What nobody tells you is that the hardest part isn’t the business, rather it’s shedding your identity.
I had spent 15 years in banking, which is long enough to become someone whose career came with infrastructure: a team, a budget, and a title that did half the work before you opened your mouth. Corporate systems are brilliant at telling high performers they’re winning. From promotions to comp reviews, the feedback loops were a constant sugar high and clearly, I was addicted without knowing it.
Entrepreneurship offers almost none of that. The silence in your first few years isn’t failure, but your nervous system doesn’t know the difference.
The identity shift nobody prepares you for
Here’s the thing nobody mentions about leaving a senior corporate career to start something: Your identity doesn’t just live in your head, rather it lives in your title, your firm’s stature, and the calibre of clients and clever people you rub shoulders with. Strip those away and you find out very quickly how much of your identity was borrowed from the institution rather than owned by you.
I went from being the person everyone called when they didn’t know what to do, to sitting alone at a desk wondering who to call myself. The silence has a way of asking questions you weren’t expecting.
I found that out the hard way. The version of myself that once had entire teams for each of those functions was now the one building deal terms, learning proformas, and hand-writing thank you cards to every client and partner we had, sometimes in the same afternoon.
There’s no framework for the loneliness of a decision that only you can make, at 11pm, with a team who depends on the outcome. What I am still learning is that you have to manufacture the scaffolding yourself, because nobody hands it to you as they did inside a large corporate.
The scaffolding I’ve curated is imperfect and always evolving based on my business’ lifecycle and personal life circumstances.
Today, it looks like a former colleague who opens doors without being asked, a best friend who orders an Aperol on a Friday afternoon to ensure the truth isn’t so hard to hear, a peer founder who answers the phone at 10pm and says “yes, this is normal,” a brother who acts as a life coach and mentor who has already done the next chapter and doesn’t pretend it was easy.
None of these people came as a package the way they did a big, large global bank where I was often handed mentors, mentees and leadership training programmes. I had to be shameless enough to ask, and humble enough to keep learning. Neither of which came naturally to me, until now.
That is one of the first lessons I wish someone had told me: when you leave the institution, you also leave the structures that helped hold you up. If you don’t build new ones deliberately, you feel every absence.
The other thing nobody tells you is that building something exposes your psychology in ways that nothing else does. Not in a destructive way, though it can feel that way at 2am when your heart starts racing over softer quarterly numbers. Rather, it’s a clarifying perspective:
- You find out what you actually want, separate from what the institution rewarded you for wanting.
- You find out which of your habits were skills and which were just responses to corporate stimulus, and positive affirmations.
- You find out, sometimes painfully, who you are when there is nothing holding you up but yourself.
The terrible twos nearly broke me, not because the business was failing, but because I was grieving a version of myself I hadn’t realised I’d left behind, while trying to build someone new.
Via turns three in July. We’re bootstrapped and we’re built on accountability to the people who trusted us with their careers and the clients who trusted us with their brief.
I’m not writing this because I have it all figured out. I’m writing it because, when I was in the worst of it, I would have given a lot to read something honest from someone a few steps ahead rather than years ahead. So, here’s what I wish someone had said to me.
- First, losing confidence does not always mean you are failing. Sometimes it means the systems that used to validate you have disappeared.
- Second, your network becomes your infrastructure. The people who tell you the truth, open doors, sanity-check decisions and remind you that hard does not mean wrong become more important than ever.
- Third, you need to learn the difference between loneliness and isolation. Loneliness is part of founder life. Isolation is what happens when you pretend you don’t need anyone.
The identity shedding is real. The silence is real. The loneliness is real. So is the other side of it. You do find your footing thanks to the scaffolding that holds you. And the version of yourself that comes out the other side is, in my current lived experience, considerably more dynamic and resilient than the one who walked in.
If you’re in the early years of the leap, or still standing at the edge of it, this threenager sees you.
I am only now finding my stride but I am finding it. And part of what I plan to do with it is make sure the corporates-turned-founder coming behind us don’t have to figure it out quite so alone.
- Tala Booker is the Founder and CEO of cross-border communications and marketing firm, Via.
