What failure taught me about building a business

Earlier this week, I was in Cardiff speaking to a room of business owners at a Zokit networking mixer. Neil Lloyd had asked me to share a talk, and I'd said yes, partly because I think these rooms are full of people who deserve more than the polished version of someone else's business journey.

So I told them mine.

Not the version with the rounded edges and the neat ending. The actual one. The one where Dave and I built a creative agency from a kitchen-table idea into a team of people we genuinely loved working with. The one where we closed that business in December 2023 because we'd left some decisions too late. And the one where, in the time since, I've had to work out what comes next.

If you weren't in the room, this is the written version of it.

Why I'm telling this story at all

Most of what we read about business is the win.

The growth chart. The funding round. The rebrand reveal. The "I'm thrilled to announce" post. There is nothing wrong with any of that. Wins matter, and the people doing well deserve to celebrate them. But the longer I've been doing this, the more I think the most useful stories are the ones happening just behind the headline. The Sunday night spreadsheet panic. The conversation with the accountant you didn't post about. The decision you knew you should have made six months ago. The team you love and don't want to disappoint.

Those are the stories that make business feel less lonely. So I'm going to try to be more honest about them, starting with this one.

The short version of Tiny Wizard

In 2012, I left employment. Partly because being told what to do all day wasn't really for me, and partly because Dave talked me into believing I could actually do this. I started out as a freelance designer under "As Jessica Draws". Dave joined me. Together we grew it into Tiny Wizard Studio.

For a long stretch, things were good. A team I was proud of, a strong client base, a reputation we had earned.

Then the business started drifting away from why we'd built it.

We took on bigger clients, which we assumed meant safer growth. In practice, it meant longer payment terms, more complexity and more pressure. The business looked bigger on paper, and quietly became heavier to carry. The original point, which had been more freedom and more time with our children, was getting harder to find inside our own diaries.

Then 2020 happened. From a business perspective, Covid actually worked in our favour. We pivoted quickly into digital and animation, and demand was there. Personally, it was a much harder story. I lost my dad at the start of 2020, then my grandparents over the year that followed, and I didn't make any real space to deal with any of it. I just kept going, because that is what you do when people are relying on you.

By 2023, the picture had shifted again. Work got patchier. Budgets tightened. Clients started saying they could do more in-house with AI. And honestly, I had fallen out of love with the business. My drive had gone. My social battery was empty. I withdrew from the activity that had once filled the pipeline, and the pipeline noticed.

By September we could see we'd run out of cash by Christmas. We had every conversation you can have with accountants and advisers, but we had left it too late. There was a near miss with an acquisition, but the terms weren't right, and the team we cared about wouldn't all have been kept. So Dave and I made the decision to close.

Telling the team was the worst day of my working life. What happened afterwards is something I'll always remember. They stayed. They helped us hand work over, clear the office and support clients through the transition. With no contractual reason to be there. For everything we got wrong commercially, that moment told us the culture we had built was real.

We closed Tiny Wizard on 19th December 2023.

Five things I took from it

If I had understood any of these properly a year or two earlier, the ending might have looked different. I'm sharing them in case it saves someone else from learning them the same way.

1. What people see is rarely the full picture.

When the closure became public, a lot of people said, "I had no idea, everything looked so positive online." Of course it did. We weren't going to post that we were struggling. That isn't what marketing does. So if you are scrolling LinkedIn and comparing your messy reality to someone else's neat headline, please remember: you are not seeing the whole thing. Almost nobody is showing you the whole thing.

2. Culture matters most when things go wrong.

Culture isn't the snacks or the values on the website. It is what people do under pressure. The way our team showed up at the end, with no contractual reason to, told me more about the environment we had built than any "great place to work" award ever could. Culture is the bit you only really test in a crisis. Build it for that, not for the careers page.

3. Your network is a survival kit.

Not in a transactional, "let's grab a coffee" way. In a real way. After the closure went public, I started telling people the truth and asking for help. My network turned up. On 2nd January, I started a Marketing Director role at a tech company in Oxford, through someone who knew my work and backed me at a point when my confidence was on the floor. Other consultancy work followed. The relationships you build before you need them are often what carry you through when you do.

4. Know your numbers, and make the hard call earlier.

This is the practical one. We cared deeply about the work and the people, and that made us slower to do things the numbers were quietly asking us to do. Downsize earlier. Renegotiate terms. Cut what was not working. Emotion got in the way of decisions, and delaying them only made them bigger and more expensive when we finally faced them. If your numbers are telling you something uncomfortable, that is the moment to listen, not the moment to hope.

5. We need to talk more honestly about failure.

Not as a vulnerability brand. Not as oversharing for engagement. Just as part of the actual landscape of business ownership. If the only stories we tell are the wins, anyone in a hard season feels like they're the only one in it. They aren't. Bad months, wrong calls, pressure, doubt: these are far more common than we admit in public, and naming them takes some of their power away.

Where I am now

I'm building again, just differently.

Alchemy is the brand and creative studio Dave and I are growing in this next chapter, with a much sharper sense of what we want it to be and what we don't. Alongside that, I'm doing consultancy and commercial leadership work, helping founders and growing businesses make clearer decisions about brand, marketing, sales and growth. And I've started Brand to Scale, the podcast, because the honest conversations I needed to hear two years ago are the ones I now want to be having on the record with other business owners.

The business failed. That didn't mean I was finished. It turns out a lot of what I had built was still here: the skills, the relationships, the instincts. It just needed a different container.

If any of this resonated

If you are in a hard season, or quietly carrying more than the people around you realise, I hope it helps to know you are not the only one. One failure doesn't get to decide the rest of your story.

A couple of practical notes, if they're useful.

If you are a founder or business owner who would be up for an honest conversation on the podcast, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Brand to Scale is built around the kind of real conversations I have been describing here. You can listen and apply to be a guest at brandtoscale.co.uk.

And if you run a network, event or community where a talk like this one would land well, I'm taking a small number of speaking slots over the coming months. Drop me a line and we can have a chat.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Neil and everyone at Zokit for the invitation, and to the room in Cardiff for being so generous with your attention.