Learning From Mistakes and Mentors Lessons from 20 years in business

I've been in business for more than two decades across three countries, building companies from scratch, buying others, scaling them, and selling them. In that time, I've had incredible wins and huge setbacks, and two truths have become apparent: I've learned more from my failures than my successes, and my mentors have taught me more than any business school could.

When I started my first company, I thought success was dependent on working harder than anyone else. But there are so many lessons I've learned since then which have taught me what really goes into building a prosperous business. In the last 20 years, I've led companies across multiple sectors including property, digital marketing, M&A advisory and AI-powered lead generation. Some were more successful than I ever expected, and other failed in ways I never saw coming. But all of them taught me something.

Multiple ventures, countless lessons:

1. Businesses can't scale without proper foundations
At the start of my career, I was obsessed with growth. I constantly sought more clients, more employees and more revenue. But without tested and proven processes and systems in place to support that growth, I was simply scaling chaos not a business. By trying to build a skyscraper without first laying down stable foundations, I was actually building a house of cards. When this happens, staff turnover increases, client delivery becomes inconsistent, and you burnout trying to create order from the chaos. Get the basics right, and only then can you scale properly.

2. Processes are not optional
Customising every project and giving staff free reign to operate in a way that works for them might be fine in the beginning. But eventually without documentation in place, things start to fall apart. There's no standard onboarding, delivery or support process so quality can become inconsistent. The larger your team gets, the harder it becomes to manage everyone doing things in a totally different way. And you have to sign off everything personally because there's no system for anyone to follow. Without processes, scaling becomes almost impossible. Implementing documentation which sets out the way everything works might not seem like the most exciting task, but it will save endless time and energy in the long-run, giving you a base from which to scale up.

3. Less can be more if you hire the right people
Having 50, or 100, or 1,000 people in your business might sound impressive – but if the majority of them are simply there to help you hit a headcount target, then you might as well have far fewer. Hiring people who will make a real impact to your business and help you solve specific problems is the goal, not simply adding to the payroll for no real reason other than optics. By focusing on profit per employee and quality over quantity, you'll end up with a small but mighty team around you.

4. Automation is a necessity
Automation doesn't replace humans – it frees them to focus on high-value work like strategy, relationships and creativity. For years, I resisted automation because I wanted to be a 'people business'; but I was missing the point that you can actually empower and improve team performance by taking manual, mundane tasks off their workload to enable them to focus on projects which require judgement and reasoning. Data entry, reporting, prospecting, follow-ups: these can all be undertaken automatically to help reduce workload and the possibility of burnout, while freeing your team to do what they do best.

5. Revenue matters less than profit per employee
A high revenue might look good – but it doesn't pay the bills. Profit does. One of my businesses was high-revenue but had terrible margins, meaning we were busy but not profitable, with cash flow problems and constant stress about making payroll. If you focus on profit per employee and net margin instead, you can ensure success that doesn't just look good on paper, because your business is genuinely healthy.

Putting it into practice
Now, when I talk to new founders with the benefit of 20 years of business leadership behind me, I tell them that failure is inevitable – but you can choose how you fail. Fail small, fail fast, fail forward, and learn from every mistake. I tell them to put a system in place before they build a team, ensuring processes are documented and tasks are automated ahead of any hiring. When they ask about AI, I tell them the future is about humans working with AI not against it. When it comes to metrics, I tell them to focus on what matters: profit per employee, net margin, and customer lifetime value – because revenue does not determine survival, but those numbers do. And most of all, I tell them that the best lessons come from people who've already made all of the mistakes. Find mentors, listen to them, and apply their wisdom.

Because it was my mentors who taught me that businesses which survive aren't the fastest-growing, they're the ones with the strongest foundations; that the most valuable businesses are those with the best systems not the most employees; and that unless you build systems that work without you, you'll end up working every hour of every day – with no time to enjoy the success that you've worked so hard for. It might seem like a cliché, but if I could have my time over I wouldn't erase any of the mistakes I made – because they have all taught me something valuable. And I'd definitely never change the two things I know I have got right: learning from my mistakes, and learning from my mentors. They have defined my career, defined my success, and they should define yours too.