Should You Leave Corporate and Start a Business?
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Apr 20
- 14 min read
An Honest Guide for Senior Professionals
In the last few weeks I have had quite a few conversations with people who have left or are planning on leaving their corporate careers.
Former colleagues.
Old Google network connections.
People who found me through LinkedIn.
Prospective clients referred by people I used to work with.
They are reaching out because they are standing at a crossroads and they are not sure about which way to go.
Some of the profiles are:
A Senior Director at a global FMCG company.
A Head of Partnerships at a major tech firm.
A COO who has spent twenty years building operations.
A VP who has run teams of over two hundred people.
A former consultant now heading up strategy at a PE-backed business.
All of them are people who have achieved a lot by every conventional measure, and are now asking themselves whether this is actually what they want, and perhaps more importantly, what is next for them.
The conversations have been honest in a way that professional conversations rarely are. So in this week's article, I wanted to share what people are actually saying, because I suspect many people are thinking these things and not necessarily saying them out loud.
What People Are Saying
"It's going to be ten years of grind before I see any return. That's overwhelming. Maybe I should just go back to corporate."
The ten-year number gets thrown around a lot. It is not a law. It is an average that includes everyone - people who started with no network, no transferable skills, no savings, and no market validation. You are not that person. Your years in corporate built something meaningful, something that can be monetized and carried through: expertise, relationships, pattern recognition, credibility. The timeline looks very different when you start with those assets.
"I see your LinkedIn posts and I am already exhausted thinking about doing that myself. When do you even find time to do actual work?"
What you see on LinkedIn is not the full story. The content that looks effortless is the result of systems built over time, usually very early in the morning or late at night, and occasionally scheduled in batches during one focused session a week. It looks like a lot from the outside. From the inside, it becomes part of the rhythm.
"How do I live without a stable paycheck? I need to know money is coming in."
This is the most honest fear and the one people bring up last, after they have run out of more socially acceptable objections. The paycheck is not just money. It is identity, security, and proof that you are doing something legitimate. Letting go of it is uncomfortable in a way that goes beyond personal finance. I understand this firsthand. And yet — almost everyone I know who made the jump will tell you that the fear of losing the paycheck was worse than actually losing it.
"The space I want to enter is too crowded. Coaching, consulting, SAAS, AI tools — how do I even make money in that?"
Crowded markets exist because there is sustained demand. The people who struggle in crowded markets are the ones trying to appeal to everyone and ending up being the obvious choice for no one. Positioning is the answer - not necessarily finding a less crowded space.
"Everyone around me is asking if I am crazy. Even the people who love me most want to see quick wins."
When I started my business, the most common response from people who knew me well was: "Wow, that's brave." Eyebrow raise included. Brave is what people say when they think you might be making a mistake but do not want to say so directly. One person who is very close to me made fun of a brand name I had been developing for my company. Not out of malice, albeit quite rude and hurtful. They thought it was amusing. That is a particular kind of sting - not only because it was cruel, but because when someone who knows and loves you cannot see what you see, it makes you question whether what you see is real. Yes, it is. They just do not have the reference point yet.
"I have been doing this for six months and nothing has happened. I think I need to give up."
Six months is not enough time. It is barely enough time to get your positioning right and have a few good conversations. Most people who quit in the first year quit just before things start to compound. The problem is that compounding is invisible until it suddenly is not.
"I do not even know what my business would be. I just know I cannot stay."
Clarity rarely arrives before action. For most people, it arrives through action. The conversations you have, the problems people ask you to solve, the work you find yourself drawn to are often the things that reveal the shape of your business. You do not need the full picture to take the first step.
"I am worried about what happens to my professional reputation if this does not work."
This one almost never gets said directly but it is behind a lot of hesitation at the senior level. The answer is that the professional reputation risk of trying and not thriving is far lower than people imagine, and the skills built in the attempt make you more valuable in any context - including corporate, if you ever choose to go back.
"My partner thinks this is the worst possible time. We have a mortgage, kids in school, aging parents."
Timing is always complicated at this life stage. The question is not whether the timing is perfect (hint: it never is) but whether the cost of waiting outweighs the cost of the transition. What is the cost of inaction? For many people, the answer is that staying in a role that is draining them is its own cost, one that compounds too.
"I feel like I have spent the last ten years building someone else's dream."
It comes up more often than one would think, usually from people who have had genuinely successful corporate careers and are not sure what to do with the feeling. The skills, the relationships, the pattern recognition - none of that belongs to the company. It belongs to you.
Why This Is Happening Right Now
These conversations are not random. There are real structural reasons why more senior professionals are asking this question at this moment.
Layoffs. Corporate stability is less stable than it was. U.S. employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January 2026 — the highest for any January since 2009, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. When you can be made redundant from a Senior Director role at a company you gave a decade to, the risk calculus of going independent starts to look different.
Corporate disillusionment. According to a 2025 Guidant Financial report, 22% of entrepreneurs started their businesses due to dissatisfaction with corporate life. That number has been rising consistently.
