I got fired 30 minutes after telling a friend I couldn't leave my job

I was about a year into a day job I'd taken after four or five years of being an entrepreneur, the kind of soul-crushing corporate environment that makes you forget what you're actually capable of, when I got on a call with a good friend of mine and half-confessed something I hadn't said out loud yet.

He asked me the question he'd been asking for months. "Kasey, when are you going to leave that job?"

I gave him the honest answer instead of the easy one. It was tough, I told him.

I'd gotten used to the paycheck, and I genuinely wanted to leave, but the only way I'd figured out how to survive that environment was by actively deciding not to give a shit about it. And the problem with that particular coping mechanism is it doesn't compartmentalize the way you'd hope.

If I couldn't bring myself to care during the day, I couldn't find the passion at night to build the thing that would actually let me leave.

"I just don't know," I told him. The last time I'd started a business, it hadn't been some bold leap of faith. It happened because the company I worked for ran out of money and I got laid off.

I hadn't chosen entrepreneurship at that time. It had chosen me.

We hung up. Thirty minutes later, I logged into a Teams call with my boss, my first one-on-one in almost six months, and there was a woman from HR sitting there too.

I started laughing immediately, because I already knew.

They called it a layoff though I'm not sure it's a layoff if you're the only person losing their job.

I texted my friend the second I got off the call. "Guess who just got fired?"

He wrote back, "Sounds like the universe heard what you needed and responded."

Here's the thing about that year at the day job. I hadn't just lost my nerve, I'd lost my sense of what I was actually good at.

Somewhere in that stretch of steady paychecks and toxic Teams calls, I'd started believing that building a business meant picking the right idea, the right offer, the right thing to sell, and then executing it perfectly, as if the hard part was the decision and everything after that was just discipline.

That belief is why I stayed stuck for a year trying to build "something on the side." I kept treating it like a decision I hadn't made yet, instead of a direction I hadn't found yet.

Those are not the same problem, even though they feel identical from the inside.

When I left, or more accurately, when I got pushed, I knew two things.

I still didn't know what "this" was, though.

At the time, I was running LinkedIn personal branding cohorts with a business partner, mostly for solopreneurs. We'd had some early success, so we leaned in and got focused specifically on personal branding for independent consultants, and it worked. People liked it. It was satisfying. And it sold.

But it always felt like the icing, not the cake.

I want to be precise about what that means, because it's easy to misread. It's not that the cohorts weren't good, or that I didn't see value in them. I did.

It's that some part of me kept sensing there was something deeper underneath what we were building, and at the time, I assumed that "deeper" thing was just about me. My own ambition. My own need to go further than a cohort business could take me.

Looking back now, I realize I was only half right. I didn't just intrinsically know I wanted something deeper for myself. I intrinsically knew the problem itself was deeper, and the person I was solving it for was deeper too. I just hadn't figured out why yet.

I've always been someone who wants to go deep, and something in me could tell the personal branding piece was surface-level, a symptom sitting on top of something I hadn't named.

What I did love, without hesitation, was the audience. These were sharp, experienced consultants, genuinely good at what they did, and almost entirely unable to explain it to the world in a way that got them paid what they were worth. Because I was running the cohorts myself, I was in it with them every week, every question, every post they struggled to write.

And because I was that close to them, I got obsessed. Not with the offer I was selling. With them.

That obsession is what did the actual work. I started peeling back layers I hadn't gone looking for.

The answer wasn't a content problem. It was a positioning problem, all the way down.

They didn't know what they were actually selling, not in a way they could say out loud, confidently, to a stranger, and that's why the posts felt hollow, and why they were stuck waiting for someone else to vouch for them instead of being able to make the case themselves.

Nobody hired me to find that. I found it because I couldn't stop looking, because I'd fallen in love with these people and their situation, not the offer sitting in front of me.

Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. There was so much more to build here than a cohort about LinkedIn content, and I got more excited with every conversation, not less. Two cohorts in, I was certain there was an entire body of work underneath what we were doing.

My business partner wasn't. She told me plainly this wasn't what she wanted, and she left.

I won't pretend that wasn't hard. Losing a business partner never is, no matter how mutual or clean it is.

But looking back, that split wasn't the end of anything. It was the actual beginning, because the thing I'd gotten obsessed with, that specific person, in that specific situation, sharp operators who couldn't articulate their own value, was too big and too real to stay a side feature of a cohort business. It needed to be the whole business.

That obsession is the precursor to everything I've built since. Essentialist CEO doesn't exist because I picked a smart niche off a whiteboard. It exists because I couldn't stop paying attention to one specific group of people long enough to leave them alone.

I think about that Teams call a lot. Not because getting fired felt good in the moment, it didn't, but because it taught me something I now teach constantly.

You very rarely get permission to go all-in on the thing you're obsessed with. Usually, life just takes the alternative away.

You don't need someone from HR to force your hand, though. You can choose the obsession before the universe chooses it for you.

Pick the person, the specific situation, the problem underneath the problem, and let yourself go all the way in on understanding it.

Not the market. Not the niche. The PEOPLE.

That's where the business that actually lasts gets built.

In love, growth, and permission,
Kasey