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What happens when the career you spent decades building is no longer the future you want, but the business waiting on the other side is not yet able to provide the security you need?
In this episode, Lauren and Jess discuss the changing value of consulting, the personal cost of pursuing the corporate ladder, and what happens when someone accustomed to solving complex problems for global organizations must build every part of a small business herself. While still consulting, Lauren and her husband began building a family-owned trades business. Lauren’s 2025 layoff gave her the opportunity to focus exclusively on scaling her small business, but having an alternative path did not make the transition simple.
Their conversation explores the realities hidden beneath polished entrepreneurship stories: generating demand, managing cash flow, making payroll, operating ethically, learning to sell, and accepting that greater control over your work does not necessarily produce greater ease.
Lauren also reflects on how the transition has changed her family’s relationship with money, work and success—and why the systems that once appeared fixed have proven more malleable than she believed.
This is not a story about confidently leaving a corporate career to follow a dream. It is an honest account of living between employment and entrepreneurship, transferring hard-earned capabilities into an entirely different kind of business and continuing forward before the eventual outcome is clear.
For Lauren, right now, the way out is through.
Podcast Guest: Lauren Blair
Lauren is an entrepreneur and small business owner living in Los Angeles. Her professional career spans more than 25 years in strategy, design, and technology, taking her from digital producer during the dot-com era to account director in digital marketing and, eventually, senior manager in Big Four technology consulting.
Connect with Lauren: Lauren Blair on LinkedIn
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Podcast Host: Jess Lowry
Jessica Lowry is the Founder and Socio-technical Systems Designer at ENID Studio, a collective of practitioners that enable organizations to redesign work, services, and governance for an AI-enabled future through participatory design and human-centered digital transformation.
She is also a member of Effective Immediately, a community for people building microbusinesses. Members get honest feedback, business fundamentals, and access to people a few steps ahead while they validate their idea, land first customers, and build the foundation.
Connect with Jess: Jess Lowry LinkedIn
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Deprecated Human investigates how layoffs, AI, hiring technology, and changing workplace systems are redefining expertise, security, and human value.
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