05/21/2026
The truth about leverage
It’s wild to see people scandalized by the idea of an employee working more than one full-time job at the same time.
If you can do two jobs satisfactorily and simultaneously, more power to you!
We are living in a time and a country where employees have virtually no rights.
These person-with-multiple-jobs stories bring up an essential question: in a salaried position, does your employer buy your time or your output?
Most CEOs would say, both.
Most CEOs would say, we essentially own you. Everything you create belongs to us.
When I started consulting, I said to my husband, I love this, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a tremendous amount of work.
Then leverage started to creep in.
Organizations contacted me about issues I had already helped other clients solve.
My recent experience solving new clients’ pain points was beneficial to them in that I already had models, structures and vehicles developed and ready for customization.
That preparation saved them time and money. It was good for everybody involved.
My clients paid much less for those models and structures than it would have cost for me to develop them from the ground up, but I still earned much more per hour of time expended than I would have if I hadn’t done that development work up front.
Leverage!
Not one of my clients would have preferred that I came to them knowing nothing about their problems and having to learn everything from scratch.
Don’t we all deserve to monetize our experience and talents in the highest-leverage way?
Isn’t the outrage about smart and capable people working two jobs at once really an indictment of the institution of employment?
Last week I heard from a fellow who got in trouble for using an AI tool to simplify his job, just three weeks after he and his teammates attended a mandatory AI training where he learned the offending productivity hack.
His manager did not understand the contradiction.
Leverage is what allows a manufacturing firm to pay once to develop a product and then sell that product millions of times, earning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
The reason employers are horrified at their employees’ accumulation and use of leverage is that they believe any leverage created at work belongs to them, and not the people who work for them.
Leverage and profit are two sides of the same coin.
This is why no-moonlighting policies exist.
(If you have spare time to work for someone else, you should be working those extra hours for me!)
This is why I encourage - and more and more every day, I implore – every working person to have a side business.
It’s not just for extra cash. It’s control over your income. It’s something you plan and manage that your employer has nothing to say about.
It’s leverage.
