Six questions that replace your business plan when you go freelance after 50

The business plan problem

Marleen Deleu, founder of NextConomy in Belgium, told me something on this podcast that I’ve heard echoed in conversations ever since.

• She wasn’t prepared,
• She didn’t have a business plan,
• her proposition was not clear, and when it came out of her mouth, it was vague. 

Starting as a freelancer, she told me, is also starting an enterprise. You need a business plan and you really need to think about who your target audience is and how you’re going to make money.

Michelle Kvello, who founded Lantern Partners and created the Corporate to Consultant course, sees the consequences when people skip this step.

She identifies three things that send people back to corporate: 

• they jumped away from something rather than consciously jumping into something, 
• they didn’t do enough financial planning, or
• they couldn’t get past the fear of sales. 

But here’s the difficulty. Traditional business plans are 50 or 100 pages long and nobody reads them.

 Margareta Krizova, who spent almost 30 years in mergers and acquisitions before going freelance at 53, eventually made a public declaration. She doesn’t read business plans longer than two pages, and neither does anyone else.

So you need a plan, but a 50-page document is a waste of time. What sits between those two realities?

She told me people are relieved when they hear this. But then she pushes them on the numbers, because the numbers are where people get evasive. And no business plan is set in stone. You change it as you go. She tries to make it simple and pushes people to think realistically.

Mark Elliot, who runs Startup School for Seniors in the UK, sees the same pattern from the other end. 

People over 50 who start working independently tend to do everything, everywhere, all at once. They post on every social media platform, run training courses, speak at networking events, start podcasts, write blogs. Because they’re doing so much, nothing works well and they can’t see where their success actually lies.

Margareta’s six questions are one antidote to that scattered approach. If you can answer them clearly, you know what to focus on. If you can’t answer them, you know what to work out before you spend another month doing everything at once.

Notice what the six questions actually cover

• Questions one to three deal with market intelligence: what creates value and who needs it. 
• Questions four and five address operations and financial planning: how you reach customers and whether the numbers work.
• Question six is about business structure. 

For independent professionals, these questions map directly to the three domains that determine business success: 

• understanding your market, 
• delivering your service, and
• managing your money. 

Get one wrong and it affects the other two. A pricing strategy that ignores your true costs (question five) will undermine your go-to-market approach (question four) and eventually your ability to serve the customers who need you (questions one to three).

From M&A to freelance: a career transition at 53

Margareta co-founded CEAG, an M&A advisory firm, in Prague in 1993, four years after the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia. For 27 years she ran the firm’s M&A division, working with clients like Levi Strauss and Colgate-Palmolive.

At 53, she sold her equity stake. The transition came with panic. She wished she’d known how much panic there would be. Her identity had been wrapped up in the firm for so long that leaving forced a question: who am I without this?

Michelle Kvello makes an important distinction about this moment. The people who succeed in consulting are those who jump consciously into something, not just away from something.

Margareta’s advantage was that she jumped into territory she already knew. She didn’t start from scratch in a new domain. She applied what she’d spent 30 years learning in a different context.

Today she still takes selective M&A work, coordinating a team of lawyers and financial analysts she’s worked with for seven or eight years. But she’s added the accelerator, the mentoring, and the writing.

Her second book, Third Career, came out in March 2026. She appears on Den D (the Czech version of Shark Tank). She’s built a practice around what she knows rather than starting from scratch in a new domain.

This is what the Wisepreneur approach is about: experienced professionals transforming what they already know into sustainable independent practice. 

Not retirement, not an encore career in the sense of slowing down, but a deliberate pivot toward a more impactful way of working.

The research supports it. A 50-year-old founder is around twice as likely to build a highly successful firm as a 30-year-old, based on analysis of 2.7 million startups. The accumulated judgment, the pattern recognition, the professional networks built over decades: these are precisely the assets that younger professionals cannot yet access.

Cashflow is the blood of business

Margareta returns to cashflow repeatedly, and it connects directly to Mark Elliot’s budgeting question: 

• how much money is essential? 
• What are your expectations of income?
• Then double and triple that to find out your cost.

Michelle Kvello’s pricing calculator in her Corporate to Consultant course walks through the same logic from the other direction. 

• Start with how much money you need to earn annually.
• Factor in superannuation, holidays, sick days, and business development time. 

The minimum rate you should charge won’t look anything like the hourly rate on your corporate payslip, because that payslip kept paying you when you were on holiday, when you were sick, and when you weren’t fully utilised.

For freelancers and solopreneurs, cashflow matters more than it does for bigger businesses, because you’re both the operator and the bank. You cover expenses while waiting for invoices to be paid. You take lower pay when cash is tight. The gap between invoicing and payment is where independent businesses quietly fail.

