Author: Steve Rowbotham, founder & CEO, Navigator

My dad told me my life would change when I became a father. I smiled, nodded, thanked him for the wisdom and had absolutely no idea what he meant until my son arrived.

There is no amount of reading or preparing that gets you there – you only understand it by living it.

Founding a company is exactly the same. I’ve spent time in environments that demand everything from you – particularly rowing for Team GB at the Olympics – and I still walked into building Navigator without truly grasping what it would ask of me.

You can talk to founders and study the frameworks but none of it fully lands until you’re the one making the calls and discovering at close range how to carry the weight and what you’re actually made of. It becomes apparent that the gap between knowing something intellectually and understanding it in your bones is wider than most people realise.

Here’s what I was least prepared for, though, and it isn’t what most people would expect. It wasn’t the difficulty, the pressure, the sleepless nights or even the moments where the path forward wasn’t clear. All of that I had braced myself for, at least in theory. What I genuinely wasn’t ready for was the generosity.