Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh told me she slept perfectly the night before she quit.
No anxiety. No restlessness. Just peace.
She said it surprised her more than anything else about making the leap. She was a top biller at her recruiting firm in Rochester, regularly bringing in between $550,000 and $650,000 in placements per year, full commission. By any external measure, she had nothing to walk away from. By her own measure, she had everything she needed to walk away.
That is one of the most honest things anyone has ever said on our show about what it actually feels like to know you are ready.
Who is Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh
Lauren spent nearly a decade as one of the top billing recruiters at a firm in Rochester, New York. Executive search across the C-suite. Nonprofit, higher ed, manufacturing, energy. She was billing $550,000 to $650,000 a year, while a typical recruiter in her industry bills $200,000 to $300,000. She had strong clients, great colleagues, and a reputation she had earned the hard way.
In September 2025, she walked away from all of it to found Relay Recruiting.
What she shared on Outside The Corporate Box is one of the most honest founder conversations we have had. Not because everything went perfectly. Because she told the truth about the parts that did not.
The Golden Handcuffs Are Real
We hear this phrase a lot when I talk to professionals who are thinking about going independent. Golden handcuffs. Lauren put a finer point on it than most people do.
The handcuffs are not just the paycheck. They are the routine. The reputation. The relationships. The comfortable certainty of knowing exactly what tomorrow looks like.
Lauren was full commission at her firm, which meant every hour she spent improving systems, mentoring colleagues, or exploring AI tools was an hour she was not billing. She had ideas. Real, implementable ideas. And she had full freedom to try them. She just was not getting paid for any of it.
That is the moment I recognize in a lot of the guests we have on this show. The work you are doing in your own time, on your own initiative, for someone else’s company. The moment you realize you are already doing the job of a founder. You are just not getting founder results.
She Called It Grief. She Was Right.
Here is the part most founder stories skip.
Lauren did not leave a bad situation. She left a good one. And that made the transition harder in ways she was not prepared for.
Because of her non-solicitation agreement, she could not contact over 100 clients she had built over nearly a decade. Three out of more than a hundred got a proper handoff. The rest simply stopped hearing from her one day. For someone whose entire professional identity was built on relationships and closing the loop, that was a genuine loss.
She named it grief. That word matters.
When you leave a good job to bet on yourself, you are not escaping something. You are leaving something real behind. Income, identity, structure, community. And building something new from scratch.
The first few months are disorienting in a way nobody prepares you for, because everyone around you is celebrating while you are quietly trying to figure out why you miss the routine of packing a gym bag.
“It wasn’t what I was running from. It was what I was running toward. And that mental shift I had to keep reminding myself of , that was everything.”
Naming the grief helped Lauren move through it. She also says it made her a better recruiter. She now places candidates with a level of empathy she did not have before, because she has lived the disorientation of starting over herself.
Everyone Else Could See It Before She Could
Lauren mentioned something that comes up almost every episode of this show.
When she started quietly planting the seed with friends and family, telling them she was thinking about going out on her own, every single person said the same thing. About time. Why haven’t you already?
Not one person was surprised. Not one person tried to talk her out of it.
We see potential in others more clearly and more quickly than we see it in ourselves. When it is someone else taking the risk, we have nothing to lose. When it is your own dollars, your own reputation, your own identity on the line, it feels completely different.
Imposter syndrome is real. But it is also almost never accurate. The people who know you best are usually a year or two ahead of you on your own timeline.
Lauren’s advice to herself: when in doubt, ask what you would tell a close friend in the same situation. Then give that advice to yourself.
Why She Lives With Intention
Lauren and her husband live with what she calls intention.
That became more than a philosophy in 2017, when he nearly died, and she was told to prepare funeral arrangements. He survived. They now mark that date every year by doing something hard and meaningful together.
Last summer, they took a camper van across the country with no itinerary. They went where the day took them. On that trip, Lauren met someone who later became a client. The week she sat down with us, she had just signed a new contract with that person.
The lesson from that is one I want you to chew on. You cannot always plan your way to the right outcome. Sometimes the best business development you will ever do is living a life so full that interesting people keep finding their way into it.
The Line I Pass Along
At the end of our conversation, I asked Lauren what she would tell herself on day one of starting Relay Recruiting, knowing everything she knows now. She did not hesitate.
“Don’t overthink it. Just make it exist, and perfect it from there.”
That is the most useful thing I can pass along from this episode.
Whatever version of the thing you are building is sitting in your head right now — the business, the offer, the rebrand, the leap — version one does not have to be the final version. It just has to exist.
Especially if you are somewhere in the middle of your own slow burn.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Lauren’s full episode on Outside the Corporate Box is available now. She goes deeper on the exact moment she knew she was ready, the non-solicit conversations she had to have, what the first 90 days at Relay Recruiting actually looked like, and how she found her first three clients.
Follow the show and catch every new episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606315/follow
Outside the Corporate Box, Episode 7.
Connect With the Hosts
Outside the Corporate Box is co-hosted by JMan Maneiro and Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton.
Connect with JMan: https://jmanai.com
Connect with Jeffrey: https://jeffreyscottstanton.com/
Want JMan on your stage talking reinvention, AI, and what to do when the corporate chapter closes? https://jmanai.com/hire-jman
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