Corp Strategy to M&A Attorney back to Corp Dev?

Hi all:

I'm having trouble figuring out what I want to do long term, but I have more passion for 'business'/corp dev/strategy, etc. than I do for law. I worked full-time in corporate strategy for two years during law school where I spent most of my time working on M&A (mostly business and financial diligence, modeling, and putting decks together for our board/PE sponsor), and the balance of my time working on analyses for the c-suite related to new business ventures, building budgets/models, etc. 

I worked for a portfolio company of the US private equity arm of a large global bank.  I now work in 'big law' as an M&A associate working on lower middle market M&A deals and spend some time on securities work as well.  Long term, I want to end up as a CEO, GC, or corp dev executive, and want to hear from the corp dev/strategy folks here on whether you think, given my experience, I can break back into corp dev/strategy without taking a substantial pay cut and whether you think it would be worth it in the long run.  Let me know your thoughts and thank you in advance.  Please excuse any grammatical or other errors as I try not to think too hard about that stuff outside of work.