The Safest Job You Have Is the Riskiest Position You Hold
Written by Lucie Lachaux, Strategic Advisor
Lucie Lachaux is a CFO and Strategic Advisor specialising in performance after success. She works with CEOs and business owners who have already achieved and are now figuring out what it takes to keep growing at the highest level.
You did everything you were told to do. You climbed. You hit the number. You built the title, the income, the life that looks right in every photo. Somewhere along the way, the thing that was supposed to feel like arrival started to feel like a room you'd outgrown. So you think about leaving. Building something of your own. Every time you do, the same word shows up. Reckless. The job is safe. Leaving is reckless. I spent years as a CFO. I want to show you that you have those two words in the wrong order.
One income, one buyer, one exit
Look at your career the way you'd look at a client's balance sheet. You have one employer. One income stream. A set of skills priced by one company in one industry. When that company does well, you do well. When it stumbles, your salary, your bonus, your equity, and half your professional network all move in the same direction at the same time.
In financial terms, that is a single position. Fully concentrated. Perfectly correlated. There is no hedge.
If a client walked into your office with their entire net worth sitting in one stock, you would not call that safe. You would tell them to diversify before the end of the week.
Your career is that one stock. Most of your wealth is not in your savings account. It is in your earning power. You have placed every share of it with one buyer.
Why it still feels safe
If the job is the concentrated position, why does it feel like the secure one? Because of how the mind prices loss.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that people feel a loss about twice as powerfully as they feel an equivalent gain. A steady salary is a visible, monthly, certain thing. Losing it is a loud, obvious loss. So the mind guards it.
The risk of staying is quiet. It does not arrive as a number on a payslip. It arrives slowly, as another decade tied to one employer, one industry, and one version of you that gets harder to move each year.
You are not being irrational. You are being loss averse. Those are different things.
The math you are avoiding is not the math of leaving. It is the math of staying. Almost no one calculates the second one.
Diversification has a name you don't like
Here is the part that sounds backwards until you sit with it. Becoming a business owner, done properly, is not the reckless option. It is the diversified one.
Multiple clients instead of a single employer. Income you price instead of income you are granted. An asset with your name on it instead of a role that can be removed in a reorganisation you did not see coming. Ownership is not the gamble. Ownership is the hedge.
I will be precise because precision is the point. A business built badly is its own concentration risk. Quitting on Monday with no runway and no plan does not diversify you. It moves the same gamble to a worse table. The goal is not to swap one reckless position for another. The goal is to stop calling concentration safety.
You don't need courage, you need the numbers
This is where most people reach for motivation. That is the wrong tool. You do not fix a risk problem with courage. You fix it with a plan.
What does your life actually cost, stripped of assumptions? How many months of runway do you hold right now? What does the business need to generate to replace the income, and by when? Put real figures against those questions, and something shifts. Leaving stops being a leap off a cliff. It becomes a position you can size, stage, and derisk like any other.
I know the number that walking away costs because I paid it. I left a senior finance role to build my own practice. There were months with no income and more honesty with myself than I had had in years. I also know the number that staying costs. That is the one that stayed hidden until I ran it.
The read most people are missing
The executives I work with are rarely short on ability. They have spent twenty years proving that. What they are short on is a clear, unsentimental read of the risk they are already carrying.
Once they see it, the decision does not get easy. It gets honest. They stop asking whether it is safe to leave and start asking what the move actually requires. That is a better question. It has an answer.
You built all of this. You are allowed to own it, not just earn it.
The first step is not resigning. It is running the numbers you have been avoiding and finding out what the safe choice has really been costing you.
Read more from Lucie Lachaux
Lucie Lachaux, Strategic Advisor
Lucie Lachaux is a Strategic Advisor and former CFO working with CEOs, founders, and senior executives on one of the least discussed crises in high performance, what happens when the drive that built their success stops being enough to sustain it. Her clients are not failing. They are among the most capable people in their field. But at a certain level of achievement, the clarity that used to make decisions obvious disappears. Performance drops consistently. The cause is rarely visible from the outside. She became a CFO at 26, worked inside multi-entity businesses across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, and brings CFO-level business precision and the ability to identify what is actually blocking the next move. Both. Simultaneously.
