How the Mehdeeka biz runs, a 3 year update!

• A follow up to the most popular Mehdeeka issue:
  

• I’ve now been self employed for three whole years (and Mehdeeka has run for almost 6!) and here are all the ways the business has changed since the above issue

• A “things I wish I’d known” about moving from sole trader to PTY LTD structure

• Experiments, learnings, failures, and tips!

• Crowdsourced Q&A

⚠️Heads up, this issue is over 5k words, might want to come back to it when you’re in the brain space and have time for it!⚠️

Click here to go to the web version, your inbox will 100% cut this email off.

It’s a short week thanks to Easter, and we just came off a long-long four-day weekend, so I figured I’d bash out this issue which is not marketing related but is one I’ve been meaning to write for like six months.

As mentioned above, my “wtf is fractional” issue is the most popular Mehdeeka and honestly I think it might have been read by a lot of non-Mehketeers, but as more and more high performing marketers are looking at their next career steps and are choosing to go fractional, I want to share how I’ve built up my business (AKA the biz, AKA legally it is Mehdeeka PTY LTD!) and hopefully help anyone who is considering becoming fractional skip a couple of steps.

If you’re looking for “how I got started” I’d recommend reading the original, the issue you’re reading right now will be more of an 'intermediate’ run through of things:

I have tried my best to make this structured, skimmable, and informative, so skip to any section that’s relevant or interesting for you!

1. Fractional services and client work
   I offer fractional product marketing, most often in the form of ‘the equivalent of two days a week’, where I work a little bit every day to keep things moving for clients who don’t have a full FTE load of work. I do both strategy and execution.
   I do this either as a project or retainer. All retainer clients must first complete a project to test how we work together. Retainers are rolling monthly contracts, with a 30-day termination notice, and the scope is pretty broad, allowing for changing priorities and unknown things that pop up as is quite normal in startup land.
   I do not offer day rates and would recommend against them.

   My best balance of clients is three at a time, which is the sweet spot for how much context switching my brain can still operate at optimally. I take occasional one-off projects on top of retainer work which vary in length and price.
   ✅Pros: Very fun, I love retainer work and getting to feel like part of a client’s team without any of the office politics and being able to shut off work at the end of the day. I’m also at a point where all my new clients are inbound or via referral, and I’ve never been down a client for long. Retainers are great for consistent cashflow.
   ❌Cons: There’s a limit to how much you can earn as a business without simply just working more and more and more. There’s only so much you can increase your prices by.
   

2. Workshops🏗
   I started building this as an offering in H2 of 2025 and have run several to date. This was my biggest bet in terms of being able to continue earning more money without working more. A couple of workshops a month (or even a quarter) could earn the same as a full month of retainers.
   However, there’s a lot more complexity in this. One, it’s a much higher volume of clients which means a lot more of a sales motion is needed. It’s hard to find a number of people who are all looking to solve the same problem at the same time.
   Two, it takes so much time, which if you’re completing client work, means you’re doing out of business hours and working a lot more. I haven’t cracked this yet.
   I offer three main workshops, the pricing one which I’ve been advertising and was most ‘designed’ for this repeatable method, one aimed at product teams which is usually part of my intial client project, and a sales <> marketing one for clients who have a team cohesion issue.

   

3. My book > PMM course 🗒
   I wrote a book, as I hope you all know by now. It started as my own checklist for onboarding new clients, became the book it is now, and honestly hasn’t made me a lot of money but it has gotten me authority in the space.
   I’m currently in the process of turning the content of the book into a course for junior marketers looking to become PMMs, since the book is already structured in a 12-week process, I’ve simplified it down for a junior audience.
   Why? Well, I keep getting people ask me “do you know any junior marketers, we’re looking to hire” and my answer keeps being “they don’t exist” so I’m going to see if I can make some.
   

4. Not revenue driving but still business related 🙃
   This newsletter, LinkedIn content, speaking at events and guest writing, co-organising Generate Summit, which btw we are more than 50% sold out! I also started a TikTok which is aimed at creating a pipeline of junior marketers, and will soon be doing workshop related content on YouTube. Ya girl just needs to find time to batch film.
   One other thing I’m going to launch is a PMM lunch meetup in Sydney. If you’re interested, you can RSVP for the May launch!

RSVP to PMM lunch club

Ok so that’s just the primer. I’m earning >90% of my income through just the fractional services right now, but I want to slowly shift this closer to ~60%.

