What Corporate Never Taught Me: Real-World Lessons from Entrepreneurship

What Corporate Never Taught Me- Real-World Lessons from Entrepreneurship, Grace Cheng & Co

Transitioning from a corporate girl to an entrepreneur has been 10x more challenging than even moving and settling across continents.

And I mean that, having lived and worked across Hong Kong, the UK, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore!

My transition from being a “forever corporate girl” into entrepreneurship, and blending it with being a creator, creating content and monetising it, started half-jokingly, half-seriously, when I said: “This is the one experience puzzle I haven’t yet collected.”

So I dove in, just to see how it’d go.

Entrepreneurship has opened up exponential growth opportunities in every direction:

• True business experience
  Starting solo and learning through real world touchpoints on how to start, run, grow, and scale a business from the ground up.

• Product-market fit:
  Even product folks in big companies talking about this every day often haven’t lived through it from 0 to 1, without all the corporate resources and structure backing them.

• High agency:
  Leverage challenges in conflict, leadership, communication, and alignment within corporations are often better addressed from the inside through deeper understanding and perspective gained after experiencing entrepreneurship.

• Marketing:

  Totally flipped my understanding of what marketing really is—when you're "forced" to dive deep and learn hands-on, especially with limited resources and without the backing of a fancy corporate brand. It's about truly understanding content–audience/market fit, unlocking real challenges, and upgrading yourself to the next level.

• Branding is deeply undervalued—whether it’s your personal brand (I prefer to call it your personal reputation, recognisability, and trust) or your company brand.

Let’s be honest, being a “shining star” in a big corporate role gives you a platform.

It’s relatively easy to get invited to speak on stages, be featured, and be “respected.”

Things have shifted.

It when you go independent, whether as a solopreneur, creator, consultant, or coachm you quickly learn that opportunities don’t come easy. You have to build everything from scratch.

Business. Sales. Operation. Product. Branding. Value. Credibility. All of it.

Shout out to everyone walking this independent path and shout out to myself, too, for having the courage to still shine on global stages post-corporate life.

I used to think navigating career and life across Europe and Asia was hard enough through my 10s, 20s, and now 30s—places like Hong Kong, the UK, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore shaped who I am.

But testing entrepreneurship?

Zero regrets.

Not just because I collected a new “experience puzzle,” but because entrepreneurship added a whole new depth to my life:

• Real-world business acumen
  not just marketing, product, or data from within a silo, but the whole picture. All of it. Hands-on.

• Unshakable resilience and courage
  the kind that no bad day or setback can touch. Owning all the ups and downs builds you.

• New levels of self-discipline
  not the kind where you show up to an office on time, but the kind where you build habits, a lifestyle, and structure that serve you.

• A redefined vision of life ownership
  freedom of time, location, resources, and relationships. I once heard a stay-at-home mom say, after becoming a millionaire entrepreneur: “Success is being able to choose to be with your family at 10am on a Monday when they need you.” That hit.

And that’s why I’m here.

Here’s to every independent entrepreneur, solopreneur, creator, and builder out there.

Keep going.

You’re writing a story that will one day be someone else’s reason to start.