Leaving Corporate to Build Relay Recruiting: Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh's Story

Most people who leave a stable career to start their own business describe the moment they quit as terrifying. Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh describes it differently. The night before she handed in her notice, she slept perfectly. No restlessness, no second-guessing, just peace. That, she says, told her everything she needed to know.

Lauren spent nearly a decade as one of the top billing recruiters at her firm in Rochester, New York, consistently placing between $550,000 and $650,000 in fees annually. She had strong client relationships, great colleagues, and a reputation she had spent years building. She also had a growing list of ideas the structure around her would never let her execute. In September 2024, she left to found Relay Recruiting.

On this episode of Outside the Corporate Box, Lauren walked JMan and Jeffrey Scott Stanton through the real experience of going independent — including the parts most founder stories skip over.

What Golden Handcuffs Actually Cost You

The term golden handcuffs gets used a lot in corporate settings, but Lauren defines it more precisely than most. It is not just about a high salary. It is the full package of comfort — the income, the routine, the reputation, the relationships — that makes leaving feel more dangerous than staying.

For Lauren, the handcuffs were real. She was on full commission, which meant every hour spent improving systems, training colleagues, or exploring technology was an hour she was not billing. She had ideas for making the business more efficient, including meaningful uses of AI to automate administrative tasks. But none of that work translated into compensation, and the owner's vision for the firm's future did not match where Lauren wanted to go.

"I had so many ideas to improve the business, to implement different technologies and AI that would make everything more efficient. And while I had full rein to do that, I wasn't getting paid for it."

— Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh

The honest accounting she ran was simple: worst case, she gets another recruiting job at another firm. That realization freed her. When you strip away the fear of catastrophe and find out the floor is closer than you thought, the leap gets a lot shorter.

Leaving a Good Job Requires Grief — Not Just Excitement

One of the most valuable things Lauren said in this conversation is something most founder stories bury entirely. She called her first months of entrepreneurship grief. Not burnout from a bad job, not relief from escaping a toxic environment — grief from leaving something genuinely good.

She left great colleagues who became long-term friends. She left a client base she had spent nearly a decade building. Because of a non-solicitation agreement, she could not contact more than 100 of those clients for a year after she left. Three out of over a hundred got a proper handoff. The rest simply stopped hearing from her.

"I pride myself on the relationship. Closing the loop. And not being able to close that loop with most of them was really hard."

— Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh

Naming the experience grief rather than excitement or nerves allowed Lauren to move through it instead of pretending it was not happening. She connects that honesty directly to her recruiting work today: having lived the disorientation of starting over, she has deeper empathy for the candidates she places into new roles.

The Non-Solicitation Reality Nobody Prepares You For

A non-compete prevents you from working in your industry at all for a defined period. A non-solicitation agreement is narrower: you can stay in your field, but you cannot reach out to clients or candidates from your previous firm for a set amount of time, typically around a year. The practical effect is significant. Imagine spending eight years building a network of hundreds of clients who trust you, and then being legally prohibited from contacting any of them. For a real estate agent, the hosts noted, it would be the equivalent of your entire CRM being locked down overnight.

Lauren went in with eyes open. She knew the agreement existed before she left, negotiated a smooth transition for a small number of active accounts, and accepted that the rest of the network was off limits for a year. Her strategy: build a new book of business from scratch, lean on the reputation she had established in her market, and trust that her professional relationships would eventually find their way back on their own terms.

AI as the Administrative Layer, Not the Relationship

One of the reasons Lauren felt she could go independent was her early investment in understanding AI and workflow automation. In her previous role, she had identified multiple administrative tasks in the recruiting process — outreach messages, scheduling, follow-up sequences — that could be handled more efficiently with the right tools.

"It's still my messages, my follow-up. Everything that would go into finding candidates. I just wanted to work more efficiently — and that's where I could see that if I started my own firm, I could do less of the admin and way more of the work that actually matters."

— Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh

She is not using AI to replace the relationship — that remains the core of her work. She is using it to compress the time spent on everything that surrounds the relationship.

Living by Design

Lauren and her husband live, in her words, with intention. That phrase became more than a preference in 2017, when her husband nearly died and she was told to prepare for the worst. He survived. They now mark that date every year by doing something hard together, something that reminds them what it means to be alive.

Last summer, they drove a camper van across the country with no itinerary. On that trip, Lauren met someone who later became a client — she signed a new contract with that person the week she recorded this episode. The autonomy to take a noon walk when the sun finally comes out in Rochester, to choose her own schedule, to not ask permission for her own time — Lauren says that freedom was worth more than any number on a pay stub.

And her advice for herself on day one of the journey?

"Don't overthink it. Just make it exist, and perfect it from there."

— Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh

About Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh

Lauren Dunkle Dlugosh is the Founder and CEO of Relay Recruiting, an executive and professional search firm based in Rochester, New York. With nearly a decade of experience recruiting across the C-suite, nonprofit, higher education, manufacturing, and energy sectors, she built her career as one of the top billing recruiters in her market before launching independently. Her approach combines deep relationship-based search with a practical, forward-thinking use of AI and workflow automation. She is also a passionate runner, adventurer, and advocate for living with intention.