Lessons learned from entrepreneurs who returned to corporate life

Becoming an entrepreneur became the trend for women during the last two years as the lure of being her own boss who can create her own culture. "The attractive part of all that is certainly freedom. My time was my time and how I wanted to use it. I could work 20 hours a day, but then I can also take four days off," says Michelle Wong, a marketing consultant in the early parts of the pandemic. 

Women also left because of toxic work cultures and difficulty managing a household with children while working remotely. Others had no choice but to leave to protect themselves or their families from falling ill because their jobs did not have remote opportunities. "I think even seeing how life was changing reminded us that life is short. It is one of those like, 'Hey, let's take advantage of the time we do have on the earth,'" says Paris Tyler, the Chicago-based PR executive.

With the power of the Internet, you could sell just about anything, especially since everyone was home anyway. From becoming content creators, turning their expertise into consulting services, to selling products like candles, women found their new hustles to invest their time in to make a viable living. "I thought with the extra time in my day that I could scale my business to new heights," shares Abigail Gibbons, founder of The WOW Series. Gibbons started hosting networking events at the end of 2019 outside of her full-time job and decided to make it a speaker series in 2020. Still, she had to reorganize business plans due to the pause of in-person events, relaunched as a digital series and community in the summer of 2020. 

Being an entrepreneur isn’t what it’s glamorized to be. Women are returning because entrepreneurship is harder than anticipated, but going back to corporate doesn’t mean you can’t try being a founder again. Sometimes it takes being in the right financial and mental space to take on the responsibilities of managing a business. These women share lessons they have learned as an entrepreneur and their advice for those who are interested in making that leap.

Building a business is hard enough. Imagine being a single woman or single mother with no additional income in your household or the privilege of a partner's benefits to fall back on while trying to build one. There are things we don't know about entrepreneurship until we are in it, and many women experienced this firsthand as they’ve started building their own companies amid the Great Resignation. 

"There's definitely a glamorization of entrepreneurship," Michelle says. "But you're the CEO, CFO, CMO, and the mail lady, right?" 

Not only does it involve wearing many hats, but it does mean often working way more as an entrepreneur than one might with a full-time job. "If you are a solo entrepreneur, the amount of self-care it takes for you to show up consistently every day as a decision-maker is mentally taxing and can negatively impact your physical health," Vannessia Darby says.

Although many self-employed people boast about their ability to vacation whenever they want, it can take years to get that level of freedom or enough money. "I promise you, the influencer who said they made six figures overnight is not running a sustainable business,” Abigail  says. “Or behind the scenes, it took them years to get there. What you don't know is that they were working at the beach, but it wasn't a real vacation. They still worked a 10-hour day.”

Vanessia believes people underestimate the number of logistics, systems, tools, and people that it takes to build a business. Entrepreneurship's operational and financial part is what people learn about later, or when it's too late. "I don't think people take the time to think about how you have to set aside money for when it comes time to do your taxes, or about how to appropriately price out for your service or product or licensing and registration," Paris says. 

Ashley Garth agrees that the accounting piece is crucial for entrepreneurs and that too much effort is going into marketing. "They're not scaling like they should because they're not diving into their numbers,” she explains. “I can't set a goal for next month if I don't know where I am this month." 

Paris admits she didn't see profit during her first two years in business while living in NYC, but she started seeing revenue after she moved to Atlanta. For this reason, Paris encourages new college graduates to spend some time in the corporate setting before setting out on their own. "A lot of young people are starting to jump straight from college into entrepreneurship, but you haven't even had a chance to understand how a business is even run," she says. 

Ashley is an advocate for creating systems for a business, a skill she believes is missing from today's entrepreneurs. "The grind and the hustle are very attractive,” she says. “What they're not prepared for is the long-term goal. They end up just creating a job for themselves and feeling like they felt when they worked for someone else." The long-term goal should be to operate as a CEO and delegate. "So I don't always have to work in the trenches of my business, the 12 to 15 hours a day that I started with."

Before you make the entry or exit of entrepreneurship, consider what can help make your business run better and be prepared to do the work. 

Learn more about their return to corporate on Glamour.com.