What if you could leave your job, start a business, and pursue greater freedom without putting your financial future at risk? In this episode of Build It to Billions, Brett Swarts sits down with Drea Lynn, attorney, entrepreneur, business strategist, and creator of the Smart Quit Framework, to explore how professionals can make the leap from employee to entrepreneur with a smarter financial strategy.
Drea shares lessons from her own transition out of corporate life, including how to build a financial runway, create income before quitting, leverage your existing skills and relationships, and avoid the costly mistakes many new entrepreneurs make. If you’re considering leaving your career to build something of your own, this conversation offers practical insights for making the transition with greater confidence, freedom, and financial stability.
Episode Highlights Here:
Intro
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward, scale to billions, and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want
you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing; it means the world to me.
Brett
Welcome to the Build it to Billions podcast, where we guide successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth in life starts every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goals have to be scale and compound your wealth and life, so you can give more all the way to help MVPs. I’ll be your host today, Brett Swartz. I’m excited about our next guest. Each and our guest that we have on every single every single week, we have entrepreneurs, millionaires, or billionaires sharing their secrets and insights with us, so we can all level up and make a bigger impact. And our guest is today going to deliver that. I know she will. I’m excited. She’s an attorney and former chief operating officer turned entrepreneur, business strategist, and author of Smart Quit. After years leading teams inside high-growth organizations, she walked away from the corner office in a six-figure salary to build her own consulting business. The exit didn’t go to plan. She landed in six figures of debt before rebuilding to a half a million in revenue. The hard-won experience became Smart Quit, which isa four-phase framework and a book. Prepare, position, pivot, profit for ambitious professionals ready to exit work that no longer fits with the plan. That no longer fits no longer fits with the plan, not in a panic, and so much more. Please welcome the show with me, Drea Landrea. How are we doing?
Drea
Thank you, Brett. Such a great intro. Whenever I hear my bio, I’m like, who are they talking about? So, I was like, that’s me. So, thank you,
Brett
Absolutely! looking forward to having you on the on the show today.
Drea
Oh yeah, glad to be here.
Brett
Yeah, and our listeners get to know for the first time. Maybe you can just share a little bit about your story and then your current focus.
Drea
Yeah, absolutely. It’s so funny because I see “pray first” in your background, and really, that really is the foundation of my story because God, God just has ordained so much because so much of it would seem like it does not make sense of how all the pieces people hear like attorney, COO, and actually I’ve spent eight years in church ministry, and this is actually the first time where all of those pieces seem to fit together. Where even you know me writing smart quit, there’s a piece of me who would have felt that I wish my entrepreneurial story was not so painful because it was painful. But I would not have you know been able to have birthed smart quit had it not been for that journey. And I really feel like it was from that journey, you know, that I was able to. But yeah, you know, I like I said, I was in ministry. I ended up really never thinking that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Really, you know, working for someone else. I always thought that life fit me very well, and so somehow, you know, in the kind of the latter part of my life, I kind of got this entrepreneurial bug, and I was like, “Where did this come from? And I thought I set myself up so well. I had the plan, you know. I am a planner, you know. I had it set out, you know. I had six months of kind of runway planned, you know. I went to go and talk to my boss about you know the transition of what that was going to look like. I kind of had it set of you know how long it was going to take to get my first client, and the first step of my plan was the one that failed because when I went to go and talk to my company about what that transition was going to look like where I kind of wanted three to six months because Iactually was leading a division for the company, and you know I kind of said okay let’s take three to six months to transition. I think that was a Tuesday, and they told me Well Friday could be my last day, and I was like wait hold on no let’s back let’s back it up that’s not you know that’s not the plan no that we’re not ready for that, and you know that that was when pivoting kind of started. I was like, okay, well, let’s take it from there. And so that kind of was the that was the first step of okay, well, this wasn’t as smart of a quit as what I would have thought this would have been. So yeah. By the way, it’s
Brett
unfortunate, right? You perform and you do great and you do all the things and you’re loyal and you’re being honest and you’re like, hey, I want to be honest, and I’m gonna not gonna leave you in shambles. Like, I want to work through this together, and sometimes the corporate world can be, you know, just a little colder on they’re approach to that, which is unfortunate. Wow, what a story! Brett, I will
Drea
say this. Let me say this because I have this thing where, and I have this in relationships as well, because you cannot. I was the one who changed. I decided I wanted something different, so I was the one who pivoted in my relationship. And though I would have loved had that been met with the same degree of loyalty and I feel like faithfulness that I gave the company, but I actually cannot be mad if they did not see the same vision. That I saw, and so I actually did not meet that with any kind of animosity or any kind of. I didn’t have bad feelings with that. I understood that they actually were doing with what they felt was best for their business, because really what they said was what I was moving into was.
Outro
So, if you like this little, short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview, and please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody.
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About Drea Lynn
Drea Lynn is an attorney, entrepreneur, business strategist, and creator of the Smart Quit Framework, which helps professionals strategically transition from corporate careers into entrepreneurship without sacrificing their financial stability. With experience as an attorney, corporate COO, fractional COO, and business owner, Drea combines legal, operational, and entrepreneurial expertise to help aspiring business owners prepare, position, pivot, and profit.
After experiencing the challenges of leaving corporate life herself, Drea transformed those lessons into a practical approach for building financial runway, leveraging existing skills and relationships, and creating sustainable income. She is also the author of Smart Quit and shares her insights through speaking, coaching, and podcast appearances.
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