Twenty years on a corporate calendar. Seven years on mine.
By Angeliki Markopoulou | The Coachultants | October 2026
| Reading time: 6 minutes Related programs: UNBOUND SHIFT |
On 26 September 2019, I opened the doors of The Coachultants. There was no door. There was a laptop, a company name and a long list of things I had never done myself.
Three years earlier, I had left Procter & Gamble after twenty years. There, I ran a P&L of more than $600 million and was the marketing lead of the Duracell divestiture to Berkshire Hathaway. I grew brands across diverse categories and I worked through the Wella acquisition and organizational country clusterings.
I knew how a big system moves, and how to move it. Ten years out, and seven years into building my own company, here is what nobody told me. The strategy I expected. Almost everything around it surprised me.
Leaving the World Where Everyone Knew Everyone
A multinational gives you a language before it gives you a job. We shared acronyms, frameworks and a way of reasoning. A one-page memo meant the same thing in every country I worked in.
The network came with the language. You knew who to call. People knew your track record before you opened your mouth, and your title opened the door before you knocked.
I underestimated how much of that belonged to the system. A corporate seat is rented, never owned. When I left, my experience came with me. The jargon, the instant credibility and the people who already trusted my judgement stayed behind.
The first lesson arrived fast. Outside, nobody has read your file. You earn credibility one conversation at a time, in plain words, with people who judge only what is in front of them.
Three Years to Reset
Leaving P&G meant leaving Geneva too. My husband, our daughters and I moved back to Greece, to Kalamata, a city where we had never lived. Geneva had been a world where everyone knew everyone. Kalamata was a blank page.
We built a house. We cultivated the family olive trees. We spent time together, the time corporate life had always cut short.
We met new people and put down roots, for ourselves and for our daughters. For the first time in two decades, nobody else owned my calendar.
Then I did something my corporate self never allowed. I stopped. I reset, I rested and I let the pace drop.
The pause also made room to prepare. In 2018, I earned my Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching certification.
When I opened The Coachultants in 2019, I started from solid ground: rested, rooted and clear about the work I wanted to do. Executives are taught to fear a gap on the CV. Mine became the foundation.
From Multinationals to SMEs
Most of my work now sits with small and medium-sized businesses across Greece. I also work with multinationals on training and executive coaching, so I move between both worlds.
Walking into a multinational feels like coming home. I know the language: the acronyms, the frameworks, the pressure behind every quarterly review. Nobody needs to explain how the system works. What changed is where I sit. I used to be the executive in the room.Now I stand beside them, giving back what twenty years taught me. With no seat to protect, I can tell them what I wish someone had told me.
With SMEs, it was the opposite. The scale changed overnight. The stakes got personal. In a multinational, a bad quarter is a variance to explain. In an SME, it is payroll on Friday. The owner is the company. The money on the table is family money, and the family is often in the room.
Some of my toolkit travelled well. The discipline of deciding where to play and how to win. Brand building rooted in the consumer. The habit of tying every decision back to the numbers.
Much of it needed rebuilding. There are no specialist departments, no layers to absorb the work, no six-month planning cycle. A forty-slide strategy means little to a founder who needs to know what to do on Monday. I learned to cut everything down to the decision and the first three actions.
SMEs gave me something back. Speed. Proximity. A decision made on Tuesday and running by Thursday. I have learned as much about leadership from founders carrying their people through hard seasons, as I did in the boardroom.
Local SMEs are also where I want to leave my mark. Everything I learned in twenty years at P&G now goes to smaller companies in my home country, with the same rigour. It is my way of paying it forward.
Starting from Scratch, Responsible for Myself
Day one came with no infrastructure. No office manager, no IT helpdesk, no legal team. I opened the bank account, built the website, drafted the contracts and chased the invoices. For years I had signed off on this work. Now I was doing it.
The practical work was the easy part. The bigger shift was responsibility. In a corporation, targets come from above, reviews arrive on a calendar and someone else decides whether your year counted.
On your own, all of that lands on one person. I set the targets. I run the review. Nobody tells me the year went well, and nobody tells me to stop. That is real freedom. It carries real weight. Nobody can suspend you, and nobody carries you either.
Being responsible for myself, and for the people who live with my calendar at home, brought doubt too. I did not know if I could make it outside the safe cocoon of the corporation. Seven years on, I have my answer.
Seven Lessons from Seven Years
If you are weighing the same move, take these. They cost me seven years.
- Rebuild your credibility in every room. Your CV earns you the meeting. Your first useful insight earns you the second one.
- Cut the toolkit down to what a founder can act on. Big-company frameworks work in SMEs once you strip them to the decision and the next three moves. Leave the acronyms behind.
- Move at your client’s speed. SMEs decide in days. A plan that takes a quarter to write misses its window before it starts.
- Build the new network on purpose. The old network cheers you on. The new one sends the work. My roles with the EBRD, SDE, EFEX, EIT Food and Women On Top gave me trust, context and peers.
- Own the unglamorous parts. Cash flow, contracts, tax and collections keep the business alive. Master them early and they stop stealing your attention.
- Write your own review. No manager will tell you how the year went. I coach leaders through structured stakeholder feedback, and I run the same process on myself, with clients as my stakeholders.
- Let the business make room for a bigger life. A corporate career flies like an arrow: one direction, one measure. Ten years outside it have let me build a sphere. MESIMERI on our family land in Messinia. Board work and mentoring. SMEs, start-ups and corporations. Brand building and leadership coaching. And the next chapter: a PhD, about to begin. I was accepted for one after my studies and never started it. Decades later, I am starting one anyway.
The Next Seven
I start the next seven years with more hope than I carried on day one. Hope for the companies I work with, for the leaders I have yet to meet, and for anyone reading this who is quietly asking if there is another way.
I want to see Greek SMEs grow beyond their founders and outlast them. Companies built here, led well and handed on with pride. Every one of them strengthens the country my daughters will inherit.
If you are inside the cocoon and wondering what lies beyond it, here is what ten years outside have shown me. The power, the influence and the reward are all out here too. So is a far larger life.
To talented women weighing the same move: the ability that carried you up the ladder travels with you. It works just as well on a route you design yourself, actually even better.
As for me: still a believer, still a dreamer, still hopeful, still an optimist. And the sphere keeps widening: a harvest every autumn, a PhD on the horizon, founders who still teach me something new.
You cannot wait for others. You cannot be suspended by others. You claim it.
To every client who trusted a new name with their business, to our partners and the team: thank you. You built this with me.
Ten years ago, I handed back the badge. Seven years ago, I picked up the key. Here’s to the next seven.
| EXPLORE UNBOUND SHIFT →
Whether you still hold the badge or have just picked up the key, UNBOUND SHIFT is built for the move in between. It is the transition module of UNBOUND, The Coachultants’ flagship development journey for executives and their organisations. It works on both sides of change: the shift inside the leader and the transition around them. A new role. A step out of the corporate world. A restructuring. A family business handed to the next generation. We pair focused workshops with sustained one-on-one coaching, so the new way of leading holds once the change has landed. It is led by a practitioner who has made the move herself: twenty years inside a multinational, seven years building on her own terms. Contact us: angeliki@thecoachultants.com | +30 698 452 7162 | thecoachultants.com |
| ABOUT THE COACHULTANTS
The Coachultants is a business transformation consultancy founded by Angeliki Markopoulou, MBA, Meng, a former C-level executive with 25+ years leading teams, brands, and organizational change across multinational environments. |
