I didn’t set out to become a company of one. In fact, when I first began shaping the business, I had two co-founders alongside me who played an important role in testing whether the idea had any real substance. They challenged my early thinking, questioned my rationale, pushed on my business model and, perhaps most usefully of all, tested my resolve. At that stage, the business was still more possibility than reality, and their job was not to agree with me but to make sure I could explain why I believed in what I was building.
That mattered because I have never been particularly interested in being the person with the winning idea. I care much more about the best idea winning. Over the years, that has meant learning to look directly at my own gaps, oversights and biases, debating and to let go of an idea when something stronger emerges. I do not see that as a loss of authority. If anything, I think it is one of the more important disciplines in professional life. Expertise should make us more discerning, not more defensive.
My co-founders helped me practise that discipline from the start. They questioned everything from pricing and positioning to fonts, colours, website design, research standards, operational practices, marketing and finance. They put early versions of the product into the hands of testers and helped me interpret the feedback. Their involvement led to changes in the research, the design, the layout and the learning experience itself. They made the work better, and they continue to serve as advisors, mentors and trusted challengers, even though the day-to-day reality of the business now sits with me.
They have full-time jobs, families and lives of their own, so while they helped shape the business, they are not running it. That distinction has become more obvious as the business has grown. At the moment, I am the person doing all of the work required to keep it moving. On any given day I can move between being the CEO, researcher, learning experience designer, technology lead, AI builder, graphic designer, marketer, administrator, finance manager, website builder, social media manager, business strategist and customer support team. I am also still working with clients on bespoke learning solutions, coaching and mentoring people in my network, and continuing to develop the products themselves.
It is a lot to hold, and there are days when the sheer number of roles can feel slightly absurd. I can spend the morning thinking deeply about learning research, move into a technical problem with an AI assistant, switch to a design decision, answer a client question, review a piece of website copy and then discover that something financial or administrative has been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for attention. The work stretches me because the business asks me to move constantly between different kinds of thinking, and there is no large team behind the curtain waiting to pick up whatever I do not have time to finish.
And yet, somewhere in the middle of all that, I realised something that felt strangely familiar.
For most of my career, I have been interested in one central question: how do people actually build capability?
After 23 years in learning and development, working with teams ranging from ten people to organisations of more than 100,000, I have seen a great deal of learning delivered and a great deal of learning fail. I have led teams, built facilitated workshops used by tens of thousands of people, created programs aimed at practical behaviour change, and designed learning that contributed to improvements in safety, efficiency, engagement, teamwork and operational performance. Some of that work reduced duplicated effort and errors. Some of it saved organisations significant amounts of money. All of it taught me something about the difference between presenting information and helping people change how they work.
What I kept seeing, again and again, was that people rarely build real capability in one dramatic leap. They learn something small, they put it into practice, and they discover what it means in the reality of their own work. Then, once that skill or idea has begun to settle, they add another layer. Complexity grows gradually. Confidence grows with it. Eventually, what once felt new begins to feel natural.
That observation became one of the foundations of the learning system I have built. The model is deliberately designed around small pieces of learning that can be practised, integrated and built upon over time. It is evidence-backed, but it is also deeply practical. I have little interest in learning that sounds impressive but fails when it meets the working day. I want people to leave a session with something they can actually use, and I want each piece of learning to make the next one easier to absorb.
When I first tested that thinking with my co-founders, this was the part I felt most certain about. I knew the learning design itself had substance because it had been shaped by decades of practice, research, experimentation and refinement. The harder questions were not about whether the method worked. They were about what kind of business I wanted to build around it.
Pricing became one of the most persistent areas of debate.
My co-founders have both worked with learning companies and have seen what organisations are willing to pay for good work. They looked at what I had built and repeatedly challenged me to charge more. From their perspective, the quality of the system, the depth of the research and the accumulated experience behind it justified a much higher price. I understood that argument then, and I understand it now.
I am not uncertain about the value of the work.
I know what sits underneath the framework. I know the years of experience that have been distilled into it, the mistakes that informed it, the evidence that shaped it and the standards I have applied to it. I know what similar work can cost when it is built for large organisations, particularly when it involves bespoke consulting, design and implementation. I also know that, in another kind of business, the same intellectual property could be positioned very differently and sold for vastly more.
But knowing what something could command in the market is not the same as deciding what you want it to do in the world.
That has been the more important question for me.
I have never attached much personal meaning to accumulating money. That does not mean I am naïve about the need for a business to be financially viable. A business that cannot sustain itself eventually stops helping anyone. But money has never been the thing I was trying to optimise. What I have always valued more is the usefulness of the work, the quality of the relationships around it, and the possibility that something I create might help people think more clearly, work more effectively or grow together.
That is why access matters so much to me.
