I Traded a Corner Office for a Blank Page. Two Decades Later, Here’s the Project Report.

They say the seven-year itch in a partnership is what makes people do some crazy things.  

Nobody warns you it also applies to careers.

Mine hit somewhere around year seven of corporate life … a quiet, persistent restlessness that had nothing to do with the job being bad and everything to do with the job being finite. Someone else’s ceiling, someone else’s calendar, someone else’s definition of what “senior” meant for me. Almost two decades ago, I scratched that itch by starting a PR boutique instead of waiting for a corner office. I did not, at the time, understand I was signing up for a different life entirely …one that never fully goes away, just changes location.

This is the honest version of what the corporate to agency switch does to you, personally and professionally. Not the LinkedIn version.

Pro: You finally find out who you are without a designation. Corporate life hands you an identity : Head of Corp Comm, VP Marketing, whatever the card says. Agency life strips that away and asks you to build one from nothing, with your own name attached to every decision. Nineteen years in, I can tell you this is the single most clarifying professional experience available to a human being. You stop performing competence for a performance review and start actually building it, because the client doesn’t care about your last appraisal, only your last output. It is, without exaggeration, the fastest professional growth curve I have ever been on.

Con: Sure, and it’s also delightful discovering that “who you are without a designation” is apparently someone who checks the bank balance four times before 10 a.m. Personal growth, they call it.

Pro: Every skill you own gets sharper because you’re the one wielding it. No department to hide behind. Strategy, client management, negotiation, new business development, crisis calls at midnight … you do them, you own the outcome, you get better at an alarming pace because there’s no one else’s name to put on the failure. Years of that compounds into instinct. I trust my gut now in ways corporate-me never got the reps to earn.

Con: This “alarming pace” of improvement is also known as never, ever switching off, and calling it “instinct” is doing a lot of emotional labour for what is actually just chronic vigilance with better vocabulary.

Pro: You build something that outlasts you being in the room. A corporate role disappears the day you leave it. A firm you’ve built… its culture, its clients, its reputation; keeps existing, keeps compounding, becomes a legacy rather than a line on someone else’s org chart. Watching Nucleus grow from an idea into an institution people actively want to work with is a satisfaction no appraisal cycle ever gave me.

Con: It also means the firm exists whether or not you’re on holiday, whether or not you’re unwell, whether or not you’ve slept … a legacy that, charmingly, does not clock out when you do.

Pro: You get to define success on your own terms, finally. No more measuring your worth by someone else’s KPI dashboard. You decide what winning looks like across revenue, reputation, the clients you’re proud to have in the portfolio, the people you’ve mentored into their own careers.

Con: You also get to define failure entirely on your own terms too, alone, usually at 2 a.m., with nobody to loop in except your own reflection and a half-finished cup of chai.

Here’s what years has actually taught me: the itch never resolves.

You just trade one kind of restlessness wanting more room to grow for another the responsibility of having built the room yourself. Both are real. Only one of them makes a good LinkedIn post. If you’re standing at that same edge right now, wondering whether the switch is worth it… don’t ask someone who left last year. Ask someone a couple of decades years in, and then ask yourself honestly which itch you’d rather be scratching for the next two decades.

For me … I would not have it any other way.

– Tarunjeet Rattan

Managing Partner – Nucleus PR & Founder – PRPOI