A year on the outside.

Tomorrow will mark one year that I have left the corporate environment and have joined the entrepreneurial hustle.

In the last year there have been many eyebrows raised over why someone would leave corporate, especially out of a board level role, but also questioning queries from friends, colleagues and work friends who are also contemplating to "take the leap" and are putting their pinkie in the water to see what the temperature feels like.

The reason for my leaving the corporate environment was in essence that my path in the labyrinth had come to a dead end. Certain opportunities were not available anymore and it was time for fresh blood to take over the helm and for some fresh air for me. We parted as friends.

This post doesn't advocate either side, and it isn't yet another post that demonises corporate over “personal freedom” of entrepreneurship. To this day I fail to understand the motivation for these posts. This article attempts to portray my personal journey in the last year and my findings. The ultimate hope is that it will inform you, the reader, of aspects of this journey and it is up to you to decide which direction you want to be headed in.

There are many to whom the following quote has been attributed, I invite you to be the wise person and let me be the “fool” in this post: “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

Setting sail, on your own

The first element that you need to be aware of is that from the day you have left your corporate employer, you are not that company anymore. For people like me who have been with a big-name employers for a while (almost nine years with HEINEKEN, before that Roche Pharmaceuticals and Carlsberg) it can be quite tough. I don't smoke but I think it is the same kind of withdrawal syndrome that is experienced. You honestly feel like you have been through a terrible break-up with a girlfriend you loved so, so much. All of a sudden, all these people you were connected with daily for so long and with some of whom you’ve developed bonds of true friendship (I was lucky in that way!) are now on the other side of the fence.

It’s tough. It’s OK to cry. I did.

We tend to identify with the culture of the companies we work for, and as much as we influence the culture of the company, the culture influences us in return. Coming out of corporate, nothing can prepare you for the reality-check slap you are about to receive. You are on your own. You are who you are, with your set of skills and capabilities, and it doesn't matter to anyone anymore where you used to be, it is how much you are worth now, on your own. The skills and capabilities you have built over the years are what defines you now.

Everything is not so bleak however, as it is said, you aren’t starting from scratch, you are starting from experience. On top of your experience there is the wealth of connections and the vastness of your network that are here to support you. It is time to buckle up and to hustle! More on that later.

I was lucky enough to have a running start working with a start-up in serious scale-up mode that is run by business friends of mine, whom I’ve come to call friends now.

Finding and defining your purpose

In the first days, or even before starting out on your own, it is good to try to find your “top right corner” of your personal two by two matrix. I am a strategy buff, and ex-colleagues would often chuckle when I would start drawing two by twos for almost any topic discussed…

An effective exercise to do is to score your skills and competencies along the following two dimensions:

1. How much do you like to do it, and
2. How good (objectively!) you are at it

Skills and capabilities that land in the top right quadrant of the matrix are your dream job.

After that find the market for it, and it will be your Ikigai. If the market doesn’t exist yet, create it.

Learn to unlearn and to relearn

This is another greatly important element that you need to embrace. This topic was covered fantastically in a Forbes article by Dr Margie Warrell. I highly recommend the read.

Coming out of an environment in which you may have been for a while shapes the way your mind works. It also creates a set of priorities and rules by which you operate. While you may have thought of yourself as a truly agile mind, you will find that you may have been agile for your previous environment but that you are quite rigid for the “outside world”.

Very early on I have come across this hurdle. To operate efficiently in your new environment, you need to learn how to think in the way each of your potential prospects or clients thinks. This is important as you need to start talking their language. It is OK to suggest ways of approaching a task, however you need to be mindful that you don’t try to make everything around you like it was in your corporate environment – stay fluid, but focused.

Find new sources of fresh knowledge?

To stay on top of the game you must keep investing in growing your knowledge. You have to remain curious, and you need to keep feeding your thirst for knowledge. There are many resources today and not learning is a choice, not a question of circumstance. The knowledge you have coming out of your last employer may be cutting edge now and for the next year, but what then?

Invest in allocating time in staying up to date with current events, skills and knowledge. If you don’t do this you will end up paying the price in the long run.

