Betting on myself for more than one year

David Nebinski (0:04)

Hey, friend, it's David Nebinski here in Brooklyn. I'm the founder of A Chief of Staff.

And yeah, I wanted to pop on here and share a little bit of a update, a little bit of a personal kind of overview of my portfolio career or my work. I've been kind of doing it bits and pieces in different episodes more recently. And I just thought it'd be, especially, it happened many weeks ago. And I wrote a subsec post about it, but basically it's been a year of kind of working on my own. So I'm recording this on Tuesday, October 13th. And it's going to go out Thursday, October 15th. So, yeah, a little bit late, but thought been busy. So, but it's Tuesday night, and I just thought, hey, let me rip this. So, yeah, just in general, things are going well. And I'm really grateful for all the great support and projects and incredible partners, and that I've been working on over the past year plus, and kind of where I'm at.

Kind of, I've written in Substack a bunch of different kind of connected ideas.

But I, I think the big thing that I'm really enjoying now is the building something that's compounding, and that's a Chief of Staff. And what I like there is that I have basically a productized service, which are a Chief of Staff mixers. So those are two-hour events for Chiefs of Staff, and I've partnered with some incredible companies that are interested in building relationships with Chiefs of Staff. And yeah, that over the last couple of months, I've kind of realized that's like a product or a productized service, and I've been kind of presenting and pitching that in addition to the existing sponsors and partners that I've had. And that's been really fun to have a certain thing and talk to people about it and people that I've known for a little while too. So yeah, you never know where your prior relationships and how they'll kind of come back around and stuff like that. But it is nice to just have this kind of product to offer, and which I think ties into another idea that I think I'm really passionate about is this idea of just building something and seeing where it takes you, and just knowing that you can keep pushing on something, even if it's not the full thing. But I think I've worked on some good projects that have been, I think for the Community-Led Growth Conference, which I'll talk about, that's been like a, I did it twice, so that was a big project in the beginning of the year of 2026 And then Zach, Ruthie, and I kind of sprinted and did it again October 2nd. And, and, but that's been like a project. And I've worked on other projects and other kind of like freelance work. And then sometimes you do that, and then it's kind of like over. And while I like the idea that I'm like building something that's growing, and that like I'm in more control of, and see where it goes from there, and like things continue to like improve, etc. New ideas, etc. It's like I think you can kind of stay in the game and keep building something like new things can happen. And I'm already kind of seeing that right now with a chief of staff.

And maybe more of that will come over time. I don't know when, but the more that I think you like build something and continue to put out work and do good work, it eventually keeps finding new people and new things emerge. And you can say yes, you can say no, and you try different things, et cetera, but that kind of consistency of building something I think is like cool. And I love the other projects that I've worked on, and I think that they'll have turned into great relationships, and we'll kind of see where they go. But sometimes they're a little bit more time-bound, and that's okay. Kind of like trading time for money and more, like skills and body of work, et cetera. But kind of like more simply, it's a little bit of like time for money versus like kind of like compounding something. And you can compound things like podcasts like this or newsletters or probably some other things too. But I think that it's nice to build something. I've been really enjoying compounding something that is revenue generating compared to podcasting and newsletters that for the most part have not been revenue generating. So it's been like a really big shift over this past year plus.

And yeah, I think just in general where I'm at right now, I feel like I have like my feet underneath me more. I've had like more visibility on and like more of like a pipeline, I guess, although sometimes that's like choppy, which I think is a little bit of the challenge of the type of the work that I do, which is like, it's very like time specific. So if like an event sponsorship or an event doesn't happen, it's like hard to just like push it back a day. You kind of can't. So yeah, that's kind of one of the challenges of some of the work that I've been doing is like, it's very like time, time intense. Like it's very, like a lot of the pieces have to come together at this date. And then if things move around for whatever reason, and I've had like some tough weather issues and that I've had to kind of work around, and they've been okay. But like, again, like there is a lot with events, there's a lot of things that have to come together and like work. And then versus like, you know, sometimes you have those like work meetings and it's like, oh yeah, let's chat tomorrow. How about the next day? Next day? Like with events, it's different. It's very like everyone comes together this date, this time, and if like it's just a lot of pieces to come together, and if like things need to adjust, it's like hard to kind of move those. And so, you know, yeah, I've had to or like I'm working on kind of readjusting an event because of that, of like not all the pieces could come together the way that we thought they were going to come together. So.