Over more than twenty years working inside small and medium businesses - across marketing, sales, operations and management - I kept seeing the same thing.

The jobs I loved? Always came down to a great boss and a team that worked. The roles where I struggled? Almost always traced back to a leader who hadn't figured out the people side.

When I eventually moved into working with small businesses, I started speaking to owner after owner who had never planned to be a manager. They'd built something brilliant - a product, a brand, an aesthetic that was entirely theirs - hired people to help them grow and then found themselves drowning in the very thing that was supposed to make their life easier.

And I noticed something that most coaching and consultancy quietly skips over. When a founder struggles with their team, the standard advice is to make them a better manager - more structure, more accountability, more performance conversations. Which might help. But it also pulls them even further from the work they love and deeper into a role they were never built for. Nobody was asking the more interesting question: what if the founder isn't the problem? What if they just need someone around them who can translate their vision into the team, so they don't have to?

That's the gap nobody was filling. So I decided to fill it.