I spent a Saturday morning this month at the Health Optimisation Summit in London listening to Bear Grylls, unscripted. It is a health optimisation event, the same world a lot of founder-led brands build in, and he opened the weekend. Grylls went through Reserve SAS selection at twenty and has spent the years since in places where poor judgement carries a price. He was asked early on whether he was born resilient, and three things he said that morning apply directly to how a founder builds a business.
His answer was no. He was uneasy with the idea that he is super resilient, is not sure he is, and as he gets older realises he is much more fragile than the TV shows make out. Resilience is not handed out, so it is available to everybody. School rewards the sporty, the academic and the good looking, none of which turns out to be the currency of adult life. The quiet child who keeps turning up, keeps trying and gets back on his feet is the one who tends to do well later. Resilience is an inner muscle, built like any muscle out of repetitions too small to register. “The little stuff is the big stuff.”
A business builds its resilience in the same place: in its processes, the small repeated acts nobody notices until they stop. The month-end that closes on time when nothing is wrong. The cash forecast kept current through a quiet month. The written procedure that keeps finance running while the one person who knows how is away. None of it is interesting, and all of it holds when a manufacturer misses a run, a marketplace changes its terms or peak season comes in short. With those routines a bad month is a bad month. Without them it is a crisis.
The second thing was about leadership. Most of the models on show now are look at me, he said: on stage, on display, everything about them. It is inherently weak: “As soon as you make it about you, your power goes.” Great leadership runs the other way. Look at you, look what you can do, I will stand beside you while you do it. It is quieter, it builds people, and it has its own arithmetic: survival maths says one plus one with the right person makes five. His last word on it: “Leave the ego at home.”
Founder-led businesses drift towards look at me, rarely through arrogance. The founder is the story, the wins carry their name, and everyone else waits for the answer. The look at you version starts at hiring. Hire people better than you at the job, finance included, then build them up: give them the real numbers, the worrying ones too, let them present the month to the team, and give them the credit when it comes in on time. And be the example: a team works to the standard it watches the founder keep. Turning up to the monthly review, reading it straight and owning what went wrong sets that standard. Built up that way, the right person is the one plus one that makes five, and the business goes up with them.
The last was risk. Our job in life, he said, is to get good at handling risk, because that is where the rewards go. He quoted the mountaineers’ line about being ninety-nine percent cautious and one percent reckless, and added the part that is his: “The game is knowing when to play your one percent card.” Then he described taking scouts into a storm: a plan, an assessment of the dangers, a decision to go. The children felt they were climbing Everest; nothing dangerous happened, because the risk was assessed before anyone moved.
That is the model, in two halves. The first is knowing the risks and putting a number on them. How much revenue runs through one marketplace or one contract manufacturer. What the peak-season stock commitment does to cash if the season lands 20 percent short. What the exchange rate does to margin on the next purchase order. Most of it is measurable, most goes unmeasured, and the founder runs on feel. The second half is what measurement buys you: the one percent card. A new market, a hire ahead of revenue, a large stock bet: each is only reckless while the downside is unsized. Sized, the same move is a plan, an assessment and a decision to go.
The capacity to play the one percent well is built earlier, in routines that hold when it gets hard and people who can carry the business without the founder there. Grylls called resilience the inner muscle. A business has one too, and it is built the same way, in the little stuff, long before it is needed.
About Phoenix Advisory.
Phoenix Advisory is an advisory-led accountancy practice providing Fractional CFO support to founder-led UK Ltd businesses, primarily health-optimisation brands in e-commerce, and a small number of selective professional services firms. We help founders build the clarity, stability and momentum to scale profitably while designing the life behind the business. Where it helps, we also provide compliance services, so founders work with one team rather than coordinating three. Every engagement begins with a free thirty-minute Discovery Call.
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