I spent my whole career helping others navigate their career challenges.
Then, it was my turn.
The shared moment
Eight years reduced to sixty seconds.
That was the Friday morning call. I sat across from an HR Business Partner and listened to more than a decade of work end in the length of a coffee break.
I didn’t panic. What I felt was closer to clarity. Because I had spent years watching this happen to people I respected, and I knew the mistake most of them made next. They took the first thing available. They rebuilt from fear instead of from a plan. And a year later, most of them were sitting in the same seat with a different logo on the wall.
I decided I wasn’t going to do that. And then I realized I’d been preparing to help people avoid exactly this for most of my working life.
Why people came to me
Here is the thing I noticed, over and over, for twenty years.
People sought me out. At JP Morgan, at the startups, at every place I worked, colleagues would close my office door and ask me the same kinds of questions. What should I do next. How do I negotiate this offer. How do I lead my team through a change nobody asked for.
Eventually it became the actual job. In one role I led business unit transformations, which meant coaching and mentoring people through changes they didn’t ask for and weren’t sure they’d survive. Upskilling. New processes. The hard, human side of change that most companies handle badly. I was the person responsible for getting people through it intact.
I was never the person with the flashiest title in the room. I was the person people trusted to tell them the truth about their next move. That happened so consistently, for so long, that I eventually stopped thinking of it as a side conversation and started thinking of it as the actual work.
Next Chapter Now is that work, built into something that can reach more than the people who happened to walk past my desk.
Rob Lee
How I learned to start over
I didn’t take the traditional path, and that turned out to matter.
Out of graduate school with an MBA in international business, I skipped the first rung of the big firm ladder and went abroad instead. Then spent ten years working across South America and Eastern Europe. I moved an entire household, three young children included, to places where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t know a soul.
I want to be honest about that, because this isn’t the clean bio version. About seven months into that first year, I wondered if I’d made a serious mistake. Building a career and a life in an unfamiliar country, with a family counting on me to get it right, was genuinely hard. There were nights I questioned the whole thing.
I learned the languages eventually. Portuguese, then Spanish. More importantly, I learned how to adapt fast, build trust across cultures, and create relationships that looked impossible on paper. Toward the end of that chapter, I was approached by the CIA. Recruited, vetted, and put through more than I expected before I decided my family’s stability mattered more. I mention this chapter of my life for one reason.
That decade, followed by the years in corporate, taught me the things this entire platform is built on. Starting over is survivable. More than survivable. It can be the best decision you ever make, if you do it on purpose instead of in panic.