We spent 25 years in corporate. Here's what it never taught us about getting clients.

Between us, we spent more than 25 years inside two big companies.

Olga started at adidas as a personal assistant and worked her way up to Senior Product Manager. She ran marketing budgets of more than €20 million, worked on 800 concept stores and events for 7,000 people, then managed European eCommerce across 17 markets. After that she led a team at Wayfair.

Carsten spent eight years at adidas, running marketing for more than 500 Reebok stores and then working in adidas Digital. At Wayfair, he grew a B2B sales line from €1.5 million to €5 million in 18 months.

On paper, we were ready to run our own business. We weren't.

What corporate gives you without you noticing

In a big company you inherit things. You get a brand that people already trust. You get a marketing team that brings in demand. You get a sales team, a budget, a job description and a calendar full of meetings that tell you what counts as work.

You don't notice any of this while you have it. You notice the day it's gone.

We both left around 2019 and 2020 and started a coaching business. And the first thing we learned was that being good at a job is a different skill from finding people who will pay you to do it.

Our expensive first lesson

We did what a lot of smart people do. We thought the gap was knowledge, so we bought more of it. More certifications. More courses. More programmes that promised a clear path.

We spent somewhere between €40,000 and €50,000 on the wrong things before we did the one thing that actually worked: we talked to the people we wanted as clients and asked them what they needed.

Their answer surprised us. They didn't want more coaching. They wanted someone to help them with marketing and sales. They wanted the positioning, the offer, the content and the outreach to actually get done.

So we became that. We turned what we had painfully learned into a repeatable process, and the business finally became stable. In 2022 we started our studio. Since then we've run more than 200 client engagements with coaches, consultants and fractional leaders making the same jump we made.

Three corporate habits that slow you down

Olga likes to say that the habits that make you great at a big company can make you a slow first-time business owner. Here are the three we see most often, in ourselves and in our clients.

Waiting until it's perfect. In corporate, a mistake in front of the CEO costs you. So you polish. On your own, polishing is how a LinkedIn profile stays half-written for eight months. Done and public beats perfect and hidden.

Keeping your options open. Big companies serve many customers, so you learned to speak to everyone. A solo practice can't. When you try to help "leaders in transition, teams, and also individuals who want more balance", nobody feels you're talking to them.

Expecting someone else to create demand. For years, marketing filled your calendar. Now you are marketing. That doesn't mean you have to become a full-time content creator. It means you need a system that keeps going when you're busy with clients.

What we'd tell ourselves in 2020

Talk to ten potential clients before you buy another course. Pick one group of people and one problem. Write it down in one sentence. Then show up where those people already are, which for most of our clients is LinkedIn, and keep showing up every week, with a system that does most of the work for you.

That last part is why we built mettaCofounder.ai. It's the marketing and sales team we wish we'd had in year one, and it runs the same process our agency uses with clients.

Your career didn't waste your time. It gave you real expertise and real stories. What it didn't give you was the system around that expertise. That part can be learned, and it can be built.