World Entrepreneurship Day - What Nobody Tells You About Starting a Business.

A year ago, we made one of the biggest decisions of our careers.

We left them.

For years, we had both built careers around business operations, people, systems and processes. We had spent our working lives helping businesses run better, solving problems, improving processes and finding ways to make people and organisations more effective.

Then we decided to take everything we had learned and build something of our own.

That became ThinkSwift.

It sounds simple when you write it in a sentence. It wasn't.

Before ThinkSwift became a real business, it was a side project.

We had talked about it for a long time. We had experimented with ideas, worked with new technology and started taking on projects outside our careers.

But there is a very big difference between thinking about starting a business and actually leaving your job to build one.

For Jac, that meant finishing up a full-time role in private equity, where she was responsible for running day-to-day operations.

For Nick, it meant stepping away from a career in HR and taking the time to prepare himself for what he knew would be a significant challenge.

There was excitement.

There was anticipation.

And, if we're being honest, there was fear.

But we both felt that if we didn't take the chance now, we might spend years wondering what would have happened if we had.

We only get one life.

And eventually, “what if?” became a less attractive option than “let's find out.”

So we took the leap.

That was the moment ThinkSwift stopped being a side hustle and became a real business.

One of the things that made the decision easier was that neither of us was starting from zero.

We had spent years independently working on the same fundamental problems.

• How do you make a business run better?
• How do you build systems that actually support people?
• How do you reduce unnecessary manual work?
• How do you make information easier to find?
• How do you create processes that don't rely on one person remembering everything?
• And how do you use technology to make all of that easier?

We had both been early adopters of new technology and had been experimenting with AI well before it became a mainstream business conversation.

The more we learned, the more obvious it became that technology was going to fundamentally change what businesses could build and how people could work.

We didn't want to sit on the sidelines.

We also knew that technology isn’t the answer, it’s the tool.

The real work is understanding the business problem and building something that genuinely makes the business better.

That distinction has become even more important to us as we've grown.

When we started, we thought the biggest challenge would be finding consistent work.

We were wrong.

The bigger challenge has been finding enough time to build the business while simultaneously delivering the work that pays for it.

• There are only so many hours in a day.
• Client projects need attention.
• New opportunities need attention.
• The team needs attention.
• The business itself needs systems.
• New products need building.
• Marketing needs doing.
• Sales needs doing.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you are supposed to stop and think strategically about where you're going next.

It is very easy to spend all of your time working in the business and almost none of it working on the business.

That's been one of our biggest lessons.

Building a business isn't just about becoming better at delivering your service.

It's about creating enough space to build the thing around the service.

There is one thing Jac was particularly confident about when we started.

Operations.

That makes sense. After years working in executive support and operations, building systems, managing people and improving business processes, it is an area she knows extremely well.

Marketing was a different story.

“I thought I knew so much about marketing and sales.”

That confidence didn't last long.

Marketing is not one skill. Neither is sales.

There is:

• Positioning.
• Brand.
• Content.
• Copywriting.
• Advertising.
• Lead generation.
• Customer psychology.
• Sales.
• Performance marketing.
• Analytics.
• And a hundred other things that sit underneath those words.

Being good at running a business doesn't automatically make you good at marketing one.

That has been a humbling lesson.

Jac still considers herself an apprentice in marketing and sales, and has deliberately sought out people who are much better at those disciplines to learn from.

And perhaps that's the more important lesson:

You don't need to know everything.

You need to know what you don't know.

Then be willing to learn it.

Nick thought the challenge would be getting enough projects.

Early on, that meant being tempted to say yes to almost anything that would bring in revenue.

But as ThinkSwift developed, that thinking changed.

A project isn't automatically a good project because it pays.

We started asking better questions.

• Will this create meaningful value for the client?
• Is the problem actually worth solving?
• Will the outcome last?
• Does the work align with what we're trying to build?

And perhaps most importantly:

Is the change we're recommending actually necessary?

Because change is expensive.

It takes time. It takes energy. It takes people's attention.

And unnecessary change creates unnecessary stress.

We don't want to build things simply because we can.

We want to build things that make businesses better.

That shift has changed the way we think about projects, clients and growth.

One of Jac's biggest operational lessons has been around process.

It can be tempting to think that processes are about control.

They're not.

Good systems create freedom.

When tasks, information and responsibilities live inside people's heads, everyone becomes a bottleneck.

• People can't switch off.
• People struggle to take holidays.
• Someone being sick suddenly becomes a crisis.

And instead of using their brains to solve problems, create and make decisions, people spend mental energy trying to remember what they were supposed to do next.

That's something Jac became particularly conscious of after years working in operations.

Keeping task boards up to date might sound like overkill to some people.

But the goal isn't to control every task. The goal is to free people's minds from having to remember every task. A business should be able to keep moving when one person isn't there.

That isn't about making people less important.

It's about giving people the freedom to be more valuable.

Some milestones look impressive from the outside.

Others would probably sound completely boring.

For us, one of the biggest moments of the past six months was getting our first organic signups for Stack.

Stack started as an idea inside ThinkSwift.

We had gone from consulting and building projects for clients to creating a digital product of our own.

That is a completely different feeling.

When a client hires you, they are trusting you to solve a problem for them.

When someone discovers something you've built and chooses to sign up without knowing you, they're putting their trust in the product itself.

That first organic signup felt enormous. Not because of the number. Because of what it represented.

Someone out there had seen something we had created and thought:

“I believe this could help me.”

That's a very powerful feeling when you're building something from scratch.

A year into ThinkSwift, we know much more than we did when we started.

We also know how much we still don't know.

We've learned that entrepreneurship isn't about having a perfect plan.

It's about making a decision, learning from what happens next and being willing to change your approach.

We've learned that growth isn't always about doing more.

Sometimes it's about doing less, but doing it better.

We've learned that technology is only valuable when it solves a real problem.

We've learned that good systems shouldn't make businesses more complicated.

They should make them simpler.

And we've learned that you don't have to be completely ready before you start.

Sometimes you just have to be brave enough to begin.

Absolutely.

There are days when building a business is hard.

There are days when the uncertainty is uncomfortable.

There are days when we miss having someone else responsible for the problems.

But we would still make the same decision.

Because the alternative was staying where we were and wondering what might have happened.

And we'd rather find out.

ThinkSwift is still evolving.

We're still learning.

We're still building.

We're still getting things wrong.

But we're also building something that we genuinely believe in, together.

And perhaps that's the biggest lesson of our first year:

You don't need to know exactly where you're going to take the first step.

You just need to be willing to stop asking “what if?”

And start finding out.