What GenX Women Leaving Corporate Must Do First Before Starting a Business

If You Don’t Have This, Your Business Will Never Make a Profit 

GenX women leaving corporate aren’t doing it on a whim. This decision is intentional, bold, and often years in the making. You’ve built careers, led teams, hit targets, and made things happen for everyone else. But now it’s your turn. You’re ready to build something of your own, something that finally reflects your values, your expertise, and your freedom. 

Here’s what most people don’t realize: even big corporations don’t always get this right. They struggle to innovate, move fast, or truly serve the customer because the money they make doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to stakeholders. And every metric you worked so hard to hit? It reflected someone else’s agenda. 

Now, that changes. You’re building something where you decide what matters. But with that freedom comes accountability. Profit isn’t a quarterly report anymore, it’s your livelihood. 

You’ve left the meetings, the metrics, and the manager approvals behind. You’ve traded your title for freedom. But let’s be honest, freedom without direction can feel a lot like falling. 

And the first rule of building a profitable business? You must know exactly who you’re serving. 

That means defining a very specific niche market, not “everyone who might need your help,” but a crystal-clear group of people who are actively searching for what you offer. 

The Hard Truth: Without a Defined Market, Your Business Won’t Survive 

Alex Hormozi, a self-made entrepreneur, investor, and author of $100M Offers, teaches a principle that’s impossible to ignore: before you create anything, find the market that’s already looking for what you sell. 

Here’s the truth that separates the dreamers from the earners: you can have an incredible offer, but if you aim it at the wrong people, everything you’ve built can vanish quietly. The long nights, the savings you’ve poured in, the belief that this would be your next chapter, it can all disappear into a market that never wanted what you’re selling. 

It’s okay to have passion for what you’re creating. Honestly, that passion is fire 🔥. But passion doesn’t guarantee sales. Your business has to make money, bottom line, and consistently. You’re not selling your dream, you’re selling the only answer to a big problem that your specific market urgently needs solved and will pay a premium for. 

Most new entrepreneurs don’t fail because their ideas are bad. They fail because they’ve targeted a market that never needed what they built in the first place. They designed an offer that solved their problem, not the customer’s. 

This is where the science of business comes in. If you don’t identify real pain points, understand the customer’s journey, and assess their ability and willingness to buy, you’ll miss the mark entirely. The result? They scroll right past your offer. Not because they don’t care, but because it was never meant for them to begin with. 

That’s why finding product market fit isn’t luck or passion, it’s strategy. It’s knowing exactly who your audience is, what keeps them up at night, and how your solution fits seamlessly into the moment they’re ready to act. 

That’s where Hormozi’s concept of the “starving market” comes in, a group of people who already know they have a problem and are actively searching for someone to fix it. That’s your target. If you’re serving up something “delicious” that starving people want, they’ll line up around the block and  pay a premium to get it.  

Why Niche Matters More Than You Think 

The instinct to cast a wide net is strong. You’ve got decades of skills, you could help anyone, right? But the truth is, when you talk to everyone, no one really hears you, and girl, that’s exhausting. 

Let’s say you’re a leadership coach. You can say, “I help women become better leaders.” Sure. But that’s vague. Instead, what if you said, “I help GenX women leaving corporate hone their leadership identity so they can thrive as consultants.” Now you’ve got clarity. You’ve got power. You’ve got focus. 

That’s the power of a niche. It makes you undeniable to the right people. 

As Alex Hormozi says in $100M Offers, the goal is to “make your offer so good people feel stupid saying no.” When you know your audience deeply enough, you can build that kind of offer, one that’s so clearly aligned with their needs that choosing you feels like the smartest move they could make. 

When you define your niche, you can develop your Avatar (your ideal client persona) with precision. You know where she works, what keeps her up at night, what she’s afraid to admit out loud, and what would make her breathe a sigh of relief if someone could just fix it. That level of insight lets you build offers that feel tailor-made, and that’s how you command premium pricing. 

The Power of One 🚀 

Inside LAUNCH, I teach something called the Power of One. It’s my proprietary method for creating clarity in a noisy business world. 

One system. One framework. One offer. One audience. 

That’s it. That’s the Power of One. 

When you focus your time, energy, and message around one clearly defined market and one transformational offer, you eliminate the chaos that keeps most new businesses stuck. You start making decisions faster. You start seeing what works. You stop spinning in circles trying to be everything to everyone. 

The Power of One forces clarity, and clarity always wins. 

It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters most, with precision. That’s how you get traction, create consistency, and ultimately, turn your passion into profit. 

You Already Know More Than You Think 

If you’re a GenX woman leaving corporate, you already hold the keys. You’ve lived the pressure, the politics, and the pace. You know how decisions get made, where opportunities are lost, and what real leadership looks like when everything’s on the line. 

You’re not here to fix what you left behind. You’re here to build something better, on your own terms. 

Good news: you already have everything you need to do it. 

It’s not about rebuilding the past. It’s about solving a big problem, with the right solution, at the right time, for a laser-targeted, starving audience. 

The Bottom Line 

If you skip this first step, defining your specific market and crafting an offer that solves one urgent problem, you’ll find yourself exhausted, marketing to the wrong people, and wondering why your dream isn’t gaining traction. 

But if you take the time to niche down, study your target audience, and build your offer around what they actually want and need, you’ll skip years of frustration and step directly into momentum. 

You’ll stop convincing. You’ll start connecting. You’ll stop guessing. You’ll start growing. 

Because the difference between a business that survives and one that thrives isn’t talent or timing, it’s targeting. And the Power of One makes that targeting achievable, measurable, and profitable. 

Ready to learn how to define your niche, simplify your strategy, and build an offer that sells? 
 

Join me inside LAUNCH 101, where I’ll introduce you to the Power of One method, designed to help GenX women leaving corporate build profitable, purpose-driven businesses from the ground up. 

Register HERE. 

About Suzette Cotto 

Suzette Cotto is the founder of LAUNCH, a digital learning platform created for women 40+ who are ready to build businesses on their own terms. With over three decades of experience in digital marketing, strategy, and entrepreneurship, Suzette helps women move from corporate careers to confident business ownership. Through LAUNCH courses and community, she teaches how to simplify marketing, clarify your offer, and grow with intention—because reinvention isn’t just possible, it’s powerful.