Thinking of jumping out of corporate life into a small business - read this first!

Despite my best efforts to take some time off since last April, I have found myself spending every spare second working with my wife to re-brand her business. It's been a fascinating experience going from FTSE100 style organisations and problems to a small business, and I thought I would share some of my reflections now we are live, should anyone else be considering a similar move in the hope you can better avoid some of the frustrations that came up for us!

I have to say first though how proud I am of my wife for building this business over the last few years. The feedback she gets about the service and impact the product has on her customer’s is incredible to read, and ultimately making a difference to customers is why any company exists. If you are still looking for a Christmas gift for your wife or girlfriend, I genuinely believe this is the ultimate romantic gift - check it out at https://www.treatly.uk.

For context, this is a direct to consumer subscription e-commerce business using for the most part fairly industrial tech and marketing technologies albeit on a small scale.

So what did I learn???

1. You can execute quickly, except when you can’t.

Coming from a “properly governed” corporate background, it’s refreshing how quickly you can make decisions and execute on things that will make a difference to customers (and if not, why do it!?). When I look back on my career to date, even though I always thought I was pushing various boundaries on this, a lot of what we spent time on seems even less customer related than I thought at the time! There are however only a finite number of hours in the day and there is no team capacity to back you up, so if you are sick, things take longer than you expected, or life interruptions happen, it's painfully obvious that things slow down. I found knowing I could go faster but being held up super frustrating, especially when we had just made some killer decisions and were keen to crack on and test the results!??

2. I had to reassess a lot of what I have gotten practiced at in terms of delegation.

This was hard, both practically and emotionally. With a small team, limited funds, and a decent amount of both customer, commercial, and tech knowledge to hand, there was a strong case to attempt most things ourselves. I also love learning new things and it was a refreshing change to be in the detail getting things done every day! Even so, especially when I was doing something I didn’t feel particularly good at or was taking more time than I thought it should, a distracting voice relentlessly told me I should be finding someone who was good at this and getting them to take over. Ignoring any financial constraints for a minute, I would be the first to say that getting the right person almost always pays off in the long term, so this is sensible advice no? Well, not quite, based on the next thing that took me by surprise…

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3. Finding (good, reliable) partners is way harder than I expected.

The number of times I have told someone to “just” find someone on FIverr, Upwork, Topcoder, etc to get something done, with limited experience of this myself, really came round and bit me in the backside…Also, given my experience of large organisations often not getting good performance from partners in ￡ contracts with many zeros, I should have appropriately set my expectations on what support we were likely to get on a much smaller scale. Factor in the overhead of structuring this work, and managing a partner with no prior knowledge of the business, more often than not we ended up either abandoning the attempt to get support or cutting short our initial attempts after it became clear our objectives were not going to be met. This is 100% a problem that can be solved, and credit to Laura who has found fantastic operational partners, but it was a real shock to me how much time this was going to take to do well. This left me constantly second-guessing if I should just grind on through or take some time to try and bring in some help. In the end, putting the energy that I was using to second guess myself into just getting on with it, in most cases would have been a more healthy approach. That said, with hindsight, better judging what needed to be delivered by a partner and appropriately planning (more time!) to find and onboard someone upfront, instead of starting and then trying to get someone in later on a tight schedule would have been a less stressful way to handle those things that were more obvious opportunities to outsource. Of course, getting recommendations was a massive help, and we had some real successes via this route, but even then, what works for friends business may not be right for yours, so a decent amount of due diligence and testing is needed.

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4. Go-lives are a pain in the ass, always! :)

I honestly thought we had it all covered for a nice “simple” project. Detailed plans in place, templates done, migration processes ready, comms pre-written, testing (ok, almost..!) complete. I should have known better! Along with getting sick and our lovely 15 month old twins deciding it was a great week to have a sleep regression, we ticked all the usual boxes! Major last minute wobbles on systems, published processes either not working or doing something totally unexpected, underwhelming support from our platforms, and a few customer scenarios that hadn't been thought of, meant delays and last minute dramas. Considering what I have spent a good part of my career doing, I should have been better prepared for these things to happen and probably also smiled a bit more when they did!

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5. Finally, talking of pains in the ass, the process of finding a trademark is insanely time consuming.

For anyone else trying to find a ?able name on a budget (and form what I can tell, possibly even with a budget!), be prepared for a gruelling and manually intensive process! If anyone has any experience building web crawlers to gather somewhat fuzzy data give me a shout as I think there is a big gap here.??

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I hope these are helpful to anyone thinking of a similar transition, or already made the jump and are in the thick of it! It's been an insanely busy few months and I have gotten so much from the experience, but certainly could have done with a bit of an expectation set going in to avoid a fairly persistent sense of frustration!??

I also have so much respect for anyone who has launched a successful business. Whilst it is orders of magnitude easier to get started today than even 10 years ago, it is still very fiddly to do well, and in a much more competitive environment pretty much everywhere, these fiddly bits can make or break a fledgling business, so bravo to those who are in the process or have succeeded!