The Checklist That Let Me Leave a €250,000 Salesforce Salary
Two years ago this week, I handed back my badge at Salesforce.
Eleven years. A sales director role. A €250,000 salary.
People still bring it up on calls. “That must have taken courage.”
It took less courage than you think. Before I left, six things had to be true.
1 - The pain was real, and it was everywhere.
Every colleague I talked money with earned brilliantly and felt broke. I knew that feeling. I had lived it myself for fourteen years.
2 - People were already pulling it out of me.
By the time I left, I had presented to more than 200 people. The one that mattered was a room of 80 sales leaders who listened to me talk about money for 90 minutes straight. Too long, I know. Several booked a follow-up call before I had even packed up. A few became my first real clients.
I am still grateful for the leader who invited me to speak there. It gave me the confidence I needed.
3 - I could see a gap nobody around me was filling.
I had sat across from plenty of advisers myself. The pattern was always the same. The moment they realised there was nothing to sell me, they promised to look into a few things and I never heard from them again. Every colleague I compared notes with described the exact same thing. What I wanted to do for people was not something the QFA taught. I could see the gap. That was the edge.
4 - Ten months of spending, in cash.
Not a guess. I knew my monthly number, so I knew exactly how long I could earn nothing and change nothing about how we live. Fear is vague. A runway is a number.
5 - My investments could keep growing without me.
Leaving Salesforce meant giving up the salary. It did not mean starting my finances again from zero. The money I had already invested would keep compounding whether I sat in an office or not. Financial Independence only needed time to materialise.
6 - I was qualified.
I finished the QFA before I left. Not after. The safety net was built before I jumped.
Now read the list again.
Not one of those six is courage.
A pilot does not take off on bravery. She takes off because the checklist is green.
Mine was green.
From the outside, leaving a €250,000 job looked like a huge leap. From where I stood, staying had started to feel like the bigger risk.
Being confident going in did not mean staying confident the whole way through.
There have been months where none of it made sense. Followers stopped growing and so did revenue. I have spent years telling clients not to put all their eggs in one basket, and my entire business ran through one channel. No audience growth meant no new leads. No new leads meant no revenue.
I started to wonder if I would ever make this work. Whether I could earn enough to support the life we had built.
The checklist did not stop the worry. It meant I could sit in it without needing to run back to a salary.
That same idea works for a lot of the scary money decisions you might be circling right now: changing jobs, dropping to four days, taking the career break. The checklist does not remove the uncertainty. It makes the uncertainty affordable.
If you have ever thought about building something of your own, I am thinking about running a free webinar on what these two years have actually been like. The room of 80. The stretch where the audience stopped growing and nothing made sense for months. What paid the bills and what did not.
If enough people are interested, I will run it.
So, write down the decision you keep postponing. Then answer three questions.
What does my life cost each month?
How long could I afford for this to go badly?
What would need to be true before I felt comfortable saying yes?
You do not have to make the decision this weekend. Just get the numbers. They will not decide for you. They will show you which decisions you can afford to make.
P.S. My membership opens on 15 September. Founding places are capped at 50. You can put your name on the waitlist here: https://www.bamillionaire.com/membership
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