But Remember That They're Former Colleagues
While Ms. Ford wasn't using her former co-workers to drum up new business, she was still turning to them as lunch buddies. "We went out to lunch and parties with the old gang. It was easy to do because of the proximity," she says. "But they still wanted to talk about office gossip, and I had no interest in that anymore."
Ms. Furman had the opposite experience Ms. Ford did. Her colleagues began treating her as an outsider before she saw herself that way. "It was hard to adjust to suddenly not being included in things," she says, especially when her day-to-day work hadn't changed. "There was a time when a bunch of people were invited to a company party, and I was insulted that I wasn't. But I wasn't even in Chicago [where the party was], I was home in Las Vegas."
The answer for both women was to "wean ourselves off the mother ship," as Ms. Ford puts it. Her firm moved into its own office when it was about a year old. And as its client list grew, she didn't try to dissuade Linguisystems when it moved some of the human-resources services her firm had been handling back in-house.
As new clients came in, Ms. Furman eventually had to let her former bosses know she'd be less available to them. "I was skittish about doing it, but they were cool about it. They weren't surprised I was taking on other business."
Have a Plan to Diversify
As Ms. Furman and Ms. Ford both learned, "it's in your best interest psychologically and fiscally to get additional clients as soon as possible," Ms. Lonier says. But keep in mind that if you're working for your former employer, you probably won't be allowed to work for its direct competitors.
"You have to know before you get started that you won't need those competitors to be your clients," says the travel consultant. "Your work has to be broad enough that you can apply your expertise to different kinds of companies." For example, he sought out companies that would be interested in his knowledge about airline and hotel pricing, but that were both smaller than his former company and in distinctly different areas of the travel industry.
Ms. Furman had an exclusivity clause in her contract with her former company (Mr. Lieb has one with the Greenberg Group, too). She tried to use it as motivator for goals she knew she should be working toward anyway.
"I wanted to work for different kinds of companies, and for local Las Vegas companies," she says. Even though she didn't pursue new and different clients as aggressively as she should have initially, she points out, that diversity is ultimately, "why I wanted to go out on my own."
Ms. Gunn is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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