Why do successful corporate women who already have established careers, high incomes and years of professional reputation still want to build a business of their own? It’s often not about leaving corporate at all. It’s about creating more ownership over your income, expertise and future – and building options before you need them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why successful corporate women decide to build businesses alongside careers they have spent 15 or 20 years building.
Because when you really think about it, it’s a little counterintuitive.
You already have a demanding job. You may have a senior title, a good income, a strong professional reputation that took years to build, and not even mention all those years of experience behind you. You probably already have more than enough competing for your time outside work too. So why would you voluntarily add another thing to an already full life?
The obvious assumption is that you must want to leave corporate.
And sometimes that is the goal. But I don’t think that is the whole story for many corporate women.
After you have spent a long time building a successful career, the questions you ask yourself start to change. Earlier in your career, so much of your ambition is focused on how far you can go. Can I get the next promotion? Can I make Director or Partner? Can I earn more, lead a bigger team, take on more responsibility?
But once you have spent 15 or 20 years proving that you can succeed in that world, another question can start to creep in: How much of what I have built do I actually own?
And I think that question sits underneath a lot of the real desire to build something of your own.
A high income is not the same as owning your income
You can earn $180,000, $200,000 or $300,000 or more a year and still have almost all of your earned income coming from one source: your employer.
That doesn’t diminish what you have achieved. Building a successful career and earning a high income is an achievement in itself. But it does mean that you have become very good at creating income through one particular economic model: employment.
What many successful corporate women have never actually tested is whether somebody would pay them directly for what they know, outside their impressive job titles.
I think that distinction matters.
Your employer pays you because you perform a role within an organisation. But what happens when somebody chooses to pay you for your thinking, your experience or your ability to help them solve a particular problem?
That is why I don’t think the first few thousand dollars you make outside your salary is only about the money.
If you earn $200,000 a year, making your first $2,000 or $5,000 from a business you created obviously isn’t going to transform your household finances. But it can prove something much more important: your ability to create income exists independently of your employer.
You have spent your career learning how to earn through employment. Building something of your own is partly about developing another economic capability- the ability to turn what you know into something another person or business will choose to pay for directly.
And once you have proven that to yourself, even on a small scale, you have something you didn’t have before.
You have another option.
The point isn’t necessarily to leave. It’s to have a choice.
This is where I think my view of building a business is quite different from a lot of the entrepreneurship messaging we see online.
I don’t believe the natural end point of building a business alongside your career has to be quitting your job.
Maybe you eventually do. Maybe you don’t.
You might build a consulting or coaching business and continue progressing in your corporate career. You might eventually move to four days a week. You might build something that generates $50,000 a year and decide you are perfectly happy keeping it there alongside your $200,000 corporate salary. Or perhaps, five years from now, it grows to the point where leaving corporate becomes a genuine option.
You don’t need to know which of those outcomes you want when you start.
What matters is that you are building the option before you need the option. And that is important.
Because the worst time to start asking yourself what else you could do is often when you suddenly need an answer.
If you have just been made redundant, you are completely burnt out, your role is being restructured, you can no longer tolerate your boss, or something changes in your family that makes your current way of working impossible, you are trying to create alternatives under pressure.
That is very different from building something gradually while you still have a salary coming in, while your career is going well, and while you have the luxury of testing what works without needing it to replace your income immediately.
You don’t have to exercise an option simply because you’ve created it. But having it changes the decisions you are able to make.
There is also something powerful about having one part of your professional life that belongs to you
One of the interesting things about becoming more senior in your corporate career is that seniority doesn’t necessarily give you as much autonomy as people imagine.
You can manage a multimillion-dollar budget, lead a large team and make decisions that have significant consequences for your employer, while still having relatively little control over some very basic parts of your own working life.
You don’t ultimately control the organisation’s priorities. You don’t decide whether there will be another restructure. You may not control where you work, who you report to, what lands on your desk or how your compensation is determined.
That’s simply part of choosing employment, and I’m not suggesting there is anything inherently wrong with that.
But I do think there comes a point where some women want something professionally where they get to decide.
You choose what you want to help people with. You choose your clients. You decide how you want to deliver the work, what you want to charge, what your standards are and where you want to take it.
It may only represent a very small part of your professional life in the beginning. Your corporate career might still provide 95% of your income.
But that small piece is yours.
And I think that sense of ownership matters more than we sometimes realise.
Then there is the question nobody really asks during a corporate career
After 20 years working for established organisations, you probably have plenty of evidence that you are competent at what you do.
But there is a slightly uncomfortable question you may never have needed to answer:
Would somebody still pay for my expertise if there wasn’t a company name underneath mine?
Corporate success and independent market value are not exactly the same thing.
When you work inside an organisation, your expertise sits alongside the company’s brand, systems, infrastructure, relationships and reputation. When somebody independently chooses to work with you, they are making a different decision.
They are saying, I want you to help me with this.
I think that can create quite a profound shift in how you see your own experience.
Because after 15 or 20 years, you have accumulated far more than a list of jobs titles to put on your résumé. You have judgment, pattern recognition, technical or industry knowledge, leadership experience, relationships, lessons learned from mistakes, and problems you now know how to solve almost instinctively because you have encountered them so many times.
You also probably have skills that you barely recognise as skills anymore because they have become so normal to you.
Most of us spend our careers exchanging all of that accumulated value for a salary, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But eventually you might start wondering whether some of it could become an asset that you truly own.
Maybe that becomes a consulting proposition. Maybe it’s a coaching methodology. It could be intellectual property, an audience, an independent professional reputation or eventually a client base.
And that changes your relationship with your experience.
Instead of everything you have learned becoming another line on your résumé that helps you qualify for the next job, some of it begins to have economic value outside the employment relationship.
Maybe this is what ambition looks like at this stage of our careers
I don’t think wanting something of your own necessarily means you have become less ambitious about your corporate career.
Sometimes I think it means your ambition has expanded.
Earlier in our careers, ambition is often fairly linear. We want the next role, the bigger salary, the more senior title and the opportunity to prove how far we can go.
But at some point, particularly once you have already achieved many of the things your younger self was working towards, you start thinking differently about the next 10 or 15 years.
You may still want the promotion. You may still want to make VP, Partner, move into the C-suite or take on a bigger role.
But perhaps you also want a professional reputation that belongs to you rather than only to your job title. You want an income stream that isn’t dependent on one employer. You want to know that there are people in the market who will pay for your expertise. You want something you can continue building regardless of which company happens to employ you next.
Over time, instead of thinking about your working life as one career ladder, you start building a portfolio of things that belong to you: your expertise, your reputation, your network, perhaps an audience, a business, additional income streams and, ultimately, more choices.
Many successful corporate women I knew aren’t building something of their own because they are unhappy with their careers. In fact, they start thinking about it precisely because their careers succeeded.
We have spent years accumulating knowledge, judgment, experience and credibility, and eventually a different question starts to emerge.
Not only, “How far can I go in my career?”
But also, “What could I build from everything my career has given me, that belongs to me?”
Not instead of the career. Alongside it.
Because the goal doesn’t always have to be to leave.
Sometimes the goal is to build the option before you need the option.
If you’re an experienced corporate woman thinking about what you could build from the skills, expertise and experience you already have, without walking away from the career you’ve worked hard to build – subscribe to my newsletter. Each Sunday, I share practical ideas on how to turn what you already know into a coaching or consulting business you can build alongside your 9-to-5.