Everything I did not know when I started BearTech
For most of my career, I knew what the next step looked like. I spent more than twenty years in large organisations, including a FTSE-listed business, leading people and running transformation programmes. There was structure around me: a brand people recognised, teams and budgets, and someone above me who carried the ultimate risk. I was good at that world, and it was comfortable. Then I decided to leave it and start BearTech, and almost none of what had made me comfortable came with me.
I want to be honest about what that was actually like, because the version of founder stories you usually read tends to skip the part where you do not know what you are doing.
Leaving the thing that made sense
Walking away from a senior role in an established business is not a small decision. The salary is real, the pension is real, and the identity that comes with a job title is more real than most of us admit. For years, when someone asked what I did, the answer came with a recognisable name attached. Starting my own company meant trading all of that for an idea and a lot of uncertainty.
The strange part is that leadership experience only takes you so far. I had led large teams and delivered complex change, but I had always done it inside a machine that already existed. Running your own business is not a bigger version of that job. It is a different job entirely, and on day one you are the whole machine.
Not knowing the sector
BearTech builds software, data and AI. My background was not in writing code. It was in people and in change. So on top of learning how to run a business, I was learning a sector from the outside, while trying to lead a company in it.
That meant asking a lot of questions that felt basic, and being willing to look like the least technical person in the room, because I was. I learned quickly that pretending to understand something is far more dangerous than admitting you do not. The people who know their craft respect honest questions. They do not respect bluffing. Some of the most useful things I now understand about our work came from simply admitting, out loud, sorry, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Everything that comes with it
Nobody warns you about the sheer breadth of running a business, especially at the start when it is mostly you. In a corporate role there is a department for almost everything. There is finance, HR, legal, IT, procurement. When you start out, you are all of those departments, usually before lunch.
There were VAT returns and contracts, insurance and invoicing, tools to choose and mistakes to unpick. There were quiet weeks that made me question the whole thing, and busy weeks where the admin buried the actual work. None of it is glamorous, and all of it matters. I have come to think that a big part of building a business is just being willing to do the unglamorous things properly, over and over, until they become normal.
I did not do it entirely alone, and that matters too. My co-founder is also my husband. Running a business with the person you are married to is a whole other article in itself. But building it alongside him, and then with a team, meant I did not have to hold every gap on my own. The responsibility still lands differently when it is your name on the company, but you do not have to carry all of it by yourself.
What I would tell my earlier self
If I could go back to the version of me who was deciding whether to jump, I would not pretend it would be easy, because it was not. I would share a few things I have since learned to believe.
You do not need to know everything before you start. You need to be willing to learn faster than the problems arrive. The corporate world rewards looking certain. Running a business rewards being honest about what you do not know and then closing the gap. And the experience you think does not transfer often does, just not in the way you expected. Leading people, staying calm under pressure, and caring about doing things properly turned out to matter more than any single technical skill.
Starting BearTech with none of the founder experience I probably should have had was daunting. It was also the best decision I have made. Not because it was smooth, but because I learned more in the first year of running my own business than in several years of doing a comfortable job well.
If you are standing where I was, weighing up the safe path against the one that scares you, I will not tell you which to choose. I will only say that not knowing how to do something has never been a good enough reason not to start.