In the 2025 tax year, I made $270k+ as a sole trader. So far this FY, with one quarter to go, I’ve been paid roughly $130k, have another $23k in unpaid invoices, and have a minimum of about $58k in contracted work left for this financial year which will bring me to about 210k. It’s lower than FY 25 because I reduced my client work in H2 of 2025 to spend time building out workshops, the PMM course, and experiment.

I’ll also be a lot less profitable because my expenses have gone up (also related to producing all of that work just listed.) This is definitely what is meant by “investing back into the business.”

But yeah, as you can imagine my tax in FY25 was bonkers, and I was advised to change from sole trader to PTY LTD to reduce my tax burden. A lot of you may have heard this too! I then did it and had a bunch of things that I wish I’d really thought about a lot more before I did it:

❌Also FML none of this is financial advice, it is a personal reflection of my individual journey. I really cannot stress this enough — speak to an actual accountant before making any decisions for yourself.❌

• The money you earn is no longer “yours.” I now need to pay myself as an employee, which has a few options. One, pay yourself dividends. Two, give yourself a salary. Both options are made complicated by additional insurance you now need to get that you didn’t need as a sole trader, and payday super is coming up, which means if you pick the salary route, you must pay your super contribution on the same day as you pay your salary, every time. Because of the super obligation, I can’t just willy nilly myself some cash whenever I want to book a holiday, so my personal finances are no longer as carefree as they once were.

• PTY LTD company structures have additional ASIC reporting requirements. I was using Rounded to do my invoicing, and my accountant made me get Xero because Rounded doesn’t do the additional reporting. However I am so busy I have not had time to properly onboard onto Xero so I have no idea how it works, it’s not intuitive, and now I’m continuing to use Rounded to send my invoices, and my accountant is using my bank feed connected to Xero to track my business. It’s a fucking mess, I hate it.

• 💳CREDIT CARDS!!!! You can’t imagine how many points I was racking up with business trips booked on my personal credit card. Delicious.
  However, since I am technically a “new” business, I can’t get a business credit card for a minimum of 12 months (which I’m actually only 3 months away from, thank god) even though I’m just transferring an existing business into a new structure.
  The thing here is, you can register a business and not use it for 12 months and then get a credit card no problem, it’s so stupid. You do also have to be registed for GST which I am.

• A little thing called PSI or personal services income. So, even if you’re a PTY LTD, the ATO can decide that actually you’re just an individual providing services under a business structure and then tax you like a sole trader.
  Ummmmm I don’t love the sound of that. The way they decide if you’re a “business” or “personal services” is also very grey area and is kind of hand wavey. This has been the biggest pain in my ass this year. I’ll probably say that about several things, but really this is the root cause.

Ok so that’s stuff I wish I had really had a much longer conversation with my accountant about. I don’t love my accountant, they’re always in a rush and don’t really take time to talk through things and are very “it’s fine” even when it most definitely is not fine.

However, everyone I ask “would you recommend your accountant to” (minus literally one person who I actually need to chase up) says a big fat “no, if you have a good one can you tell me who it is?”

Here’s what I pay for to keep my business running:

• Accountant

• Financial advisor who actually just stopped being an advisor so I will be cutting this

• One intern helping me build up TikTok

• One freelancer for admin and overflow and helping me pull Mehdeeka stuff together because I will always deprioritise it to do client work

• Claude

• Miro

• Both Rounded and Xero for invoicing and accounting

• Google business suite (two paid email addresses)

• Slack

• LinkedIn premium

• Shopify

• MS Office

• Canva pro

• Docusign

• A password manager

I have played around with CRMs but even when I found a good one, it’s just not in my workflow and no one is forcing me to use it, so I never keep them up to date. This is an ongoing issue for my workshop pipeline which I’m actively trying to fix but don’t have a happy ending to yet.

The one I was most happy with was Folk, however a lot of solo operaters recommended Attio to me too.

Tools I paid for but eventually got rid of: Notion Pro, Adobe Creative Cloud (i.e. Photoshop, Premier Pro, occasionally Illustrator, but the thing I miss is Acrobat), SEMrush (mainly because originally I did do some SEO/web stuff but now do pure PMM), MeetEdgar for social scheduling (it’s not great for LinkedIn.)

Because then I’d be an agency owner and that’s a completely different job to the one I want. I want to be a product marketer. I like being a product marketer. I like not having to manage people.

I’ve always been a huge L&D advocate, so doing 1-2 upskilling commitments per year hasn’t been hard to commit to. That’s not to say it hasn’t been hard to take the time out and do it, and squish all my client work into less time, but I have had absolutely no doubts or apprehension about investing in growing my skills.