Embrace the hustle

This is one that is very, very interesting. When you are working for a company that is already established and has a good reputation, prospects will come to you, and you will even have the luxury to refuse some of them. Not anymore. While you do need to choose your projects wisely and need to be somewhat picky, you also need to be the right support for your client and at times do jobs that you have stopped doing years ago (like data entry…).

You will need to learn to sell your story, your skills, and competences all the time. On top of that you will need to learn to do it in a way that isn’t too direct, overbearing, annihilating, or annoying. The line between being the perfect partner in solving one’s problems and being the person who always has an offer up their sleeve and is ready to pocket client budget is very, very fine.

Walking that line can be difficult, especially as you have a very serious agenda to land your next assignment, but for your prospect you may be just another line on the “to do” list, and you don’t even know what level of priority you hold on it. Just try to remember when you had a job in a bigger organisation and there was this little, tiny agency that was reminding you constantly of their offer and inviting you for coffee / lunch / walk in the park to discuss it – what was your reaction? You are that little, tiny agency now!

There is time aplenty now! Or is there??

That’s it, you are out! Now you have the time for all those hikes, bike rides, beers with friends, housework, extended summer holiday you had last time when you were at university! Or do you?

You don’t.

I remember vividly, one of the first persons I called is a good friend of mine and a cycling buddy. I announced that now we can finally go on these 100+ kilometre rides. We haven’t been to a single one. We did a few shorter ones, but time is a scarce commodity!

You are now all the departments and all the functions in the company. Apart from doing the actual work you have to set time to plan revenues, manage the costs, manage payments, handle all the legal work, prepare presentations, find leads, write prospect emails, call potential business partners, do strategy, find the pictures on Google for your presentations, surf Instagram for popular hashtags for that client you are doing a digital piece on, and the list goes on and on…

You should be very precise about planning your time, as you actually have very little of it. You aren’t spending it on endless, back-to-back meetings that could have been emails, but there is a plethora of other activities that need to be done. Some of which I wasn’t even aware of! When is the last time you filled in your own holiday plan for the accounting partner to book in your company’s books?

Also – plan for the unplanned.

Build up resilience

This one likely goes without saying, but when you are employed in a company somehow there is always the mental security of knowing that next month the pay-check will be there. This certainty has of course been somewhat reduced with COVID-19 and many businesses closing, but in general that is almost always there.

When you are running your own venture, in any area of business, there are simply no guarantees. You need to build up resilience. Resilience to find a willing client, the resilience to withstand the long sales and billing cycles, the resilience to receive a “no” sometimes at the least expected time.

I will not lie; it is not easy. I’ve gone literally from the exhilaration of “landing the best deal ever” to the same deal being pulled a few weeks later.

A type of resilience that merits a special mention is resilience to ghosting. There is nothing worst for your self esteem than being ghosted. A million questions and thoughts will go through your mind, such as: “Was it something I said? Was it something I wrote? It must have been that joke I said… Was the price too high? Did they just take my project proposal and ran with it themselves?”. The truth is probably none of the above. The prospect likely has a slew of priorities to handle that have nothing to do with you.

For those of you reading the post and are working in a bigger or established company. Don’t ghost your vendors. Give them closure if nothing else. A “no” is an answer they will live with in an easier way than receiving no answer at all. Give them also feedback on their proposal – what could have been done better, they will learn from it and come back better.

Find your circle of comfort

Stemming from the point above you shouldn’t share the burden on your own. With my wife we have of course been sharing everything, however me flying off into the unknown of private consultancy we’ve grown closer than ever, sharing the highs and lows. Find comfort and support at home, in a circle of close friends, in a circle of trusted business friends. If you share your challenges, you will often see that solutions spring from just talking about it.?

In fine…

In this now somewhat lengthy post, I wanted to share my main experiences and learnings. Do I want to continue as a privateer? I do. Would I take another corporate opportunity if it presented itself? I would. The two sides of business aren’t mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, I think if one wants to be a complete professional, they must try both. If you are coming out of corporate and learn to unlearn and relearn you will be a tremendous entrepreneur as you had access to knowledge that not all entrepreneurs had the chance to encounter. If you are an entrepreneur and join corporate and are ready to learn the rules of the game you are entering you will be one of the most agile persons in that system.?

Whichever path you chose, make sure you enjoy it. To end on an overused quote: “It’s about the journey, not the destination”.

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