I left Corporate America in 2013 when I was smack in the middle of family-rearing chaos. Two small children, day-care expenses, a mortgage, car payments, the endless race, and constant stress. It wasn’t a logical time for me to leave. Not to go small and less stable, anyway.
But I’d always been curious about entrepreneurship and small business. It was starting to eat at me. I remember sitting in my office one day thinking, “What’s scarier? Staying in Corporate America for the sake of stability…or choosing less stable for the sake of new experience?”
For me, hands-down the former. So, I left.
I learned a ton in that transition. If you’re in a similar situation, here are a few things to consider:
1. You no longer have positional power.
Maybe you don’t have a huge title. Maybe you’ve said a million times that titles don’t matter to you. Fine. But this is different. You literally have nothing to rest on but yourself. Your hustle, your smarts, your personability, your network. It’s all raw you.
PRACTICE NOW
If you want to practice now, remove yourself from your title. Watch how it changes how you behave and interact. Watch the creativity come back. Resist any urge to represent yourself by position (verbally, in email, on LinkedIn, or less subtly). Watch how people interact with you. If they’re polite and deferential, you still have a title.
2. You never needed an admin.
You’re going to need to book your own travel, pay your own expenses, schedule your own meetings, fix your own technical problems. Turns out, none of that is all that complicated or time-consuming if there’s no one else to do it for you.
PRACTICE NOW
Want to practice now? Do your own admin work. Honestly, it’s a great way to learn new tools and technologies. It’s also a great way to stay current.
3. You can hold your own on real work.
I’ve written multiple leadership messages for clients, as one example, when those same messages would have been written for me. Somewhere in the rat-race of back-to-back meetings, I had forgotten how much I love to write. I had forgotten that I’m still capable of it.
Be careful with your “real work” muscles. They will atrophy.
PRACTICE NOW
Next time you delegate something important, try it yourself, too. Give yourself the space and time to think, create, test and refine. Work as if you were going to present your thinking to your board or someone highly reputable to you. In other words, don’t take it lightly.
4. The range of what you’ll be exposed to is mind-blowing.
I had at least 6 different roles in the 12 years I spent at one Fortune 30 company. I considered that exposure to multiple parts of business.
It’s not.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re CEO, COO, accounts payable and receivable, the janitor, frontline delivery, customer service, CMO, and CHRO—all in one day. The range of what you’ll be exposed to is astounding.
PRACTICE NOW
Ask yourself what you would never do at work today. If it’s empty the garbage can, empty it. If it’s swap desks with your admin, do it. Seriously. Get out of your own routine and out of what you think is above or beneath you.
5. There’s real responsibility.
I have 35 families counting on me. I know their names, faces, kids, pets, dreams, and more. I knew my direct team in Corporate America, too, but not the other 350,000 people who worked for the same company. Take a RIF. It’s always terrible. But it’s less terrible when the people losing their jobs live across the country and you’ve never met them.
You will never have the “luxury” of not knowing again.
If I fail, we fail. If I win, we win. It’s an entirely different level of responsibility.
PRACTICE NOW
Take one day and put your child in the middle of every business decision you make. Pretend that every decision impacts your child in a positive or negative way. What happens differently?
6. There’s real freedom.
The hardest part of Corporate America is how little control you have over your own time. I’ve never worked more or harder as an entrepreneur. And yet I’ve never felt freer. Free to do the work I want, with the people I want, in service to the things I care most about.
There are entrepreneurial ups and downs constantly. But I can almost guarantee you, that you will never again have the Sunday blues.
PRACTICE NOW
Next time you don’t feel like going to work, don’t. Head straight to a coffee shop and write down the top five things you’d rather be doing. My guess is it will guide you right to the right next experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Molly Koenen is one of four owners of Pioneer Management Consulting, a business strategy, program and project management, and organizational effectiveness management firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Since putting these practices in place, and in the last year alone, Molly and firm have:
· Increased staff by 400%.
· Served 11 additional clients
· Increased revenues by 283%.
· Kept internal team engagement high at 94%.
· Exceeded internal client satisfaction goals by 6% (currently 96% against a goal of 90%).