I could make the business more bespoke and focus on customers with larger budgets. There would be a straightforward commercial logic to that. Large organisations can afford to commission tailored work, and there is certainly nothing wrong with serving them. In fact, the model I have created could be extremely valuable in large businesses because once a workshop is purchased, it can be used many times across the organisation, making the cost per learner remarkably low.
But I do not want quality learning to be available only to companies with deep pockets or large internal learning functions. I want a small business, a team leader, or a growing organisation with limited resources to be able to access something that has been designed with the same level of care and rigour.
That is why the commercial model matters almost as much as the learning model.
If someone buys a workshop, I want them to be able to keep using it. I do not want the value to disappear at the end of a licence period or require another payment every time a new group needs to learn. If the material is useful, then I want its usefulness to increase with use. A workshop bought once and run repeatedly can eventually cost pennies per learner, and that is not a flaw in the model. It is one of the things I most value about it.
There is something satisfying to me about the idea that the economics of the product mirror the philosophy of the learning itself. Capability accumulates over time, and so does value. One investment can continue to generate benefit long after the initial purchase, provided people keep putting the learning into practice.
Of course, the question of altruism still needs some discipline around it. Good intentions do not pay invoices, and generosity without sustainability is not much of a business model. My co-founders have helped me see that clearly. Their challenge has been useful because it has forced me to think carefully about the difference between accessibility and underpricing. I do not want to make the work cheap in a way that diminishes it or makes the business fragile. What I want is to make it accessible without making it disposable, and sustainable without allowing the commercial model to dictate the purpose of the work.
I am still learning where that balance sits.
Perhaps that is what has surprised me most about becoming a company of one. For decades, my professional life has revolved around helping other people build capability, yet I now find myself applying the same principles to my own work almost every day.
I did not suddenly become capable of running a business. I learned how to do one thing, then another. I learned enough about website design to build what I needed. I developed enough understanding of branding and visual communication to make informed decisions. I learned more about finance, marketing, operations, social platforms and digital tools. I deepened my work with AI, building learning assistants, research agents and quality-control processes that support the system around the products. Each time I reached the edge of what I knew, the business gave me another reason to learn.
That realisation made me smile because, in a way, I had built a business that was quietly forcing me to live inside my own learning philosophy.
Learn one thing. Practise it. Integrate it. Add another layer.
There is some reassurance in that, although I would be lying if I said it always feels comfortable. Running a company of one creates a particular kind of freedom, but it also removes some convenient places to hide. There is no large structure to absorb a mistake. There is no committee to blame when something does not work. There is no senior stakeholder to point to when a decision turns out to be wrong. The responsibility sits very close.
At the same time, that closeness gives me something I have rarely had in quite the same way before: the ability to protect the integrity of the work.
I can listen to feedback and change what needs changing. I can test ideas against evidence. I can refine the research, the design and the experience. I can admit when something is not good enough and rebuild it. What I do not have to do is watch the work get slowly diluted by people changing it because of personal preference rather than evidence.
I have seen good learning die that way more than once.
Usually, it does not happen dramatically. Nobody walks into a room and announces that they are about to make the work worse. It happens gradually. Someone adds something because they think it is important. Someone else removes something because it makes them uncomfortable. A stakeholder asks for more context. Another asks for more content. A simple idea becomes crowded with explanations until the design is carrying the weight of every opinion in the room.
By the time everyone is satisfied, the thing that made the learning useful can be difficult to find.
There is a freedom in being able to resist that, and I do not take it lightly. The point is not to protect the work from challenge. Challenge has made the work better from the beginning. The point is to distinguish between challenge that sharpens an idea and interference that simply reshapes it around hierarchy, preference or habit.
For now, that responsibility is mine.
So is everything else.
That can make the working day feel very full, but the business is not the whole of my life and I do not want it to become that. At some point, the laptop closes and other things matter more. I am a husband and a stepfather. I draw and doodle. I walk my dog. I cuddle my cat (whether she likes it or not). I look after my food garden and do the endless small jobs that come with maintaining a yard, which lately has including filling in the test holes the wombats are digging throughout my back garden! Those parts of life are not distractions from the work. They are part of what keeps the work in proportion.
I suspect that may be another lesson in all of this.
A company of one could easily become a life of one if I let the business consume me. I am trying not to do that. I want the work to matter, but I also want to remain connected to the life around it, because that is where much of the meaning sits for me anyway.
When I think about what I am building now, I can see the same pattern running through almost every part of it. The learning products themselves are built one small thing at a time. The business has grown one capability at a time. My confidence in what I am doing has grown in much the same way, not because I suddenly arrived at certainty, but because I kept testing, learning, adjusting and carrying forward what worked.
After more than two decades spent helping other people learn, there is something quietly fitting about finding myself back in the learner’s seat.
Perhaps that is what becoming a company of one really means for me. Not becoming one person who can do everything, but becoming someone willing to keep learning the next thing that matters, without losing sight of why I started.
And then, when that thing has become part of me, adding another.