Field Notes for Founders

Confidence is not the starting point. More often, it is the evidence you collect after you have begun.

I learned this the hard way when I left the RAF and tried to get into sales. I did not step into business with a polished plan or a powerful network. I had energy, ambition and a fair amount of doubt about whether any of it would work.

Everywhere I turned, I heard the same answer.

"You need sales experience."

It is one of those maddening sentences that sounds reasonable until you are the person standing outside the door. You need experience to get experience. You need proof before anyone will give you the chance to create it. The logic is airtight and completely useless to the person it is aimed at.

For a while, that could have become my story. I could have accepted it as evidence that I was not the right sort of person, that the timing was wrong, that I should wait until I felt more ready.

But one day, after hearing the same line again, I pushed back.

I said something like: how am I supposed to get sales experience if no one will give me a go?

It was not a grand speech. It was frustration, really. But sometimes frustration is courage arriving badly dressed.

That small moment opened a door. Not the perfect door. Not the dream door. But a door. And that is often how progress begins — not with a perfect opportunity but with a small opening, not with total readiness but with enough willingness to move.

The important thing, looking back, was not that I suddenly felt confident. I did not. The important thing was that I acted before confidence had arrived. The feeling came later, built from evidence — small wins, conversations, a growing sense that I knew what I was doing. But none of that was available at the start. It only existed on the other side of beginning.

Many people wait to feel different before they do something different. They wait to feel ready before they act, legitimate before they step forward, brave before they begin. The feeling they are waiting for is real. But the sequence is wrong. Very often, the feeling follows the behaviour, not the other way around.

This does not mean pretending fear does not exist. Fear can be useful. It makes you prepare more carefully and respect what is at stake. The point is not to remove fear from the room. The point is to stop giving it the chair at the head of the table.

There is a question I have found useful when self-doubt becomes too loud.

Not: am I good enough?

That question can swallow a room.

A better question is: what would a responsible person do next?

Not a fearless person. Not a perfect person. A responsible one.

That question brings the work back to a manageable size. A responsible person makes the call. Writes the first paragraph. Checks the numbers. Has the difficult conversation. Sends the proposal. Follows up. Takes the next small step.

The step may not solve everything. It rarely does. But it changes the atmosphere, because something has moved from thought into reality. And reality is where confidence is built — not in the planning, not in the preparing, not in the waiting, but in the doing.

Somewhere in your life, the work is waiting.

It does not need you to feel fearless.

It needs you to show up.

Anxiety has a particular talent for sounding intelligent. It rarely announces itself as panic. More often, it arrives as caution, preparation, realism, analysis or strategy. It tells you to think a little longer, check the numbers again, revisit the plan, ask for one more opinion or wait until you feel clearer.

Sometimes caution is useful. A founder who never stops to think can do enormous damage. There is nothing noble about recklessness. But there is another kind of thinking that does not lead to clarity at all. It simply circles the same fear under different names.

That kind of thinking feels busy but nothing moves. No call is made. No decision is taken. No truth is spoken. No useful risk is faced. You are not solving the problem. You are rehearsing your fear of it.

I learned this not when things were going badly but when they were going well. That may sound strange because we often associate anxiety with failure: the empty order book, the rejected pitch, the customer who disappears. But growth brings its own anxieties. Success increases the number of people who can be let down. The bigger the opportunity, the more exposed you can feel.

At Computer Telecom Installations, there was a period when the business seemed to be growing faster than my certainty. The order book was strong, the phones were busy, we were winning work across more territories and more people were relying on us. From the outside, it probably looked exciting. Inside, it sometimes felt like standing on the bonnet of a moving car and pretending you had designed the engine.

One particular week brought that feeling into sharp focus. We had several large jobs running at once. Engineers were scattered across sites. Customers wanted updates. Suppliers wanted payment. A delivery had been delayed. A key person was off. Every conversation opened another door and behind every door was another problem waiting.

None of the issues was fatal on its own, which almost made it worse. A genuine crisis can sometimes be clarifying. Everyone knows where to look. But a growing business often creates a fog of smaller anxieties: a late part here, a customer chasing there, a margin slightly thinner than expected, a person stretched beyond capacity, a decision postponed because something louder arrived first.

By the end of that week, my head was full of noise. I went home carrying the business in my chest. I sat at the kitchen table with papers spread out in front of me, looking at numbers I already knew and lists I had already written. I was not solving anything. I was walking around inside the same worry.

Then, late that evening, I stopped trying to feel better and asked a simpler question.

What actually needs doing next?

Not what needed solving forever. Not what would prove I was in control. Just the next useful thing.

The answer was embarrassingly basic. I needed to see the truth in one place. So I made three lists.

The first was cash: what was coming in, what had to go out and where the timing risk sat.

The second was commitments: what had been promised, by when and who owned each action.

The third was people: who was overloaded, who needed support, who could take more responsibility and who needed a clear decision from me.

Within an hour, the fog had edges. The business had not become easy but it had become visible. I could see which problems were real, which were merely noisy and which were being made worse by my delay.

The following morning I went in early. Not with a grand speech or a perfect plan. With a pad, a list and a willingness to move. We called two customers before they had to chase us. We clarified ownership on the urgent jobs. We moved one engineer from a lower-priority task to a higher-risk site. We tightened the cash view for the week. We made decisions that had been waiting for my anxiety to turn into confidence.

Confidence did not arrive first. Action did.

By lunchtime, nothing magical had happened. The business was still stretched. The risks were still there. But the atmosphere had changed because the problems were being handled rather than imagined.

That is the lesson. Anxiety feeds on vagueness. When a worry stays abstract, it grows. When you name it, write it down, break it into parts and take one step, it usually becomes smaller.

Not solved. But visible. And visible is where you start.