The job I shouldn't have walked away from
My dad worked at IBM his whole career. You don't leave money on the table.
In 2016 I walked away from a top-tier software company. Ivy Leaguers under me. Stock options, good benefits. A retention bonus sitting on the table because the company was restructuring and they wanted me to stay.
I left.
My parents were proud I’d landed there. My dad spent his whole career at IBM, and the gospel in our house was simple. You find a good job, you keep your head down, you build a retirement. And you don’t walk away from money on the table.
I was helping my partner at the time get her hearing practice off the ground. I knew nothing about hearing aids or audiology, and nothing about how doctors run their practices. But I was running her Facebook ads, back when almost nobody was marketing to seniors 65 and over, and one of the doctors we met at a conference kept asking me what I was doing over there.
He became my first paying client. $2,500 a month.
The number sounds small to me now. At the time, asking for it with a straight face felt insane. I’d come from a corporate salary of about $100K a year, and charging one person $2,500 every thirty days felt like I was getting away with something.
My coach held the vision before I could see it. Told me, flatly, I was going to do this. He’d watched other people build this kind of work, starting from exactly where I was, and he didn’t have a doubt about me. I didn’t fully believe him. But he believed it enough for the both of us, and that was enough to keep me moving.
The next leap was stranger. I built an $18K offer that ran for 90 days. Easier to deliver than the $2,500 a month, because the work wasn’t custom and didn’t bleed across my whole calendar. That was the moment I started to feel value coming unhooked from time. It’s a small sentence on the page here. But truly living it changed everything.
A few months in, I was logging into ThriveCart on a regular afternoon, two-thirds of the way through the month, and the number on the screen had crossed $100K. I sat with it. Then I said something out loud that wasn’t fit for print. It was just me and Vanessa running the whole operation virtually, and Vanessa, by the way, is still my assistant ten years later!
I never thought of it as a business. I called it the accidental business. A software guy who’d dropped out of college, landed at a top firm, then somehow ended up consulting hearing aid doctors on Facebook ads. None of it was on any plan I’d written down, and looking back, the lesson in all of it has almost nothing to do with the money.
Someone held the vision of who I was becoming before I could. A real person who’d built this kind of work themselves, who could look at me and say “yes, this is real, this version of you exists, and I’ll hold the line until you catch up.”
If my coach hadn’t done that, I’d have charged less than I should have for years. Or I’d still be in a cubicle, telling myself the lifestyle I was reading about on someone’s blog was for other people.
That’s the work Carolina and I do now, in a different shape. Most of the people we partner with have done plenty. What they need is someone steady enough to hold the vision of who they’re becoming until they can stand in the center of it themselves.
Phil