Mental health and meaning. The post-pandemic reckoning has not gone away. Sitting in a role where your contribution feels invisible, where your energy goes into organizational politics rather than actual work, takes a toll that does not show up on a performance review. 36% of entrepreneurs report that mental health challenges disrupt their workweek, but many will tell you that what they left behind was harder.
Retirement and what comes next. A growing number of people I speak with are in transition. They have financial runway and twenty or thirty years of expertise they want to do something meaningful with. This is one of the strongest positions from which to start.
AI and the future of corporate roles. Americans are incorporating new businesses in record numbers as AI sweeps across many workplaces, with some leaving preemptively, anticipating future layoffs. The question of what work will look like in five years is pushing people to think differently about whether the corporate path is as secure as it once felt.
70% of entrepreneurs in 2024 attributed their motivation to a career or lifestyle change. You are not alone. You are part of a very large, very quiet shift.
What Kind of Business Are We Actually Talking About?
This article is for two types of people: those considering a consulting, coaching, or service business — leveraging existing expertise to serve clients independently — and those considering building a startup or founding something new.
The questions at the surface look the same. The underlying considerations are quite different.
A consulting or coaching business has a faster path to revenue, lower capital requirements, and directly monetizes expertise you already have. The challenge is positioning, building a personal brand, and learning to sell yourself, which many senior professionals find uncomfortable at first. The ceiling feels limited but rarely is, particularly when you productize your services, build a team, or move into retained or fractional arrangements.
A startup has a longer path to revenue, usually requires capital, and involves building something beyond yourself. The upside can be larger. The timeline is longer. The risk is higher. The question is whether you are building something because the market genuinely needs it, or because the idea of building something feels more legitimate than selling your expertise directly.
Both paths are viable. The right one depends on your WHY, your financial runway, your risk tolerance, and your personality.
Here Is What I Tell Coachees
1. Understand WHY You Are Doing This
Not the surface answer. The deeper one.
Is it freedom? Impact? Legacy? Flexibility? Flow? Not being able to do another performance review cycle inside a system you have stopped believing in? Not wanting someone else to decide whether this is the year you get promoted? All of these are legitimate. But you need to be honest with yourself about which one it actually is, because your reason will be the thing that carries you when the path is unclear and challenging.
Starting a business because you cannot find a job, or because you are burned out, or because the idea sounds appealing, those are often not strong enough foundations on their own. Starting because this work is genuinely your calling, because you have something to offer that people need and you cannot not do it - that is a different conversation entirely.
The first exercise I do with every client, before we touch business model, positioning, or pricing, is the IKIGAI exercise.
IKIGAI is a Japanese concept — the word combines iki (life) and gai (purpose) — and it maps the intersection of four questions:
What do you love?
What are you good at?
What does the world need?
What can you be paid for?
It is at the intersection of all four that patterns start to emerge about what your career or business could genuinely look like.
I have sat with clients as they worked through this and watched the moment it lands. One person realized after over thirty years that they had been in the wrong career entirely.
Another realized that what they had been doing in their corporate role was the wrong application of entirely the right expertise. The exercise does not give you a business plan. It gives you an honest foundation honest to build one on.
You can find a free IKIGAI template here and a free IKIGAI diagram tool here built by 👨💻 dan malone 📱. Set aside an hour. Do it before you do anything else.
2. Patience Is Not the Same as Waiting
When people say "it takes years," they are not describing years of waiting. They are describing years of compounding. Every conversation, every piece of content, every client relationship, every piece of work you deliver — it accumulates. The problem is that you cannot see the accumulation while it is happening. You only see it in hindsight, usually all at once.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, described entrepreneurship this way: "An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down." You are not waiting for the conditions to be right. You are building while in motion.
Of entrepreneurs who went into business wanting to make more income than their corporate salary, 73% were successful in doing so. Rarely in year one. Usually in year two or three, after the compounding has had time to work.
3. ABC (Authenticity, Belief, Consistency) — In That Order
These are the three things I come back to constantly, in my own business and in my work with every client.
Authenticity is not about being vulnerable online. It is about being the same person in your content, your proposals, and your client calls. People sense very quickly when someone is performing a version of themselves versus when they are just being themselves. In a market with many options, the thing that makes you irreplaceable is often just being unmistakably, specifically you.
Belief is harder than it sounds. You will have days where you question whether any of it is working. The work is not to avoid those days, but rather to build evidence before they arrive. Track the wins, even the small ones. Document the client who said something shifted. Build a file of proof to look at when nothing seems to be working.
Consistency is the most underestimated of the three. Entrepreneurs filed 5.2 million new business applications in the US in 2024, a 48.6% increase over 2019. Most of those businesses will not survive. The ones that do are not always the cleverest ideas. They are usually the most consistent execution. Showing up — in your content, your outreach, the quality of your work — even when it feels like nobody is watching, is what separates people who build something real from people who tried it for six months and decided it was not for them.
4. Start Before You Are Ready
This is the advice that makes people most uncomfortable, especially at the senior level where being prepared feels synonymous with being competent.
