The Monorail Network?

Things have been busy in Monorail consulting land! After about a year of doing this, I’m working with six different companies, doing a mix of security and IT advising.

I’m helping many of them with the SOC 2 audit process, and recommending and rolling out new tools and practices to improve their security posture.

None of these companies have any full time security people, and it’s rare for them to have any IT people. They have between 5 and 100 employees, and their customers are often larger companies that have relatively high standards for security and compliance practices.

This works out pretty well, because I can help them out quite a lot with somewhere between 3 and 30 hours of work per month. That’s way better for them than hiring someone full time.

It's fun! And I'm having a much better time billing about 20 hours a week and choosing how to spend my time. I can't imagine going back to a regular full time job.

There’s one thing I keep running into, though. Sometimes I’ll make a recommendation that takes more hands-on time to implement, and I don’t have enough time in the day to help them with it.

It might mean working through a backlog of vendor security reviews.

It might mean talking to a bunch of folks on the engineering team to figure out what data stores hold what data and which services they connect to.

Or maybe a client needs to do research about a category of tools, like contract management software, and figure out what the options are and how they compare. This usually means setting up sales calls, going through demos, and writing up notes.

Maybe they need to set up a new, trackable process for handling employee requests for access to different tools and systems.

Maybe they need somebody to help them stay on top of the various recurring tasks, like quarterly internal access reviews, or patching open source vulnerabilities, so they don't get dinged during their next audit or miss something really dangerous.

One common pattern across all my clients is that they don’t have extra time to do stuff like this. Everybody's time is already spoken for.

If it’s important enough, they can make the tradeoffs, but I keep thinking that it would be super valuable if I could help them get more of this work done.

They're willing to pay for it, too. They just aren't ready to hire for it, yet.

When I started Monorail, I was convinced that it would just be me, and that I'd never have full time employees, or even contractors.

But I have a hunch.

I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of people who could do this work quite well who are either between jobs, have AI burnout, have other commitments or goals that make full time work difficult or undesirable, or are just sick of the full time office job life. (It can be kind of terrible!) For any number of reasons, hourly work might sound pretty good, especially if it pays decently well.

And of those people, I’m sure some of them have experience in this security/compliance/IT stuff, or are interested in learning. But even that doesn't matter a whole lot–skills in project management, critical thinking, and communication go a long way, especially when there are people around you who know the domain. Specific experience is a bonus.

I feel like I've found a sweet spot where the hours aren't ridiculous, and I'm spending my time applying my expertise to help people solve real world problems.

I'm not trying to win the startup lottery or automate something with AI faster than the next guy. I'm just following the age-old model of trading services for money, and it's actually kind of great.

Maybe you want to join me?

I don't know exactly what shape this is going to take yet, but I'm ready to start to build the network and have some initial conversations.

If this piques your interest at all, please drop me a line and tell me a little bit about yourself.

You can also sign up for emails about this by subscribing and choosing the Monorail Network newsletter after you click the "Sign up" button.

And if you know somebody who might be into this kind of thing, please send this post their way. I'm convinced the right people are out there.