Mindset Over Experience

Senior, curious, willing to sell and work with peers — the real profile behind who actually makes it on their own.

The people who do well here tend to be the same profile. Senior executive, late forties or fifties; they've been on the corporate treadmill long enough to know exactly what it feels like from the inside, and they've decided they've had enough of it.

Experience isn't the hard part to screen for. Mindset is. Are you actually willing to work with peers, or did you leave corporate life because you never want to answer to anyone again? Are you still curious enough to keep learning something new, or do you think you already know what you need to know? And can you sell? Not present, not pitch. Actually pick up the phone and sell. Because if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how good the work is. If you don't sell, the business is dead. It's that simple.

The real marker of success isn't the income number, although that matters too. It's whether you go home on a Friday and your family thinks the decision was worth it.

Whether the trade you made, a corporate salary for something less certain but more yours, actually paid off the way you hoped it would when you first talked about it at the kitchen table.