I Didn't Quit My Corporate Job. My Suit Was Already on Fire.

I didn't quit my corporate job because I had a business plan.

There was no carefully orchestrated exit strategy.

No twelve-month runway.

No list of prospects waiting for my call.

No bottle of champagne chilling in the refrigerator for the day I finally handed in my resignation.

I had none of that.

I went at odds with the CEO.

I was the only woman on the leadership team, in an environment that was very patriarchal. And somehow, in this day and time, women are still navigating versions of that same story.

One day, he told me to pack my things.

And that was it.

I had never been fired in my life.

For God's sake, I was over 50.

At that point, getting fired felt less like a career setback and more like somebody had picked up the table and dumped the whole damn thing over.

No severance.

No unemployment.

I had a tax refund.

That's the part I used to hate admitting.

Because when you've spent your entire adult life being capable, prepared and responsible, finding yourself standing there with no job and a tax refund as your financial plan doesn't exactly feel like one of your finer moments.

I was scared.

Really scared.

But life is funny about those moments.

Sometimes life tries to break you.

And sometimes, right in the middle of what feels like the breaking, something else is happening.

You don't know it yet.

You certainly wouldn't call it a gift while you're standing in it.

But something is shifting.

I learned later that the owner also fired several other people on that leadership team. Some had known him for more than thirty years. People who thought of themselves as family.

I can't imagine what that felt like.

By then, I was already moving in another direction.

I didn't know exactly where I was going.

I just knew one thing with absolute certainty.

I wasn't going back.

My suit was already on fire.

The Things We Carry

There had been other hard things before that.

Stuff in my suitcase.

I've written before about the things we carry around with us. Expectations. Responsibilities. Disappointments. Things done to us. Things we've done to ourselves. Decisions we made because they were the best decisions we knew how to make at the time.

I'm not unpacking my whole suitcase here.

Some things belong to us.

But there is one story I will tell you.

Years before I started my business, there was a period when my son was living with my mother while I tried to figure things out.

He was about eleven.

I went home for a visit and saw a photograph of me that someone had printed for him.

There were smears across the picture.

I asked my mother what they were.

She told me he had cried over my photograph.

I can still see it.

That's the thing about certain moments.

They don't really become memories.

They stay somewhere inside you, and every once in a while you brush against them again.

I broke that day.

I had been working so hard.

Trying to survive.

Trying to provide.

Trying to accomplish.

Trying to become whatever version of successful I thought I was supposed to become.

And my little boy was crying over a photograph of his mother.

What exactly was I accomplishing?

I still don't have a neat answer to that question.

And I'm not interested in rewriting my life so everything becomes either a good decision or a bad one.

Life isn't that simple.

I did what I knew how to do.

I survived things.

I built things.

I accomplished things I'm proud of.

And some of it cost me.

Maybe that's part of getting older too.

You can love the woman you were and still wish she'd had an easier road.

You can be proud of what she accomplished and wish she'd known she didn't have to carry quite so much.

My suitcase had gotten heavy.

Eventually, I realized I didn't have to carry every single thing in it forever.

Neither do you.

You don't have to unpack your entire life in public.

You don't have to understand every wound.

You don't have to make peace with every person who hurt you.

Sometimes you can decide:

I'm not carrying this anymore.

Put it down.

Throw it off a bridge if you have to.

You've got somewhere else to go.

We Learned Something About Work

I left corporate in 2013.

Years later, the rest of the world got one hell of a reality check about work.

The pandemic sent us home.

There was nothing romantic about the pandemic itself. People lost people they loved. Businesses disappeared. Families struggled. It changed us in ways I think we're still trying to understand.

But something else happened.

We discovered that a whole bunch of things we'd been told had to be done a certain way...

didn't.

The meeting really could have been an email.

We didn't have to spend two hours sitting in traffic to prove we were committed to our jobs.

People worked from kitchen tables, spare bedrooms and couches, and somehow companies continued to operate.

We got the work done.

And for a lot of us, there was something else.

We got a little piece of our lives back.

We had breakfast at home.

We saw our kids in the middle of the day.

We walked outside between meetings.

We threw a load of laundry in.

We discovered there were hours in the day we had previously been giving away just getting to and from work.

And maybe, for the first time in a very long time, we experienced what it felt like to have work fit somewhere inside our lives instead of arranging our entire lives around work.

That planted a seed.

Then came the Great Resignation.

Millions of people looked at the old agreement with work and apparently had a collective reality check.

Nope.

I'd rather live under a bridge.

Okay, maybe not literally.

