I have faded in the back half of enough races to respect what the second half does to you.
The first half feels manageable. The pace sits easy, especially with the start line adrenaline still flowing, and it is tempting to go out harder than you should. The athletes who finish well are the ones who did the work required to be on the start line, held something back early, and trusted the work they had done. Completing the second half faster than the first is called a negative split, and it is one of the harder things to do well.
Notion Capital published a report at the end of last year, The Negative Split, that borrows the idea for founders. It draws on more than 100 venture-backed founders, and it notes that the strain of building a company tends to arrive late, once the long hours, the isolation and the investor pressure have had time to compound. Interestingly the founders working the longest hours often did not feel burned out, while some on ordinary weeks did. Endurance, the report suggests, is less about the hours and more about how well you adapt to the strain.
The report is an insightful read and provides helpful tips on how founders can manage that strain. But it’s not just the founder, it’s also the business that needs to endure.
A founder can pace their body and their mind well and still not reach the finish, because the business is running its own race alongside them. Whether a company can run its second half faster is mostly a financial question. It comes down to how much runway there is, whether working capital has been factored in correctly, whether margin survives the discounting that peak season demands, how much stock was committed against a forecast that wanted to be true, and whether the founder’s own pay is hiding how the business is doing.
None of that is visible until the numbers are clear. You cannot pace what you cannot see. From my experience in finance, effort was rarely the missing piece. It was having a clear financial picture, and being able to understand what the numbers meant in time to make the right decision.
Personal endurance and financial endurance are two races to the same finish line. Tending one while ignoring the other still ends in a fade. The work I care about is making the financial side clear enough that a founder can pace the whole distance and reach the part that counts with something left.
Phoenix Advisory is an advisory-led accountancy practice providing Portfolio FD 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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