After 17 years as one of the lead planners for San Diego’s transit system, Bill Lieberman called it quits two years ago. Rather than retire, MTDB’s former director of planning and operations became his own boss, opening a consulting business. Aware the experience would be very different from supervising 20 employees at a large government agency, he went back to school.

Lieberman credits an SDSU course in consultancy, delivered in a three-hour class one night a week over 40 weeks, for giving him the direction needed. “It really walked us through how you establish a business, how you attract clients and things like whether you should incorporate or not,” says Lieberman, 56. “That was a tremendous help to me and it gave me the courage to go ahead.”

These days clients include the city of Austin where he is helping with efforts to build a light-rail line, and Lieberman recently got a call from a transit authority in Boston seeking to restore an abandoned line.

For other professionals contemplating a similar change, Lieberman advises they follow their hearts as well as their minds. “Our minds will give us the message that we need to stay where we are,” he says. “Our hearts will tell us to go elsewhere.”

But be prepared.

“Don’t go blindly,” he says. “Get quiet training on the side and build up a little bit of a nest egg.”

Lieberman thought about leaving for nearly two years. But the security, and familiarity, of the workplace had a grip on him. He suspects that feeling is common with other professionals pondering a move. “People are holding back for something that just doesn’t work for them anymore,” he says.

Planning a life of semi-retirement that included paying the bills also was covered in the 40-week class. “I did an analysis of my costs over the year,” he says. “It is scary how much you can’t account for. So you come up with a figure on what you need to earn, then how many hours a week or days of the month do you want to work.”

That calculation showed his original idea to be a budget consultant wouldn’t work. So he raised his rates, but made them fairly inclusive, meaning he doesn’t bill clients for postage, phone expenses, etc.

Although he has an office in a spare room in the Mission Valley home he shares with this wife, Lieberman decided he needed more traditional space. He settled on an affordable one-room office on the second floor of Downtown’s World Trade Center. He takes the trolley to work.

“I find that coming Downtown gets me out of the house,” he says. “I am not tempted to fix something that needs fixing around the house or get diverted by local phone calls. The other thing I have found is I am mixing with people.”

While he still misses the camaraderie of the MTDB staff and the regular schedule, he sleeps better at night.

“It is nice to know that if I wake up at 3 a.m. I can go work on the computer, go back to sleep at 5 a.m. and not worry about when I was going to get up.”

For those who venture out solo, he advises they anticipate a mixed experience. “Enjoy the good times when you have them and then you can endure the bad times because they won’t last forever,” he says. “Change is what it is all about. So just go with it.”

— Tim McClain