But there was definitely a moment when a whole lot of people started asking:

Wait.

Why am I doing this?

Why am I spending this much of my life somewhere I don't want to be?

Why am I commuting back to an office to sit on Zoom calls with people who aren't even in the office?

Why does somebody need to see me sitting at a desk to believe I'm working?

Why have I accepted that this is simply the way work has to be?

Those are dangerous questions.

Because once you start questioning the rules, you begin noticing how many of them aren't actually rules.

They're just the way things have always been done.

And "the way we've always done it" starts sounding a lot less convincing once you've already seen that there is another way.

That's really when we started burning our suits.

Maybe we didn't call it that.

Maybe some of us didn't even realize that's what we were doing.

But something had changed.

And here's what's interesting.

It hasn't stopped.

Women aren't quietly returning to the old script and saying, "You know what? That job wasn't so bad after all."

LOL.

Nope.

At least I'm not.

Women started nearly half of all new businesses in the United States in 2024.

Think about that.

Nearly half.

And women are doing this at ages we're too often told are supposed to be about winding things down.

We're not winding down.

We're building.

Research on entrepreneurship has found that the average founder of the fastest growing startups in this country is 45.

All those years you spent working?

They're not evidence that you're too late.

They may be part of the reason you're ready.

You know more now.

You've lived more.

You've negotiated.

You've recovered.

You've managed people.

You've managed yourself.

And somewhere along the way, maybe you realized something even more important.

You have agency.

You can choose.

You can change your mind.

You can decide something doesn't work for you anymore.

You can decide what happens next.

Merry Christmas, women of the United States who still don't have an Equal Rights Amendment.

But I digress.

You've watched brilliant ideas fail because nobody knew how to execute them, and you've watched mediocre ideas succeed because somebody did.

You've learned who you are.

You've also learned who you absolutely do not want to be anymore.

That matters.

And maybe that's why this movement hasn't lost its momentum.

The Great Resignation wasn't simply a moment when millions of people left jobs.

For some of us, it was the realization that we had choices.

Once a woman really understands that, good luck getting her to unknow it.

Especially after she builds something of her own.

I think that's what fascinates me about women who come to entrepreneurship after forty, fifty and sixty.

We're not showing up empty handed.

We're bringing decades with us.

Experience.

Judgment.

Relationships.

Failures.

Successes.

A pretty well developed bullshit detector.

And increasingly, a much clearer understanding of what we're no longer willing to trade for a paycheck.

Time matters differently now.

Freedom matters differently.

Meaning matters differently.

Quality of life matters differently.

Maybe that's why I don't see this as women running away from corporate America.

I think we're running toward something.

Something we get to define.

That's a very different thing.

My suit caught fire before millions of other women started lighting matches.

But now?

Look around.

There is smoke everywhere.

Then Everything Corporate Used to Do Just...Disappeared

Of course, knowing you're ready for something different and knowing how to build it are two entirely different matters.

This is where things got interesting.

One of the strangest things about leaving a large company is discovering how many things happened around you that you never really had to think about.

Until suddenly you have to think about ALL of them.

How will I get paid?

No, seriously.

How do I actually get paid?

Who pays the bills?

Is this contract I just created going to protect me?

How do I set up this new Mac and connect it to all the apps and software I'm apparently going to need?

Wait.

What software do I need?

How am I managing client relationships?

Where am I keeping their information?

Do I need business insurance?

What kind?

And health insurance.

Oh, my God.

Have you ever priced health insurance when there isn't an employer quietly paying part of the bill?

That's a special little entrepreneurial milestone.

How much do I have to sell just to pay for health insurance?

Then there was everything involved in actually finding business.

How do I get myself in front of the right people?

Who are the right people?

Who are the stakeholders?

How do I get a meeting with them?

Okay.

I made the sale.

Who implements everything I just sold?

Oh.

Me.

What's Canva?

How do I use Instagram for business?

What am I supposed to be doing on LinkedIn?

How do I send an invoice?

How do I collect the money?

How do I know whether I've actually made money after I pay for everything?

And taxes.

O.M.G.

Taxes terrified me.

When I worked for someone else, taxes mostly happened to me.

Money came out of my paycheck. Forms showed up. I filed a return.

Now I was supposed to know how much to put aside for money I hadn't even made yet.

And apparently I was supposed to pay some of it quarterly.

Quarterly?

I hadn't even figured out what I was doing Tuesday.

Do I need an accountant?

A bookkeeper?

Both?

What's the difference?

How much do I pay myself?

How much stays in the business?

Is the money sitting in my business bank account actually mine?

Turns out that's a very important question.