My website was not finished when I started taking clients. My positioning was not locked. My offer was not fully formed. I started having conversations, taking meetings, and delivering work. The clarity came from doing and feeling the waters, not from planning and building in isolation.
Sheryl Sandberg wrote in Lean In: "Done is better than perfect." In the early stages of a business, the most important thing is feedback from the real world — not approval from yourself.
5. Your Network Is the Starting Point, Not the Ceiling
You have spent years building relationships inside organizations. Those relationships do not disappear when you leave. In many cases they become more valuable, because now you can serve those people differently. Former colleagues become your first referrers. Former managers become your champions. Former clients, if the relationship was strong, sometimes become your first clients.
The people who struggle most in early independent work are often those who approach it as if they are starting from zero. You are not. You are redirecting years of compounded professional credibility into a different structure.
6. Positioning Is Your Competitive Advantage
Back to the "it is too crowded" concern. The consulting and coaching market is large. It is also full of generalists who are afraid to narrow their focus because they worry about losing potential clients. The opposite is what actually happens. The more specific you are about who you serve and what outcome you help them achieve, the more magnetic you become to exactly the right people.
You are not trying to appeal to everyone. You are trying to be the obvious choice for someone specific aligned with and aligned to who you are and what value you bring. That specificity is a competitive advantage.
7. You Cannot Do This Entirely Alone
This is the point that senior professionals resist most, because they are used to being the person in the room who has the answers.
A co-founder gives you someone to build and think with.
A good accountant stops you making expensive mistakes before you know they are mistakes.
A mentor who has walked a version of this path saves you months of unnecessary detours.
A coach holds up a mirror and an accountability system while you build and grow. Someone outside your head, outside your industry, outside your immediate network who can see the patterns you cannot see because you are too close to them.
Mentorship programs, funding solutions, incubators, accelerators, and businesses that support entrepreneurs are expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.8% from 2026 to 2033. The world is catching up to what good coaches have always known: you build faster with the right support.
Corporate vs. Independent: The Honest Comparison
The Questions I Get Asked Most
Do I need to quit my job before I start?
Not necessarily. Many of the most successful independent professionals I know landed their first clients, created their first content, and generated their first revenue before they ever resigned from their jobs. You do not need to leap without a parachute. Test the idea, build some traction, and give yourself evidence before making a bigger move. At the same time, having a blank canvas and no full-time job competing for your attention can create more mental space, energy, and speed. Some people build faster when they have that freedom.
The right answer depends on your current financial situation, your appetite for risk, your mental bandwidth, and how quickly you want or need to make the transition.
What if I fail?
You will fail at things. Every founder does. The relevant question is whether any specific failure is fatal or instructive. Most are instructive. And the skills you build in the attempt — client management, positioning, financial discipline, resilience — make you more valuable in any context, including corporate, if you ever choose to return.
What if I am entering a crowded market?
A crowded market is not a problem if you are clear on what makes you different. You do not need to be the only person doing what you do; you need a clear “blue ocean” angle that only you can bring. One of the first exercises we double down on with my clients is values and strengths work to understand who they really are, what they bring that no one else can, and where their experience, personality, and expertise create a unique advantage. That is often the real USP. The people who struggle most are usually trying to sound like everyone else in the market. The people who stand out know exactly who they are for, what problem they solve, and why they are the person to solve it.
What if the people around me think I am making a mistake?
They probably will, at least initially. Not because they want you to fail, but because they are measuring your future against the framework they know. Most people give advice based on their own fears, values, and tolerance for risk, not yours. What feels reckless to one person may feel deeply right to another. Let them watch. Then let them watch what happens next.
The TL,DR
This is not easy. There will be months where the work is there but the money has not caught up. Months where the revenue is fine but you feel completely alone. Proposals that go unanswered. Posts that disappear into silence. Days where you wonder whether you made the right call.
And then something will happen. A client will tell you that a conversation you had changed how they lead. A piece of writing you published six months ago will reach someone who needed it exactly then. A referral will come from someone you had almost stopped thinking about. And you will realize the compounding was happening the whole time, quietly, under the surface.
The upside of building your own thing is unlimited in a way that corporate life is not. Your ceiling is the size of your thinking and the consistency of your actions — not a headcount approval that has to go through three levels of finance.
81% of founders say they would not change their decision to start a business. That number tells you most of what you need to know.
So — Is This You?
If you recognized yourself anywhere in this article, here is what I want to say directly: you do not have to figure this out alone, and you do not need everything figured out before you begin.
Start with the IKIGAI exercise. Get honest about your WHY. Then find someone — a co-founder, a mentor, a coach — who can help you think through what comes next without the emotional charge that comes from asking people who are too close to the outcome.
If you want to talk, I am here. I help people untangle what they want, understand what is getting in the way, and build a path forward that is both ambitious and grounded in who they really are.
Merve K. Hokamp is an ICF and EMCC accredited executive coach, LEGO® Serious Play® certified facilitator, and the founder of Leadrise Coaching & Consulting. She spent 11 years at Google across ad sales, partnerships, Cloud, and data divisions, holds an INSEAD MBA, and works with founders, senior executives, and leadership teams across 40+ countries.
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