The Three Pillars of Her Big Leap

I work through three pillars with every woman before she leaves corporate and builds a business. Most programs tell you to build the business first and figure out your life afterward. We do the opposite. Here is exactly what we
work on, and why the starting point matters.

Pillar One: Clarity on the life you want, first

This is where almost every other program gets it backwards.

Most business-building programs start with the business: “Here’s the model, here’s the offer, here’s the marketing strategy. Build the business and your life will improve as a result”.

What I’ve found, working with hundreds of women making this transition, is that starting with the business is how you end up building another job for yourself where you’re just as burnt out and trapped as you felt in corporate. You leave a corporate career that owned your time, and you build a business that owns your time, because you never stopped to ask what you actually wanted your time to look like. That’s not real freedom. 

So we start with your life first.

What does your ideal week look like? Do you want to drop your kids off and pick them up every day? Do you want to be location-independent, and able to work from anywhere, anytime? Do you want two weeks (or two months) in the summer where you’re genuinely offline with your family? Do you want to never take a meeting before 9am or after 3pm? What does that life actually look like?

Once that’s clear, we build a business to support it. Not a business you then try to fit your life around, but a business specifically designed for the life you want. The business model, the clients, the hours, the revenue target — all of it flows from what your life requires, not the other way around.

It sounds simple. It’s also the one thing most women have never been asked…or asked themselves.

Pillar Two: Business strategy that supports that life

This is the full strategic layer: what’s the business model that works for your goals, your skills, and the life you designed? Who are the clients you actually want to work with, and who can you deliver the most value to? What’s your positioning in the market? What’s your value proposition? What are you charging, so you aren’t leaving money on the table.

Most women coming out of corporate have expertise that’s worth significantly more than what corporate paid them for it. They also tend to significantly under-value that expertise. The work in Pillar Two is to identify that expertise clearly, position it in a way that the right clients immediately understand your value, and build the sales and marketing strategy to attract them.

Business design, offer architecture, client strategy, pricing. The strategy is real, documented, and built around your specific strengths and target clients, not a template you’re trying to squeeze yourself into.

Pillar Three: CEO identity — the mindset work for execution

The strategy is only as powerful as the person executing it.

This is the pillar that determines whether everything you built in Pillars One and Two actually goes to market. Because every woman who goes through this transition hits the same wall at some point: the plan is right, the offer is right, and something inside is still holding you back. A belief that the clients won’t come. That you’re not ready to charge what you’re worth. That someone else will do this better and you’ll be found out.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re predictable, human responses to doing something genuinely new, to building something with no guarantee, to showing up as the CEO of something that didn’t exist six months ago. Every woman goes through it, and hits the edge of their own comfort zone at some point in the journey.

Pillar Three is where we identify the fears, the doubts, and the limiting beliefs — specifically, not generally — and coach you through them. Not around them. Through them. You step into a new version of yourself: decisive, confident, taking action, executing on the strategy you built and excited about it.

This is where everything accelerates. The clients who have gone the deepest on this pillar are the ones who match or exceed their corporate income fastest, who execute with the most consistency, who show up in sales conversations and own the room rather than hoping no one notices them.

The identity work isn’t the soft part of the program. It’s the engine.

Why these three, and why clarity comes first

I call them pillars rather than phases because they aren’t three chapters you finish and close. Clarity comes first — you have to know what you’re building toward before you can build anything worth building. But after that, the strategy work and the mindset work run alongside each other in parallel. You make progress in your business strategy and a new limiting belief surfaces. You break through a fear and your strategy suddenly becomes bolder. They feed each other throughout the entire program, but more importantly, as you build your business.

The reason clarity is the foundation is this: if you start with the wrong direction, strategy and mindset work in the wrong direction too. 

Most corporate-exit programs start with the business model. If it isn’t aligned to the life you actually want, the most successful execution of that strategy still leaves you in the wrong place.

Life first is not a tagline. It’s the difference between building something that works and building something that technically works but leaves you burnt out just like you were in corporate.

If you want to see exactly how this maps to what we build inside Her Big Leap, the method page walks through each component. And if you’d like to talk through what this would look like for your specific situation, a discovery call is the right next step.

Sarah Janzen is the founder of Her Big Leap, a program that has helped hundreds of corporate women across North America and Europe build thriving businesses on their own terms. She does all of it while raising two boys, which is the best proof she knows that “waiting for the right time” was never the strategy.