And can I take a day off?

Because somewhere inside all of those questions, I still had to actually do the work someone was paying me to do.

That's when you realize how much invisible infrastructure existed around you in corporate.

There was always a "they."

They'll send the contract.

They'll fix the computer.

They'll process the payment.

They'll set up the software.

They'll handle the paperwork.

They'll figure it out.

Then you start your own business and discover:

Oh.

I'm they.

That realization can be terrifying.

It can also be incredibly empowering.

Because every time I figured out one more thing, I owned that knowledge too.

I was building something.

Mine.

Messy, imperfect, occasionally terrifying.

But mine.

What the Hell Am I Selling?

Then came an even bigger question.

What exactly was I selling?

This is where I think accomplished women can get tripped up when they leave corporate.

Because you know things.

A LOT of things.

You've spent twenty, thirty, maybe forty years learning them.

You've solved problems other people wouldn't know how to begin solving.

You've managed teams.

Navigated personalities.

Handled crises.

Built strategies.

Made decisions with enormous consequences attached to them.

You've walked into rooms where everyone expected you to know what to do.

And somehow, you figured it out.

You know your stuff.

But knowing what you know and turning it into something another human being understands, values and will pay for?

That's a different skill.

I had to learn it too.

I started Innovate Social Media in 2013.

Social media for business was still finding its footing.

There was no Meta.

It was the Wild Wild West.

Businesses were trying to decide whether social media was something they actually needed or something the intern could play with when they weren't busy.

But I could see where things were going.

My background was business to business, so LinkedIn made sense to me.

I understood relationships.

I understood communication.

I understood how businesses made decisions.

I knew online visibility was going to matter.

Knowing that wasn't enough.

I had to turn what I knew into something I could actually sell.

What exactly was I going to do?

How much of it?

How often?

What was the value?

How would I explain that value to a business owner who had never purchased social media services?

What would I charge?

What would the contract say?

What happened after they said yes?

There wasn't much precedent.

So I did what I have always done when I don't know something.

I learned.

And Then I Met Shell

Around that time, I enrolled in courses through Constant Contact.

That decision changed my life.

I met Shell, who was an Area Local Expert with Constant Contact.

Shell became one of the most important people in my entrepreneurial story and eventually one of my lifelong friends.

They were teaching from the trenches.

Email marketing.

Content marketing.

Relationship marketing.

Things small businesses actually needed to understand.

And behind Shell was a company that understood small businesses.

I studied everything.

I wrote things down.

I asked questions.

I paid attention.

I became an expert myself.

Then Shell did something that changed the trajectory of my new little business.

They referred leads to me.

They didn't hand me clients.

That's an important distinction.

They opened a door.

I still had to walk through it.

I had to turn those leads into clients.

Remember, this was 2013.

I wasn't walking into businesses selling something everyone already understood they needed.

I had to convince people that social media, email marketing and content were going to matter to the survival and growth of their businesses.

Today, that sounds almost ridiculous.

Back then?

It felt a little like being the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain.

I was selling something most businesses couldn't really see yet.

There wasn't a long history of results to point to.

There weren't established industry standards for what a social media agency did, what those services should include, or what they should cost.

Most business owners didn't even have a frame of reference for what I was proposing.

So I had to create the frame.

I had to pull back the curtain and show them what I could already see.

Social media wasn't going away.

Email wasn't spam.

And content?

Content sometimes felt completely random.

What were you supposed to say?

Where did you put it?

When did you post it?

And what was all of this supposed to accomplish for the business?

Those were legitimate questions in 2013.

The way businesses communicated, built relationships and earned attention was changing right in front of us.

I could see it.

Now I had to get them to see it too.

And then pay me to help them do it.

They did.

Then Somebody Said Yes

My first clients weren't tiny practice projects.

There was a large, well known staffing company.

A financial planning expert.

A language translation services provider.

And an artist.

I remember preparing that first proposal.

I chose a price that felt premium to me.

And I prepared.

That's who I am.

I have always been the person who prepares.

I don't like walking into a room hoping I'll figure it out once I get there.

I want to understand the person across from me.

What matters to them?

What are they trying to accomplish?

What am I offering?

Why is it valuable?

So I presented my proposal.

And they said yes.

Just like that.

The amount was roughly one week's salary from my corporate job.

One client.

One week.

I couldn't believe it.

Then came client number two.

They said yes too.

Another week's salary.

Something happened inside me then.

It wasn't that I suddenly believed I was capable.

I already knew I was capable.

For the first time, I had evidence that someone outside a corporate structure would pay me for what I knew.

