"Find Your Inner Founder is by far one of my top three professional development experiences in my career. Â Â "
Cassie
About Find Your Inner Founder
Many freelance and independent consulting businesses are sparked by a combination of financial precarity and genuine interest. Often, the opportunity emerges when an advisor, a colleague, or a personal connection reaches out for short-term support with a specific project, such as a book index, a manuscript copyedit, or a college-bound teenager’s personal essay. The ad hoc freelancer accepts the offer, excels, and stumbles into a growing side hustle without any marketing at all. If this is you, make no mistake: you are a business owner.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, being sought after in this way is a strong sign that there is a market for your services. Many early-career knowledge workers in this position, however, lack the clarity, confidence, and language to advocate for themselves as business owners. Once you recognize the true value of your services, you will be well-positioned to ask for what you want and seek out the opportunities that work best for you.
This one-week course offers lessons, exercises and group discussions to help you elevate your freelance practice and think more expansively about the value you can bring to potential clients and employers.
During this course, you will:
- Recognize the skills you already have.
- Identify a service you could offer by tomorrow.
- Communicate your value to a potential client or employer.
- Workshop your ideas in a community of peers.
- Learn how to discover your customers.
- Learn how to talk about money and name your price.
- Learn how to craft your story for effective marketing.  Â
This session is designed for scholars and practitioners seeking to start or refine their work as freelancers, independent consultants, or other business owners. Â
Your enrollment fee includes:Â
- Virtual group sessions with founder and lead instructor Erica Machulak
- Asynchronous lessons, prompts, and exercisesÂ
- Access to a resource hub and community of fellow learnersÂ
- A hands-on roadmap to guide your next steps
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About Your InstructorÂ
Erica Machulak, PhD, is a medievalist turned entrepreneur and the author of Hustles for Humanists: Build a Business with Purpose (Rutgers University Press 2025). As the Founder of Hikma, she leads a social impact startup with a mission to mobilize scholarship for the public good through consulting, capacity building, and storytelling. Over the past five years, Hikma clients have secured $12M+ in funding to create evidence-based resources and tools, inform policies, and craft accessible communications published by Forbes, the CBC, and other platforms. Erica has delivered training at universities around the world and through “Plan for Research Impact,” a Hikma course certified by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.
As a writer, editor, and facilitator, Erica believes that the world needs to hear more from people who resist easy answers. Her work has been featured in Inside Higher Ed, the Journal of Electronic Publishing, and Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other major publications. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the University of Oxford (MSt.), and the University of Notre Dame (PhD).
"Before this seminar, I did not have a developable service, let alone an idea that I can be a “founder.” After the seminar, I have both. The most attractive and helpful aspect of this seminar was that it was decidedly practical and tailored, leaving out lofty promises and vague, one-size-fit-all formulas. The exercises and detailed feedback given throughout the course guided me to pull out the skill sets that I already had in my pocket, repackage them, and deliver them to the right people. Now, I have solid materials that I can cultivate into an actual service. Considering where I was pre-seminar, this is a huge win."
Nai
"Each day felt bold and transformative, propelled forward by deep community, insurgent creativity, and engaged feedback. In a world where everything is an ad that offers far less than what it promises, Hikma achieves and delivers substantial offerings to clients. In Find Your Inner Founder, clients complete the course realizing and then fiercely believing that they can achieve and deliver in their own businesses, too. Hikma Collective ate, left no crumbs."
Cassie