I did the AICD foundations course last year, which I do feel prepared me for moving to PTY LTD structure and the ASIC reporting requirements. This year I did Sean Grealy and Roy Head’s Sell Anything course to upskill in sales.

If you’re hesitant to invest in something like this, just know that your clients are paying you to be an expert, and an expert needs to be up to date. This is not negotiable if you want to be at the top of your game.

What you invest in learning is more important. You can either continue honing your craft or pick up additional business skills. There’s no wrong answer, but there are definitely time-sensitive-more-important answers which will be dependent on your current situation.

💯The best business books I’ve read, which are specifically applicable to fractionals and solo self employed people, have been from David C Baker. This specific book is incredible and very short. He also has a podcast called Two Bobs but I haven’t listened to it.

What I find I am in need of the most right now is a community of practice, but not product marketers, other solo self-employed people. I’ve been reaching out to those that I know (shout out to you if we’ve chatted recently, you’re saving my sanity!) more purposefully, but I still feel like I need it more than I’m currently doing.

Building up this (support) network is crucial to me being able to check my self doubt and mental breakdowns. Of which there is plenty.

So pretty much this whole time I’ve said my ICP was “B2B SaaS, any industry, still founder-led, either bootstrapped or minimal funding but cashflow positive, half of my clients have a marketing team, half don’t.”

Which, I thought was pretty specific, until I did the Sell Anything course and one of the activities made me think about it more deeply.

I’ve added an additional definition for sure, and one hypothesis:

• The founder is technical and does not have a commercial background (for sure)

• The company is 1-3 years old (hypothesis)

This came from working on outbound sales motions, where I needed filters I could add to prospecting tools, because my previous definition didn’t really fit into that.

So now I’m making an effort to get back to founder networking and attending events that are more in the technical space.

Check back for business update #3 in like 18 months time to hear how this goes!

We are less than 3 months away from the end of this financial year. I will be treating that as the end of my experimental phase, where spending and development on workshops, new “products”, and contemplating business ends, and next FY it is full steam ahead on (hopefully) reaping the return on investment.

I’ve learned a lot of people give lip service about saying “that’s a great idea”, “I’d come to your workshop if you hosted it in [city]”, and other similar things. Honestly it’s kind of the basics of customer research, that people say things they think you want to hear, but really you want to hear the truth.

I’ve learned that selling expertise is very time sensitive. They either need it right now or not at all. If you have someone changing the scope of work, dragging it out, and going back and forth constantly — they simply don’t know what they want and so you’ll never be able to make them happy because it’ll never be the right thing. There’s two ways to solve this:

1. Cut them loose if they’re a lost cause, you will waste time (and therefore income) you’ll later regret

2. If there’s something there and they’re just unfocused, sell them a one day or half day working session where you go through their situation, priorities, goals, milestones they need to meet, and build a strategy together. This then becomes your scope of work for your engagement. Make them pay you for this, do not do it for free. Give it a fancy name and not “strategy session” or “audit”.

I’m refocusing my audience. For a while I was really starting to feel like I was doing so many things (see part one of this newsletter) and it was getting harder and harder to explain and not look like I was in so many fractured areas.

My goal is “think product marketing in Australia, think Kayla.”

Everything I have been doing has always been product marketing. It’s just such a wide scope of work to begin with that trying to name all the sub-specialisations was losing the fact that the core was the same. So I’m zooming back out to PMM as my focus.

I’m splitting this into two audiences though:

1. Founders who’ll hire me for my services, workshops, and expertise

2. The full funnel of product marketers, from aspiring through to my peers who are senior, fractional, and also kicking ass in PMM

I believe so strongly that a rising tide lifts all boats. If there are a growing number PMMs, that reflects growing demand. Of course this will inverse at some point, and the job market is shit at the moment, but supply of PMMs is low right now too.

Similarly, I don’t view other fractionals as competitors. If they’re booked and busy, it means there is a viable commercial audience for me too. When I get enquiries I can’t service, you bet I’m messaging them to see if they’re free to take it. When one succeeds, we all succeed.

I don’t think of this third group as an audience, because they are my peers, but I do want to (continue to) invest into my network of other solo self employed people.

You might wonder where this newsletter sits in all of this. Well, if you haven’t gotten this impression already, it’s kind of like a diary for me. I tried giving it up once, and came back to it from pure compulsion. When I reached 1,000 subscribers (the first time, I recently reached it again) I culled my subscriber list by 400 people. More than ever, I believe I’d still publish even if my audience was zero. It’s also fun for me, as stressful as a publishing schedule is.

It also gives me an outlet to be creative. I actually have a new photoshoot idea for it which I’ll hopefully be doing soon.

