Early in my career, I was fortunate to work for companies that invested heavily in the training and development of their employees. I also invested a lot of time, money and effort on my own, reading business books and paying to attend seminars out of my own pocket.

My career benefitted from my association with these well-known, reputable organizations. I rode on their coattails while I developed my professional skills, and I followed the pattern they put in front of me.

Plus, I was comfortable with the knowledge that I was underpaid relative to the value I delivered to customers, because the value I was delivering relied on the structure they provided for me. That’s the price you pay to get trained.

The company teaches you their structure, you deliver value, and the company recoups their training investment and earns a fair return on the structure they have created and the reputation they have earned.

Making a change

This arrangement worked well for me for more than 15 years. But when I turned 40, my employer was acquired by another firm, and I noticed that the value equation had suddenly flipped.

My personal brand was more valuable than the new company’s reputation. I used to be riding on my employers coattails, but now they were riding on mine. There was a diminishing return on my investments in my own career development. The high value I created was flowing into the company, but not back to me.

I could no longer expect a fair return on my efforts, because I was bleeding too much of my value into the company. I realized I had to start my own company to have any hope of receiving a fair return on my investment of time and energy.

And candidly, I was also really tired of being told I was wrong. As I developed professionally, my path began to diverge from the company path. The way I thought about problems no longer fit the approach the company wanted to use. Their way of delivering value relied on people following a structure I had professionally outgrown.

I’ve often joked with my kids that “entrepreneur” is a French word meaning “unemployable.” I knew that to do my best work, I could no longer fit in someone else’s structure, I’d have to build a place from the ground up.