When I started Sowena, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into.
I’d been in recruitment for a decade. I understood clients, candidates, the market and the graft.
I figured that if I could do recruitment with my eyes shut, surely doing it with my own logo on the door would be a natural progression.
What nobody tells you is how quickly your expertise becomes the least important part of your job.
For the first six months, it was just me sat at my kitchen table, doing the thing I was good at.
No issues. Then suddenly the business had an office. A team. Bills. Overheads. A website. Operations. Marketing. Processes. Problems. People.
There’s no handbook for that transition.
One day you’re a recruiter; the next, you’re expected to be an expert in everything from cash flow to commercial leases.
Department store of one
Founding a business means becoming a department store of one.
Before you have specialists, you are the specialist.
In every single department. If something breaks, it’s yours to fix.
If something needs deciding, you’re the only one in the room.
You quickly learn that the glamorous parts of entrepreneurship make up about 1 per cent of the job. The other 99 per cent is admin, firefighting and figuring out things you didn’t even know existed.
Nobody warns you that you’ll spend your mornings chasing invoices, your afternoons working on brand messaging, and your evenings catching up on the endless stream of emails (usually containing even more decisions that need making).
And the truth is, you internalise all of it. Every decision, every unknown, every pound spent or saved — it all sits on your shoulders.
In the early days, there’s no board, no leadership team and no inherited wisdom.
You make the decisions alone, and you live with them. You carry the what-ifs around like loose change in your pocket.
It’s noisy, it’s heavy, and it’s part of the job nobody really talks about because founders feel they have to look like they’re breezing through it.
Yet the biggest surprise for me came later: the moment your business starts to grow, you have to stop doing the thing you’re best at.
This hit me hard. My instinct has always been to roll up my sleeves and crack on. If there was a difficult role to fill, I’d dive in.
If a client needed attention, I wanted to be the one who called them. It’s what I know. It’s how I’ve built my career.
But a business that depends on its founder for everything will eventually hit a ceiling – and that ceiling is you.
Don’t be a bottleneck
You can’t be the bottleneck and the leader at the same time.
Two years in, I’m learning to step back. Not in a detached way, but in a deliberate, strategic one.
I’m learning to let my team recruit. To let them own their roles. To let them make decisions, solve problems and grow without me hovering over every detail.
That doesn’t mean stepping away from responsibility; it just means changing the type of responsibility.
My job now is less about being the engine and more about being the driver.
To oversee, coach, support and step in only when it genuinely moves the business forward.
And if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: being a founder doesn’t mean you need to be brilliant at everything. In fact, trying to be is a guaranteed way to hold your business back.
You just need to surround yourself with people who can do the things you can’t, and who are better than you in the areas that matter.
Getting support isn’t weakness; it’s understanding where you flourish and trusting others to fill the gaps where you don’t.