It’s not until you work for yourself that you realise how much you need to do.

You are IT support, facilities management, company secretary, accountant, caterer, finance, HR, L&D, and OD. And that’s before you’ve done any of the work you actually set up the business to do.

None of this is particularly hard in isolation. What’s hard is the switching. One minute you’re fixing a microphone issue. The next thing you know, you’re chasing an invoice. Then you’re writing a proposal that needs actual thinking time.

Big organisations hide this complexity behind roles, systems, and buffers. When you’re on your own, there’s nowhere to hide, and every gap is yours.

It changes how you look at “capacity”. Not as time in a diary, but as cognitive bandwidth. What can you realistically hold in your head without dropping quality?

It also changes how you judge other people’s work. When something is late, rough, or incomplete, the question isn’t “Why didn’t they try harder?” It’s “What else were they carrying at the same time?”

Running a small business doesn’t make you superhuman. It makes trade-offs visible.

And once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them.