I was never going to fit in someone else's box.
I spent over 15 years in corporate sales. Proper sales. Cold calls, targets, pipelines, forecasts, war rooms. The kind of environment where you learn very quickly that if you are not having conversations, you are not hitting your numbers. It was relentless, and I was good at it, but I always knew I was building someone else's business and not my own.
So I left. I built my own businesses. And in doing that, I discovered something that nobody warns you about: you can know exactly how to sell and still forget to do it. The habits that were drilled into me in corporate, the daily outreach, the pipeline management, the consistent follow-up, all of that quietly fell away the moment I was working for myself. There was no manager chasing my numbers. No one holding me accountable. Just me, hoping the next enquiry would come in.
And when it didn't, the feast and famine hit hard. I knew it well. That horrible low-lying anxiety of a good month followed by a quiet one. The relief of signing a client immediately replaced by the worry of where the next one would come from. The cycle that never seemed to end no matter how much effort I put in, because effort without a system is just hope with extra steps.
It was only when I went back to the fundamentals I had learned in corporate that things changed. Outreach. Conversations. Follow-up. A pipeline I could actually see. Not complicated, not clever, just consistent. And the inconsistency stopped.
That was the moment everything shifted. Not just in my own business, but in how I understood what everyone around me was struggling with too.
