Leaving a Six-Figure Corporate Job to Do Work That Matters

Twenty years in corporate sales and marketing, working with some of the largest brands in the country, builds a certain kind of career security — and, eventually for me, a certain kind of restlessness. Somewhere in there, closing another deal for another company stopped feeling like enough, and I started thinking seriously about what it would look like to point the same skill set at something I actually cared about.

The decision wasn't about being unhappy with corporate work

I want to be clear about this, because it's often assumed otherwise: the decision to move into nonprofit work wasn't a reaction against corporate America, or a dissatisfaction with the work itself. It was more specific than that — a recognition that the actual skill I'd built over two decades, deep discovery, real relationship-building, comfort with a direct ask, was fully transferable to something that would matter to me on a different level. The skill wasn't the problem. I just wanted to point it somewhere else.

What actually made the decision feel possible

The turning point wasn't a single dramatic moment — it was realizing how directly the corporate sales skill set mapped onto nonprofit development work, especially major gift cultivation and corporate partnerships. This wasn't starting over from nothing. It was recognizing that twenty years of experience closing large, complex deals was directly applicable to closing major gifts and corporate sponsorships for organizations I actually believed in.

The version of this that made sense for me

Rather than trying to land a full-time nonprofit development role immediately, without any sector-specific track record, I chose to start with focused consulting work — bringing the corporate sales skill set directly to nonprofits that needed exactly that kind of relationship-based fundraising help. It let me start applying the skill immediately, build real, specific outcomes, and develop the sector fluency that a purely corporate background doesn't automatically include.

What I'd tell someone considering the same move

If you're sitting in a similar place — a strong sales or relationship-based background, and a growing sense that you want the work itself to matter more than the paycheck alone — I'd say the transferable skill is more valuable than it might feel from inside a corporate role. The sector-specific knowledge is learnable. The instinct for real relationship-building and confident, direct asks is the harder part to build, and if you already have it, that's the actual head start.

Where this is headed

This consulting work is, for me, a deliberate first step — a way to build real, tangible major gift and corporate partnership outcomes for organizations that need them, while building toward a long-term role fully embedded in a single mission I believe in. If that's the kind of pivot you're considering too, I'd genuinely welcome the conversation.