with other A players

• Eliminate drag

• Move at speed

• Focus on judgment, not remediation

This isn’t arrogance.
It’s preservation of excellence.

🧩 How to Build One (Practically)

1. Start with your past, not LinkedIn
Look at former colleagues you trusted under pressure — people you shipped real outcomes with.

2. Pick complements, not clones
Strategy + execution.
Business + technical.
Product + go-to-market.

3. Test before you formalize
One client. One scope. Six months.

4. Keep independence sacred
Solo clients stay solo. Only shared work is shared.

5. Treat this like a business
Clear roles. Clear splits. Clear exit terms.
A players don’t rely on vibes.

📚What I Read This Week…

🔗Anthropic’s Claude Is Becoming a Coworker, Not Just a Chatbot — Quartz 

This piece underscores a shift that matters for anyone thinking beyond a single W-2 role. Claude isn’t positioned as a tool you prompt — it’s being designed as a coworker that can manage tasks, coordinate work, and operate with increasing autonomy.

That’s the real unlock behind consulting collectives and small, elite teams. When AI handles research, synthesis, coordination, and first drafts, human value concentrates around judgment, decision-making, and trust.

This is why smaller, AI-enabled teams can now outperform much larger organizations — and why collectives are emerging as a more efficient, more flexible way to get serious work done.

🎙️What I Listened to This Week… (Podcasts)

Final Word

The era of the solo expert is fading.
The era of bloated consulting is breaking.

The future belongs to professionals who can:

• Export judgment

• Use AI as force multiplication

• And assemble the right team when it matters

This isn’t a trend.
It’s the new operating system.

You’ve got the Edge. Now sharpen it.

Until next week,
— Deepali Vyas
Your Elite Recruiter
Doing the research so you don’t have to.

✨ UPCOMING WEBINAR ✨

✨ Portfolio Career Webinar ✨

If this topic resonates, you’ll want to join the Portfolio Career Webinar on Saturday, February 28th at 10am EST.

This is where we break down:

• How senior professionals build optionality while still employed

• Consulting, advisory, and fractional paths that actually work

• How collectives fit into a portfolio model

• What to test, what to avoid, and how to protect your credibility

This is not about quitting your job.
It’s about designing what comes next — on your terms.

👉 Register here: https://www.deepalivyas.com/webinar

💼 This Week’s Elite Job Drops 💼

💼 Exclusive Job Drops — Before They Hit the Market

These openings are under the radar — not on LinkedIn, not on job boards. I’m sharing them here first, straight from my insider network.

✨ ELITE RESOURCES ✨

✨ Elite Recruiter Tools (Built for This Moment)

That’s exactly why I built:

✔️ Resume Fix
✔️ LinkedIn Optimization

These aren’t generic rewrites. They’re designed to:

• Position you correctly for the level you’re actually playing at

• Translate corporate experience into market-facing value

• Support both job search and client attraction

And yes — they work just as well if you’re:

• Staying W-2

• Exploring advisory or consulting

• Building toward a portfolio career or collective

👉 Explore here: https://www.deepalivyas.com/products

If LinkedIn visibility matters to your career, this is a smart tool to know about👇🏼

Final Layer — is a LinkedIn AI Agent that helps you stay visible, credible, and consistent — without turning content creation into a second job.

• Suggests on-brand topics aligned to your professional persona

• Writes high-quality posts in your voice (not generic AI slop)

• Adds research-backed facts so you sound informed without hours of digging

• One-click scheduling to post at optimal engagement times

Elite Edge takeaway:
If you’ve been meaning to build your personal brand but keep putting it off, this removes the friction — and the excuses.

👀 What’s Coming Next: The Portfolio Media Kit

We’re also dropping something new very soon — the Portfolio Media Kit.

Think of it as:

• Your personal “one-pager” for clients, collaborators, and partners

• A clean way to package your expertise beyond a resume

• A bridge between corporate credibility and independent work

If you’ve ever thought:
“I don’t want to build a whole website, but I need something polished…”

This is for you. More on that soon!

I personally LOVE this tool — voice to text is a lifesaver — check it out! 😃 

Better prompts. Better AI output.

AI gets smarter when your input is complete. Wispr Flow helps you think out loud and capture full context by voice, then turns that speech into a clean, structured prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant. No more chopping up thoughts into typed paragraphs. Preserve constraints, examples, edge cases, and tone by speaking them once. The result is faster iteration, more precise outputs, and less time re-prompting. Try Wispr Flow for AI or see a 30-second demo.

Start flowing free

🌟 How To Work With Me 🤝🏻

🤝 Meet My Elite Coaching Team

I’ve expanded my coaching bench — not to scale noise, but to scale judgment. Each coach is trained in the same frameworks I use with executives, operators, and leaders navigating uncertainty, restructures, and reinvention.

🎥  FOLLOW ME

🔥 ELITE RECRUITER ON THE MARCH TO 1 MILLION

We’re almost there! If you’ve found this newsletter useful, help me scale it:
Share, forward, comment, or repost. Every action gets us one step closer.

Feedback is a Gift

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