My decision to start a sales staffing agency was driven by a confluence of events. Between 2002 and 2016, I was a moderately successful salesperson, sales leader, and entrepreneur. I worked for six different companies during those fourteen years and also spent some time as an independent sales consultant. Without exception, every position I held provided me an opportunity to make a major impact on a company’s operations. I was one firm’s first sales hire and another’s first enterprise sales leader. I opened new offices and helped introduce new products and divisions within publicly traded corporations. I was often asked to drive turnaround efforts.

I figured out early in my sales career that I found true job satisfaction only when I was building something new. This led me directly to software sales, an area with tremendous demand for employees who can build their own playbook and thrive in the midst of a little chaos. Sales opportunities in software are endless. I generally worked in the areas of marketing technology, advertising technology, and HR technology, a little corner of the software world. As of April 2019, more than seven thousand software companies were operating in martech and adtech alone, according to the researcher Scott Brinker.

Angel investors, venture capitalists, and private equity companies obviously see enough potential to fund many business plans. But they also know—as does any employee of a small start-up—that the failure rate for these firms is high. Depending on which report you believe, 60 to 90 percent of start-ups will cease operations within five years of their creation.

According to research by CB Insights, the top four reasons for start-up failure are lack of market need, running out of cash, poor leadership, and simply being outgunned. There are always winners and losers, and I experienced this firsthand: my tenure at four companies included a positive event (merger or acquisition), and two ended when the companies drastically pared back operations because they faced significant product and financing challenges.

As I gained wisdom and experience in the software space, it became clear to me that no matter how good I was at picking a winning company, and how well I performed, my job would always be at risk. Software sales leaders are well compensated for taking on this risk and driving growth in challenging circumstances. That part I loved. But if I continued my career as an at-will employee of various start-ups, my financial security would always be beyond my control, in the hands of a board of directors and CEO. And their interests were not always aligned with mine. In early 2015, I decided that the only way to have full control of my career was to start a business.

As I began to think of businesses that could match my income expectations and maximize the value of my sales experience, I quickly settled on staffing. As a sales leader at three different companies, I had used staffing agencies myself, an experience that proved valuable as I figured out what I wanted to do next.

Now I dug into the details: what contingent recruiters do all day, how they find clients, how they find talent, how they determine how much time to spend with each client (i.e., what their customer service level will be), and how much money they can make.

Boom—a lightning bolt.

I realized that I was purpose-built to run a one-person sales staffing agency.

My dream was never to start some business, although I had certainly poked around various possibilities over the years. By the middle of 2015, I knew that I wanted to start a specific business, with a specific target audience and a specific business model. And I knew, months before I opened Top 10, that it could be a $500,000-a-year company.

Are you purpose-built for this model? Let’s find out.