The leap from the corporate world to entrepreneurship is often portrayed as a dramatic break. But for three southeastern Wisconsin business owners, it was less about walking away from their careers than building on them. Years spent at large companies sharpened their skills in strategy, marketing, sales and leadership before they applied those lessons to ventures of their own. While each entrepreneur’s path looked different, all three say their corporate careers proved to be invaluable training grounds for running a business.

Becky Leupi, Vibrant Gardens

Becky Leupi always had an interest in doing her own thing but did not expect to go into farming. Today, she and her husband, Marc Leupi, own and operate Vibrant Gardens, a four-season, certified organic market garden in Germantown.

Previously, Leupi had built a career over eight years as a manufacturing engineer and then a product manager at Wacker Neuson, a German construction equipment manufacturer with its American headquarters in Menomonee Falls. Also during this time, she earned an MBA with a focus on entrepreneurship.

The job at Wacker Neuson involved lots of international travel that made it nearly impossible to maintain a personal life, which became even more taxing after the birth of her first son in 2008.

“I kinda realized I could either be a bad mom and a great worker or a great mom and a bad worker, or just subpar at both … those were my three choices,” she said. “I’m not gonna be great at one thing because there’s just not enough time in the day.”

Leupi shifted to part-time work and then, after the birth of her second son, left the company altogether in 2010. But she still wanted to work in some capacity.

Inspired by a book about year-round greenhouse farming, Leupi and her husband built a single greenhouse in the backyard of their Brookfield home and started growing produce and selling it to friends and at small markets. While Marc continued to work full time at Wacker Neuson, where the couple met, Becky took care of the kids and managed the greenhouse.

As demand grew, the Leupis purchased a 20-acre property in Germantown, where zoning and land-use policies are more favorable to farming. They relocated there in 2014 and Marc quit his job later that year. Since then, the Vibrant Gardens operation has expanded to five high tunnels covering about 12,700 square feet, in addition to outdoor growing space.

The tunnels allow Vibrant Gardens to grow crops year-round, including greens such as spinach, arugula and lettuce, which make up the largest share of the farm’s business, as well as carrots and tomatoes.

“That’s how you can grow a lot more produce in more extreme weather swings,” said Leupi. “We don’t have a great climate, to be honest. … it goes from like 50 to 90, and then you get a sudden frost in the fall, and having those structures just really protects you from that.”

An increasingly unpredictable climate is among the many challenges the Leupis have had to navigate as they continue to learn farming as a new skill. But seeing demand for high-quality, fresh food and being able to meet that need in the local market has kept them motivated, said Leupi.

“ I think we just kind of fell into the farming more as, like, ‘What could we do?’ And then as time has gone on, you start to really realize what our food system is like, and so you really have to believe in it to do the work and have the struggles.”

Despite the farm’s growth, Leupi says the business remains financially challenging and physically demanding and cautions against viewing farming as an easy path to entrepreneurship – especially for young families starting from scratch. For her, making the jump was far less risky thanks to a strong financial foundation from Marc’s two-plus decades in the corporate world. They also purchased their Germantown property when farmland prices were significantly lower than they are today.

Just as important as financial security were the business skills the Leupis brought with them. Their corporate backgrounds in process improvement and sales – along with Becky’s MBA – have allowed them to do their own accounting and payroll, build their own website and maintain records required for organic certification.

While already having those skills is helpful, it’s not necessary to striking out on your own, she said.

“You can learn those skills,” said Leupi. “I think having the strength to get back up when you get knocked down and the fortitude to do that and the vision is what you need, really. You can figure stuff out; you can be creative.”

Karen Hung, Silver Rock Consulting

Karen Hung says she sees things from a “balcony view,” focused on the big picture. Throughout a corporate career spanning big companies including Citigroup, GE, Direct Supply, Lands’ End and MetLife, Hung built a reputation for leading strategy and organizational transformation across complex, global organizations.

Those experiences ultimately became the foundation for Silver Rock Consulting, the Milwaukee-based management consulting firm she launched in 2014 after realizing her greatest strengths lay not in leading a single company, but in helping many organizations navigate change.

The move into entrepreneurship wasn’t one Hung had carefully mapped out. Instead, it evolved through a series of consulting opportunities that found her while she was still working in corporate leadership. The first came when a Johnson Controls executive, whom Hung had met networking, told her the company “wanted to find a creative way” to bring her talents into the organization.

The defining moment came a couple years later while Hung was consulting for a MetLife division, where she was offered a global chief marketing officer role.

“It was a watershed moment of do I wanna go back into corporate or do I wanna take a leap of faith and be courageous and strike out on my own?” she said. “And I remember that moment and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is scary.’”

She ultimately declined the offer and decided to launch what would become Silver Rock Consulting. Though she worried about leaving behind a steady paycheck, health insurance and the familiarity of corporate leadership, Hung said she ultimately didn’t want to spend the rest of her career wondering what might have happened had she never taken the leap.

Once the firm launched, business development became a major part of Hung’s job because consulting is ultimately a trust-based business, one where relationships are built over time through conversations between senior-level executives. Today, much of Silver Rock’s work is advising CEOs and C-suite executives as well as boards on co-creation strategy, impact and leadership succession.

Looking back, Hung’s biggest piece of advice for aspiring women entrepreneurs is not to let the pursuit of perfection become a barrier to getting started. Too often, she said, women wait until every detail is figured out before taking the leap, while success in entrepreneurship often comes from learning through action.

“Don’t let perfect get in your way … the whole point of entrepreneurship or any business is you put an idea out there and you’ll evolve it,” she said. “You’ll evolve it based on market needs. You’ll evolve it based on getting smarter. You’ll evolve it based on mistakes you make.”

Jamie Andrzejewski, Nourish Natural Products

After years building her career in corporate marketing at Discover Financial Services and the publisher of Taste of Home, Jamie Andrzejewski assumed she’d continue climbing the ladder.

When her whole department was laid off in 2018, Andrzejewski was forced to rethink what would come next. At age 40, she decided to follow her passion for wellness and launch Nourish Natural Products, a Bayside-based wellness brand that has grown from homemade lip balm into a business with six employees, an established product line and a mission centered on helping women care for themselves with kindness.

Andrzejewski initially assumed she’d return to corporate marketing, even applying for jobs at other publishing companies. But none of the opportunities excited her. Armed with a severance package and time to reflect, she began working with a life coach while immersing herself in a yoga community and taking classes on  mindful self-compassion, experiences that prompted her to think less about finding another job and more about building a career rooted in purpose.

Around the same time, a DIY lip balm kit her daughter received as a birthday gift sparked an idea. Frustrated by the kit’s ingredients, Andrzejewski and her daughter made their own lip balm with all natural ingredients and shared it with friends and family. Soon, Andrzejewski started selling the lip balm and other handmade wellness products she’d been making for years online and at farmers markets. Rather than treating the venture as a hobby, she committed fully to making Nourish succeed.

“I pretty quickly knew I had to give it my all,” she said.

That meant “showing up” by tapping into Milwaukee’s entrepreneurship community for resources as well as building a network of other small business owners and customers. In more recent years, it’s meant giving back and supporting other entrepreneurs who are early in their journeys.

Andrzejewski has relied heavily on her corporate experience – including sales, business development and public speaking – to market and grow Nourish into a brand that’s currently sold at nearly 50 retailers in the Midwest and South. She encourages women interested in entrepreneurship not to underestimate the value of the experience they’ve already gained.

“I really believe every aspect of what I did in corporate America really prepared me to be an entrepreneur, even though that wasn’t necessarily something I thought I wanted to do, but all of it I draw on every single day,” she said.