That's different.

Inside corporate, somebody has already assigned a dollar value to your contribution.

It's called your salary.

Outside corporate, you have to establish that value yourself.

Your résumé isn't the offer.

Your title isn't the offer.

Twenty five years of experience isn't automatically an offer either.

You have to take everything you've learned and translate it into something another person understands well enough to value and wants enough to buy.

I discovered I was good at that.

If I could get in front of the right prospect, I could sell.

I could explain the value.

I could connect what they needed to what I knew how to do.

And the business began to grow.

Selling It Wasn't the Hard Part

Eventually, I was making more than $250,000 a year.

For a small business, that's respectable.

I learned systems.

SOPs.

Niching.

Scaling.

Hiring.

Training.

Managing.

And somewhere around employee number three, I had another revelation.

This is hard.

There wasn't a ready made workforce of people who already knew social media.

It was still a relatively new career field.

The people with significant experience were often financially out of reach for a growing small agency.

So I taught people.

I trained them.

I checked the work.

I corrected things.

And then I encountered something I suspect a lot of accomplished women recognize.

Letting go is hard when your reputation is attached to what somebody else is doing.

My name was attached to the work.

My company was attached to the work.

I cared deeply about what our clients received.

So I built the systems.

I learned how to scale.

I figured it out.

And we delivered great work.

The business worked.

I had built what I set out to build.

But eventually I realized something else.

It wasn't soul work.

Successful Doesn't Always Mean You're Finished

That's a strange thing to discover about something you successfully built.

We're taught to think success is the destination.

Build the company.

Make the money.

Hire people.

Get clients.

Grow.

You did it.

But what happens when you do it and discover you're still being called somewhere else?

I didn't start changing direction because I couldn't run a digital marketing agency anymore.

I could.

I knew exactly how.

But as I moved into my sixties, the question changed.

It wasn't only:

What can I build?

It became:

What do I want the rest of my work to mean?

And I kept coming back to women.

Women like me.

Women who grew up with me.

Women who built careers inside systems that weren't always designed with us in mind.

Women who became extraordinarily good at what they did anyway.

Women carrying twenty, thirty, forty years of experience.

Women who know things because they've lived them.

Women who may have gotten that little taste of freedom during the pandemic and never quite forgot it.

Women who are beginning to wonder whether the next part of their lives could belong more fully to them.

Maybe there's something you've wanted to build.

Maybe you've been quietly thinking about consulting.

Coaching.

Writing.

Speaking.

Creating.

Maybe there's a problem you've spent years solving for someone else's company and you've started wondering what would happen if you solved it under your own name.

Maybe you're not ready yet.

That's okay.

The seed doesn't have an expiration date.

But when it's time, I think you know.

You Don't Need Another Ladder

Leaving corporate shouldn't mean trading one definition of success for another.

You spent years climbing somebody else's ladder.

You don't need to immediately build yourself another one.

Maybe you want a million dollar company.

Build it.

Maybe you want six wonderful consulting clients and enough income to live beautifully.

Build that.

Maybe you want to speak.

Write.

Teach.

Coach.

Create.

Maybe you want to build something your children can inherit.

Maybe there's something in your industry that has bothered you for thirty years and you'd like to spend the next chapter changing it.

Maybe legacy matters now in a way it didn't when you were thirty five.

Or maybe you simply want to wake up Monday morning and know that your day belongs to you.

There isn't one correct destination.

That's the freedom.

You get to decide where you want to land.

Nobody Is Actually Self-Made

There's something else I understand now.

I didn't do this alone.

I did the work.

Absolutely.

I studied.

Prepared.

Sold.

Delivered.

Built systems.

Made mistakes.

Figured things out.

But people walked with me.

Shell opened doors.

And then there was Kiki.

Kiki was one of my early clients and became my friend.

She's a Houston folk artist I've admired deeply for years.

Her art is created from cast away objects.

Things other people stopped seeing value in.

Yeah.

I know.

There's something almost prophetic about that now.

Kiki gave me work.

But she gave me something else too.

She was available for lunch.

She came to see me.

She checked on me.

She gave me advice.

She became my friend.

She is wonderfully laid back, incredibly talented and, in my opinion, a Houston legend.

I'm thrilled to know her.

Looking backward, I can see something I couldn't see when I was in the middle of building.

People were walking with me.

That's why community matters so much to me now.

Doing this alone isn't only hard.

It can be lonely.

Entrepreneurship plays with your head.

One day you're absolutely certain you've built something brilliant.

The next day you're wondering whether anyone is ever going to buy anything from you again.

