Ahyssa of Out the Matrix on Building a Business That Does Not Become Your New Boss
Ahyssa is a Freedom + Impact Mentor at Out the Matrix. She has been corporate-job-free since 2021, has traveled to 21+ countries with her husband, and helped him retire from his 28-year career. Before building her own business, she spent years in a corporate marketing department.
In this Q&A, Ahyssa shares what finally pushed her to walk away, what is usually going on when a founder's business starts to feel like the job she left, and the one boundary she suggests every woman founder test first.
Her perspective is a reminder that freedom does not come automatically with owning a business, and that the business has to be designed around the life you actually want.
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Q: What made you step away from the corporate world in 2021, and what did you want your days to look like afterwards?
It wasn’t one moment. It was a lot of small ones, and a stye in my eye was the tipping point.
I worked in the marketing department, and my boss kept a paper graph on his office wall showing the company’s numbers for the last 15 years. After I started, the line climbed so fast that he called me into his office to say we had a problem: they were going to need a new ceiling. I remember thinking this would be a great time to offer me a raise. Instead he laughed in my face and said, “Don’t we pay you more than you used to make before?”
There were also the PTO requests that got denied, so I never had enough time off to visit my family in France, including my grandpa, who’s in his 90s. There were days I cried in my car. Deep down I’d always known I wasn’t meant to spend my whole life in the corporate world. It was just the only path anyone showed me while I was studying.
Then one morning I woke up with a stye in my eye and asked my boss for the morning off to rest my body so I could be back the following day for an important face-to-face meeting with prospects. She never wrote back. I sat there thinking, this is my one body, and I’m waiting on someone else’s permission to care for it.
That’s when I decided to start building something of my own on the side, and by 2021 it could carry me. Honestly, at first I didn’t have complete clarity on what I wanted my days to look like. I knew I wanted my mornings back, so the day could start with my rising routine and not an inbox. I wanted to work from wherever I chose. And I wanted my hours to mean something, for me, for someone else, and for the planet.
Since then, my day to day looks different every week. I’ve traveled to 21+ countries with my husband in the last 3 years, and I helped him retire from his 28-year career, which still feels surreal to say.
Q: When a founder’s business starts to feel like the job she left, what’s usually going on, and what do you tell her?
Usually she didn’t build a business. She built herself a new boss, and the boss is her.
The model needs her in every DM, every call and every follow-up, so the moment she steps away, everything stops. I’ve lived this. While we traveled I was staying up until 2, 3, sometimes 4am across time zones to run weekly team calls, because I believed showing up for everything was what leadership looked like. It was costing me the exact freedom I’d left for.
So I tell her to get clear on 2 things before she changes anything. First, the freedom she actually wants, in detail. What does an ideal Tuesday look like? Where is she, who’s in it, and when does her phone come on?
Second, what her business model really demands of her. If the model needs you available 12 hours a day, no amount of mindset work will fix it. Then ask: if this were a job posting, would I apply?
I’m still in this myself, always upgrading our systems so more of the business runs on automation and less of it runs on me.
Q: If a woman founder wants her time back, what’s one boundary you’d suggest she test first?
Protect your first hour. No texts, no DMs, no email until you’ve done whatever fills your cup, whether that’s a walk, yoga, meditation, journaling, movement or just a glass of water sitting in the grass in silence. Most of us give our best energy away before breakfast and then wonder why we feel drained by noon.
Helping everyone else first is a very old habit for me, so this wasn’t an overnight shift, but if you test it for 2 weeks, watch what happens. Nobody’s business falls apart because a reply came at 10 instead of 7. What you’ll usually find is that the urgency was coming from you, not from them.
Once you see that with 1 hour, it gets much easier to ask what else you’ve been treating as non-negotiable that really isn’t.
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