Marleen Deleu admitted the same gap in her own start. She had no idea of prices. She had no idea, if you have a certain amount of income, how to optimise it and how much net income it would bring. She tells people this openly now to prevent them making the same mistakes.

The invisible work freelancers don’t count

Margareta raised something most independent professionals recognise immediately but rarely name: invisible work. All the hours that don’t get invoiced. Admin. Planning. Networking. Pitching. Following up. The email at 10pm solving a problem before tomorrow’s meeting.

When freelancers price their services, they often count only the visible hours. A consultant spends 40 hours on a project and charges for 40 hours. But that project also had 10 hours of admin, 5 hours of business development to land it, 10 hours of follow-up, and 5 hours of thinking time. The true total is 70 hours, not 40. The pricing multiplier (total hours divided by billable hours) should be built into every rate.

Most people discover their true hourly rate is half what they thought it was. That’s not a failure of pricing. It’s a failure of counting.

Market validation comes before the pitch

Margareta’s advice to people starting out is to look at the market and ask people whether they’d buy what you’re thinking of offering. Not after you’ve built the brand, not after you’ve written the website copy. Now. Talk to potential customers before you invest time and money in something nobody wants.

Michelle Kvello recommends a similar approach: start within your existing employer if you can.

She’s seen people negotiate hybrid roles, keeping two or three days a week with their current company while building their consulting practice on the side. That employer becomes the anchor while you explore. Her own consulting career started with one big client taking four days a week, and she built her pipeline on the fifth day.

Charles Handy called this Second Curve timing: the best time to start your next chapter is before your current one peaks, while you still have energy, resources, and options.

Waiting until retirement, redundancy, or burnout forces the transition from a position of depletion rather than strength. Margareta’s side hustle advice and Michelle’s hybrid role strategy are both ways of riding two curves at once, letting the first provide stability while the second gains momentum.

Using AI to ask better questions

Margareta uses ChatGPT for brainstorming and for generating questions she wouldn’t think to ask herself. She’s uploaded Keith Cunningham’s articles and YouTube content (he wrote The Road Less Stupid) and uses the AI as a thinking partner grounded in frameworks she trusts.

Her principle: her idea about using AI is really about asking questions, getting questions that she’s not able to think about on her own. She also uses it for content ideas when she’s stuck on what to write about. The AI generates the questions. She does the thinking. For creative work like infographics, she uses NotebookLM.

This is a practical example of what it means to use AI as a capability amplifier rather than a replacement. The accumulated judgment of 30 years in M&A is something no AI can replicate. But an AI can surface questions that challenge that judgment from angles you wouldn’t naturally consider. The combination, your expertise plus AI-generated prompts, produces better decisions than either could alone.

Your knowledge is worth more than you think

Margareta sees this consistently through the accelerator: people in their 50s and 60s undervalue what they know. They’ve spent years learning their craft, building relationships, understanding how their industry works. Then they try to start something new and assume they need to start from zero.

Michelle Kvello sees the same pattern. She talks about a different level of confidence that women in their 50s develop: confidence in their own abilities, even when the corporate environment isn’t recognising their value. Her observation is that this internal shift often becomes the catalyst for going independent.

The accelerator has a 50 per cent success rate across 14 projects, partly because most of those projects are run by people with real experience. They’re not learning a domain from scratch. They’re applying what they already know in a different context.

When you leave employment, you lose the cognitive infrastructure that corporate life provided invisibly: 

• the IT support, the marketing team, 
• the financial systems,
• the administrative processes. 

Building your own versions of these systems, your own decision frameworks, memory systems, and professional networks, is what turns individual expertise into a sustainable practice.

The professionals who do this well aren’t just consultants. They’re operating what Charles Handy described as a shamrock organisation: a core of non-delegatable expertise, supported by systems and tools that handle the cognitive load, connected to a network of collaborators who provide complementary capabilities.

Listen to the episode

This conversation is Wisepreneurs Podcast Episode 88: Margareta Krizova Freelance Advice: Six Questions That Replace Your Business Plan

Related episodes

Marleen Deleu on the freelance economy and the mistakes people make when they don’t prepare

Mark Elliot on Startup School for Seniors and why people over 50 try to do everything at once

Michelle Kvello on navigating the corporate to consulting transition

About Margareta Krizova

Margareta Krizova is a business adviser, author, and mentor to founders at NEWTON University Business Accelerator in Prague. She co-founded CEAG, an M&A advisory firm, in 1993 and ran mergers and acquisitions for 27 years before going freelance at 53. Her second book, Third Career, was published in March 2026. She appears on Den D, the Czech version of Shark Tank.

Frequently asked questions