Why I Walked Away from Sales After 10 Years

I spent a decade in sales. Mostly because it was the best position to grow our agency. Calls, meetings, demos, follow-ups, repeat. Alongside that, I was consulting, running projects, managing clients. Always on. Always switching context.

At some point I realized my brain was about to explode.

Not from the work itself, not the people (people were kindhearted and the most funny coworkers you can imagine). From the noise. The constant context switching. The Slack pings during a call. The email threads during a meeting. The proposal due while you're mid-conversation with a client about something completely different.

There was zero deep work. Not a single hour in the day where I could sit down, think clearly, and build something without interruption. I was productive on paper but empty in practice.

So I stopped.

Not overnight. But I made the decision to step back from the sales grind and shift toward building. Actual building. Products, tools, things that exist after you close the laptop.

The difference is night and day. I wake up, sit down, and work on one thing for hours. No pings. No context switching. Just focus. Some days are slow. Some days I ship something real. Both feel better than the best day I ever had in back-to-back sales calls.

Somewhere along the way I realized something. I'm not a sales person. I can sell, pretty well actually, and I understand it. I understand client needs. I value every person doing sales. But I'm not a superstar salesman. Maybe I'm an entrepreneur?

I'm not saying sales is bad. The opposite, actually. I learned so much about business just by talking with managers and CEOs about their pain points, goals, and frustrations. If I hadn't done that for ten years, I wouldn't have the perspective on business that I have right now.

I stepped away from Mediashake at the end of August 2025. Since then I've been building a new business from scratch. It was the best decision I've ever made.

Now it's time to do something with full focus. Something that's actually interesting to me. Maybe if you're doing the same thing for ten years over and over, it's time to level up. If your brain feels like it's running at max capacity with nothing to show for it, maybe it's not a productivity problem. Maybe it's an environment problem.

-rj