I asked other fractionals and the Mehdeeka Whatsapp group (link to join here) what questions they had so I could add them in. Here they are!

How would I start from scratch as a fractional in 2026?

I would:

1. Not worry about websites/emails/etc, I still need to fix up my website and 50% of my clients keep using my gmail no matter how many times I’ve tried to move them to my Mehdeeka email

2. Register the business entity as soon as you’re thinking about it, to get those initial 12 months of existance underway

3. Start talking to other fractional people, even people not in your niche

4. Start posting about your area of expertise as much as possible with the aim to start conversations and build your reputation and authority, don’t worry about selling yet but you want to grow your baby chickens into hens ready to lay when you publicly launch

5. Start building your network with intention, specifically with your hypothetical ICP, and doing casual “hey what do you need most right now for your org” and just vibe it out

Where do I get a service agreement from?

I actually use one that one of my very early clients gave me and have slowly over time evolved it based on requests. You can probably get a simple template from a law firm’s website, the most important things are:

1. Scope of work is clearly detailed with deliverables

2. Payment terms

3. Contract termination terms

📅Any advice for calendar syncing?

So painful. I had one client on Outlook and all other clients on GSuite at one point which makes it impossible. Now all of my clients are on GSuite and you can “subscribe” to calendars, so I just subscribed to all of my client calendars from my Mehdeeka email (+ my personal calendar) and colour coded them so I can see when I’m busy and who it’s for.

🐖How much savings do you keep in the bank?

Tough question because my money is kinda all over the place (investments, offset account, personal transaction account, business account) and I do sort of just pull money from wherever when I need to.

Now that I’m PTY LTD, my business bank account is only touched for business expenses and all my clients pay into there. Whenever I get a big bill (e.g. BAS) I try to pay it ASAP so my fund can fill back up again.

In my personal account I just make sure I have enough to pay my rent and credit card at the end of the month. Honestly, I bring in more than I spend and I have no kids, no major life expenses, no car, a pretty average lifestyle really. I do travel a lot but it’s all paid in cash. I paid off HECS at the end of 2024, so the only major expenses I need to keep cash around for are BAS and my personal tax return.

I recognise how priviledged this is and that it’s not the case for everyone.

How do you find clients?

In all honesty, they find me. I actively add people on LinkedIn, post a lot in a lot of places, attend networking events, and as I said I try to stay top of mind for people. When they run into a problem that coincides with the topics I talk about, they reach out or they talk to someone about it and that someone refers me.

I’ve only been fractional for 3 years, but I’ve been in startups and been posting on LinkedIn and building my network for closer to 10, this is not an overnight success story by any means.

😢How do you fit the admin side in?

Kicking and screaming.

I let it pile up until it’s overwhelming and takes a whole Saturday to do, or my accountant sends me increasingly aggressive emails which I don’t open, but they live rent free in my head.

Invoicing at the end of the month is my one happy admin job, and it’s because I only send 4 and they’re the same every month, thank youuuu retainer model.

💼How do you work “on” the business?

A little bit all the time. I am never short on ideas so I’m always thinking “this could be interesting” or “what if I tried this” and I trickle small versions of them out all the time. You probably don’t even notice how much of my LinkedIn posting is actually small tests of ideas to see what traction they get.

I have recently implemented “quarterly planning days” which is where I pick a public holiday from a different state and then tell people I’m observing that public holiday and it’s a “business development day” where I fuck around with my ideas.

I would also LOVE to organise a fractional group business planning couple of days, perhaps styled like an “unconference” but this is financially and time wise a huge investment which is preventing me from really diving in.

♻️How do you manage context switching?

Stagger your client onboarding so that you’re not learning multiple clients at once. It takes me about 6 weeks for onboarding to “settle” and for my brain to recall info easily but this might be different for you. So, where possible, if I’ve just started a client, I’ll try not to start another client for at least 6 weeks. I’ve definitely had two clients start simultaneously (as recently as December so I’m guilty of ‘do as I say, not as I do’) and it is possible but hard.

Once a client is firm in my mind, I can context switch 3 clients easily with no loss of brain power. 4 is ok, 5 is unmanageable and things breakdown quickly.

I actually think this is 1000000% something that should be baked into your pricing. You need to charge your optimal number of clients the amount that will make working on that volume of clients sustainable long term so new work (and additional revenue) is not tempting enough to get you to break your own rules.

Try to finish a task at a time and finish it out before jumping to other clients. When working on a task, don’t look at Slack or emails because a different client will come through, you’ll get distracted replying to them, and it’s all the micro context switching that’ll get you.

