I did not leave a dream job because I wanted less
The difficult part was that my ambition had not disappeared. What I could no longer do was treat the conditions around the work as irrelevant.
In early 2023, I stepped down as Global Head of Sales Engineering at Leapwork to focus on my health.
It would have been easier to explain if I had hated the job. I didn't.
It had been a dream role. I had built an international Sales Engineering team from the ground up and worked across sales, product, marketing and customer success as Leapwork grew from 50 to 500 people. I was proud of the work, the team and the responsibility I had been given.
But I needed to stop and look after myself.
The difficult part was that my ambition had not disappeared. I still wanted responsibility, growth and hard business problems. What I could no longer do was treat the conditions around the work as irrelevant.
Three conditions for what came next
After a few months away, I began asking what I actually wanted to return to. I wrote down three conditions.
I wanted to work at a pace that felt like mine. I wanted to use what I had learned from building and scaling companies. And I wanted to give a longstanding dream of building my own business a real chance.
That became Top Møller Venture & Consult.
The first work was familiar in substance. In longer engagements with First Two Hundred, ZAGENO, Relesys and Groundley, I helped build business value narratives, introduce a shared sales language, enable sales organisations, hire people and coach leaders and teams through the implementation.
I didn't abandon the work I was good at. I had changed the terms under which I wanted to do it.
Your company can recreate the job you left
Becoming self-employed does not automatically give you a working life that fits you. It gives you the responsibility for designing one.
You can leave employment and recreate the same workload, the same calendar and the same lack of room for everything outside work. You can become your own boss and still build a job that consumes you.
That is why an offer and a target market are not enough to define a business. The business model also decides how you spend your days, where the pressure lands and how directly your income depends on your own time and energy.
For me, the useful questions are practical:
Which work do I still want to do personally? Which responsibilities give me energy, and which ones quietly empty the tank? How much of the business depends on my hours? What pace can I sustain? What must remain possible outside work?
The answers affect which clients I choose, what I sell, how I deliver it and how large I actually want the company to become.
I am still ambitious
I did not have a finished business model when I started. I had three conditions and enough conviction to try.
Those conditions have not made every decision obvious. They have given me something more useful to judge the decisions against.
I still want to build, grow and do work that matters. I do not want success to require me to ignore my health or hand control of my life back to the business I created.
I did not leave a dream job because I wanted less. I left because I wanted the way I work, the business I build and the life I live to belong in the same decision.