This piece was originally published on https://gev.design/newsletter/why-sarah-walked-away-from-her-own-business/
She called me to tell me about a job offer, and thirty seconds in, I already knew what I was going to say. Don’t take it. I said it more than once over the next few weeks.
Sarah took the job anyway. She’d been fractional for two years by then, mostly in marketing and product work, and she was good at it.
No one shares this with you when you go fractional, but this moment will come back. You leave a job because it stopped making sense, you build something that’s yours, clients you chose, hours you set, and then, at some point, a good offer lands in your inbox and you have to ask yourself the same questions all over again. Some people take it and never look back. Some people take it, stay a while, and go independent again in a few years, older, wiser about what they actually want this time. Almost nobody’s path is as clean as it looks.
I’ve watched enough fractional folks go through this to know the “you sold out” story and the “you finally got serious” story are both usually wrong. So when Sarah said yes to the job I told her not to take, I didn’t want to write her off. I wanted to understand what she saw that I didn’t.
I called her to actually ask.
The chat didn’t go the way I thought it would.
I asked what tipped her into yes. I expected an answer about the salary, or the brand, or the title. She didn’t go there.
“The stability was the loudest thing in my head,” she said. “This income and this offer is guaranteed, for the next little bit.”
Fine. I could argue with that, and I did, a little, in my head while she kept talking. Guaranteed for how long? I wanted to ask. Guaranteed compared to what?
But then she said something I hadn’t accounted for at all. She’s been remote and freelance for years, living alone, and what she wanted almost as much as the income was people. A team. Somewhere to be, not just something to manage. And I didn’t have a real comeback for that, I still don’t
I asked if this was a pause before she comes back to building something of her own, or if this is just where she’s headed now.
“It’s a path,” she said, “because it’s bridging into a space I feel very passionate about.”
Health has been the hardest part of her life. It’s touched her family too. She wasn’t taking the job instead of the thing she cares about. For her, this might be closer to it than any role she’s had up to now.
I felt kinda dumb. I’d spent weeks arguing about titles, raises, ceilings, what she was walking away from. She was answering something else entirely: what she wanted to spend the next few years learning, and who she wanted to be while she did it. I’d been obsessing over the outline of a career and never asked about the actual life inside it.
Then she said something that completely changed how I understood what she was doing.
“I am super afraid that I’m gonna find out that product is not my thing,” she said. A pause. “I’ll be dead-ass honest. I am very worried that I am going to want to do lots of really cool work and work really hard, and it doesn’t move the needle.”
She wasn’t naive about the risk. She was carrying it, consciously, and choosing it anyway. I’d been treating her decision like she hadn’t thought it through. She had. She just landed somewhere different than I would have.