🧐How do I think about the investment in my self-promotion?

I can tell you right now, there’s absolutely no way to measure it but 100% of referrals or “you should talk to Kayla” come because I’m top of mind for someone. I wouldn’t be top of mind if I wasn’t constantly shoving myself in front of people’s faces.

Here’s two things that’ll hopefully help you overcome any fears:

1. I once met someone who told me they did an incredibly niche thing and no joke the next week someone asked me “do you know anyone who can do this incredibly niche thing” and I thought yes… yes I do, but I cannot remember their name. I never want to be the person who you’re trying to think of but can’t recall the name of.

2. Posting on the internet feels like repeating yourself and being the obnoxious person always talking about yourself because you see 100% of your posts, basically no one else does. The algorithm only serves your content (regardless of platform) to a small % of your audience, so don’t worry about saturating it.

✍️Do I carve out time for content creation?

Lmao have you seen me report on what time I finish writing some of these newsletters? I don’t carve out time, it’s a bit chaotic. I would say I do content because it’s a compulsion, if I kept it in my head I’d explode eventually.

I do find that motion breeds motivation for me. The more I write, the more I want to write. I’d say I have some really large ambitious projects I’d love to do, but it’s genuinely ideas that are like a 40 hour week worth of research, outlining, and writing, so I’m not doing that.

Also, most of my content goes through a “this would be fun” filter in my brain so a lot of content I do is actually procrastinating work I should actually be doing.

However. Let’s get TMI while we’re here.

I have never been more committed and had no problem with working all night on my newsletter or content as I have when I’ve been deeply unsatisfied with an area of my life. Whether it was a bad boss (which was the impotus for this newsletter existing), an unhappy relationship I was distracting myself from, or grief from my dog dying, those are the times I’ve thrown myself into work and content to distract me from those things.

People look at my output and say “I don’t know how you do so much” and this is the honest truth. When I am happy, content, and living my best life, I struggle to find not just the time, but the motivation to sit at a desk, by myself, indoors, and write a newsletter about B2B marketing. Especially after a full day of work.

I love this newsletter, and I love what I do for work, but if I didn’t need to, I absolutely wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be writing for sure, but it’d be creative and for me. I’d be working but it probably wouldn’t be in tech. It’d be some Ghibli-esque florist or a bookstore.

Let’s be real, I don’t dream of work. I do not have a dream job. I do have a dream lifestyle, and this job and this work enable it. This strayed a bit from content creation, but I wanted to include this monologue.

💖Who are some people who do things very differently to me, but it works for them?

I LOVE this question because one thing I’ve optimised for is my personal preferences, and they’re not everyone’s preferences! I actually had a super fun chat with Matt Mcfarlane about how we have total opposite preferences (he prefers projects over retainer, where I like feeling like part of a clients team, he said he doesn’t like getting that involved) and honestly? Slay. If you’re doing the fractional route you better be doing it for yourself and making it your own otherwise what’s the point if you’re doing things you don’t like? Just be an employee.

I think I work quite similarly to Zac King, we were chatting the other week about our experiments for scaling ourselves via programs and repeatable work and not through retainers, but we’re taking different approaches to it.

I really admire how Tania Clarke has made fractional work around her lifestyle, rather than adapting her lifestyle to work around it. She does four days a week and prioritises her family.

Another person killing it is Eagranie Yuh, who has hit some real milestones and highs from Tasmania, proving you don’t need to be in Sydney or Melbourne to make it work. Although 100% of my clients are in Sydney, I have had long stretches of not seeing any of my clients in person, and I have had interstate clients, so it is possible to again build around the lifestyle you want rather than be forced by the business.

If you found this helpful, you can repay the favour by adding me on LinkedIn and/or sharing the link to this with a friend who might be thinking of going the self-employed route.

I’m an open AF book about all this. (If you couldn’t already tell.)

I have had some people tell me I think about this more than anyone else they know, which is kind of a weird comment to take in because I often feel like I’m acting on impulse a lot.

What I will say is I’ve absorbed the “experiments are good, and by definition, not all experiments will be a success and that’s ok” culture from startups. Take the knocks as information and not as personal failings.

It’s really hard doing all of this without a map, which, I guess, is why I’m compelled to write this as almost an artifact of me creating my map as I hack through the jungle. There’s never been anything as comforting in my career as talking to someone I thought was lightyears ahead of me, and realising they’re also figuring it out as they go.

It’s much like becoming an adult and realising the adults you thought knew everything when you were a kid, were in fact just larger kids.

5,295 words later, I’m out.

Catch ya on the other side,

Kayla