Some days I didn’t want to go to work.
I didn’t like the office politics, which were at every company I’ve been at.
There were incompetent, mean, and unmotivated people that wanted to sabotage my projects, take credit, or just waste time.
Yet I’d still do it again if I could turn back the clock 20 years— since the 10 years of corporate were my training ground for the 10 years I’ve been an entrepreneur.
I couldn’t enjoy the freedoms I have now were it not for learning how to run teams, deal with contracts, speak at conferences, get results at meetings, work with clients, and communicate in general.
Where else would I learn about how to manage a $50 million P&L without risking my own money?
How else would I have been able to meet CMOs and CEOs was I not an executive at several Fortune 500 companies?
Where else could I have learned how to build corporate training systems, except to see how it’s done at large companies?
Though I’m an entrepreneur at heart, I’m grateful I made it through those formative years.
Because every giant corporation was a small business at one point, too.
Walking through DigitalMarketer’s, after a series of meetings and pieces of training, I reflected on how DigitalMarketer was once a company of 8 people and is now quite the operation.
It now takes a whole minute to walk from one end of the office to the other, when a few years ago, I remember mainly one room on one side of the building.