Write your own ticket
A decade ago I left Galway. I'd been there two years. Those two years bought the next ten, and it took me most of them to understand why.
I got my first break in tech at 23. Six years later I was mulling the pros and cons of moving to Ireland to build an office from the ground up. One of my mentors, Diane Albano, kept telling me the same thing: do a stint like this and afterward you'll be able to write your own ticket. I nodded like I understood.
Within two years that office was a team of 25 and a $30M annual number, a business that didn't exist before I got there.
People usually ask how the jump happened that fast. I found a piece of the business nobody owned.
Nobody wanted the hours
At SmartBear, more than 30% of our inbound leads were coming from outside the US. Almost nobody was working them. Not because they were bad leads. Because covering them meant 5am calls, 9pm calls, and a calendar that made no sense.
I took them.
For years I told that story as a lesson about outworking people. That's not the lesson. The hours were the price of entry. The lesson is that there was real revenue sitting in our own funnel with no owner, and I was the one who raised a hand.
Every company has a version of this. A segment nobody covers. A product line everyone treats as a distraction. It's the fastest path to real scope, and it's usually unguarded. Nobody claims it because claiming it looks unpleasant.
What the phrase actually meant
I assumed she was talking about money and titles. Get the big win, get paid.
That wasn't it.
What those years bought me was a taste. I got hooked on being the first one in. First to launch the team, first to open the region, first to put a price on something that had never been sold. I've done a version of that four more times since. Always early, always before there was a playbook.
Financial freedom matters and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But the real prize is getting to a place where you pick the kind of work that lights you up, work you can see yourself doing for years. That's the ticket. What a gift, in hindsight.
Not every hard job buys a ticket
I was getting on that plane no matter what Diane said. She didn't change my mind. What she gave me was a sentence I'd spend ten years catching up to. And plenty of people take the brutal assignment and get nothing out of it but a rough two years.
The ones that pay off share three things.
- 01You own an outcome, not a task. A number, a P&L, a launch. Something with a real chance of failing in public.
- 02Something exists at the end that didn't exist before you. An office, a team, a market, a motion.
- 03It compresses into one sentence a decade later. Without context, and without you in the room.
That third one is the test most people fail. "Built the Galway office and took a US company international" is a ticket. "Helped grow the international business" is the same two years with nobody's name on it. Same work. Only one of them travels.
I didn't know what that room bought me until long after I'd left it. Neither will you.