Then somebody buys something.

Okay.

We're brilliant again.

That's entrepreneurship.

Having women around you who understand that matters.

Women who aren't competing with you.

Women who aren't keeping score.

Women who are building too.

Someone who can say, "I've been there."

Someone who knows the answer to the question that's keeping you awake.

Someone who doesn't know the answer either, but sits beside you while you figure it out.

Sometimes that's enough.

Maybe We Can Put the Suitcase Down Together

Every woman arrives here carrying a different suitcase.

Mine was heavy.

Yours may be too.

You don't have to tell me what's inside it.

You don't owe anyone your hardest stories just because you're beginning a new chapter.

But I want you to know something I had to learn myself.

You are allowed to put things down.

Old definitions of success.

Expectations.

Titles you worked twenty years to earn and are afraid won't mean anything once you leave the company.

The belief that working harder somehow makes you more worthy.

The idea that making good money has to cost you a good life.

The woman who believed she had to prove herself one more time.

Leave whatever doesn't belong in the next part.

Because plenty comes with you.

Your experience comes with you.

Your intelligence comes with you.

Your instincts come with you.

Your relationships come with you.

Your judgment comes with you.

Your resilience comes with you.

Your ability to walk into something you've never done before and figure it out comes with you.

You are not starting over.

You're starting differently.

And maybe that's what I wish someone had told me when I was sitting there in 2013 with a tax refund and absolutely no idea what came next.

You already have more than you think you do.

My Suits Didn't Fit Anymore

I burned my suits in 2013 because they didn't fit who I was anymore.

Not literally.

At the time I probably couldn't afford to replace them anyway.

But they had become a uniform.

They represented a version of accomplishment I had spent years pursuing.

And a kind of sacrifice I could never have imagined when I first started climbing.

Somewhere along the way, money became secondary to quality of life.

Money still matters.

Of course it does.

I want to make money.

I want you to make money.

But I don't want it badly enough to give my life away for it.

I did enough of that.

I've always loved Frost's idea of the road not taken.

And I've carried Thoreau's invitation to move confidently toward the life we imagine with me for years.

Those ideas mean something different to me now.

When we're young, the imagined life is often about what we're going to become.

At this age, I think it's more about who we finally allow ourselves to be.

I've spent thirteen years walking in that direction.

And I have a life today the terrified woman holding onto that tax refund in 2013 could never have imagined.

Life tried to break her a few times.

It didn't.

She changed.

There's a difference.

And I'm still changing.

I'm not finished.

Not even close.

And I'm taking you with me.

You coming?

I can't promise you it will always be easy.

I can pretty much promise you it won't be.

There will be days when you wonder what you're doing.

There will be things you don't know.

Things you'll have to learn.

Things you'll get wrong.

And there will be moments when you look around at something you built and think:

I did this.

Those moments are worth something.

If there is one thing I want you to know, it's that you matter.

What you know matters.

What you've lived through matters.

What you've learned matters.

And if there is something in you that keeps whispering that there may be another way to live, another way to work, another thing you're supposed to build...

you don't have to answer it today.

But listen to it.

Maybe the seed was planted years ago.

Maybe you're only beginning to notice it.

Maybe you're already standing at the door.

You'll know when it's time.

And when it is, you don't have to walk through it alone.

There are women walking too.

Some are a few steps ahead.

Some are right beside you.

Some are just reaching for the door.

We can figure things out together.

No rules.

No boxes to check.

No perfect timeline.

Come when you need us.

Step away when you don't.

Just keep moving toward whatever that imagined life looks like for you.

Mine started with a tax refund, a very heavy suitcase and a corporate suit that was already on fire.

I had no idea where it would take me.

I'm still finding out.

Walk with me.

 

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Are You Ready to Join Us? 

If you're an accomplished professional stepping away from a corporate job to pursue entrepreneurship, congratulations!

It is an exhilarating time, but it can also bring questions and surprises you may not have anticipated as you build your business. That is why we created the LAUNCH VIP Community. It's a place where women just like you are in build mode. Maybe you've been walking the walk of business ownership for a few years; there is so much here for you to learn that will help you scale and grow faster, with less confusion and with the support of others. 

I invite you into the free Innovate LAUNCH™ VIP Community and want to learn what challenges you are facing with online visibility, marketing, and sales. There is so much to know; it can be daunting. 

Learn, grow, collaborate, and find a room full of women who get you. 

I'm Suzette Cotto, Female Founder of Innovate LAUNCH, and I am welcoming you in. The door is open! Check this link for upcoming events and resources, and the Community Membership Page.

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