You're good at your job. You've been promoted, trusted, relied on. And still there's a ceiling you can feel more clearly than you can see it — a fixed schedule, a fixed range, someone else's roadmap for the next ten years.
Most professionals reach that ceiling and do one of two things: nothing, or something reckless. There is very little in between. No one offers the unglamorous middle — a clear-eyed education in what building something of your own actually involves before you bet anything on it.
That middle is where we work. Roughly one in five new businesses closes within its first year, and about half are gone inside five, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those numbers aren't an argument against starting. They're an argument against starting uninformed.