The Business Had Another Plan

In 2023, I gave myself three months

I did what everyone else did - made a plan, only it wasn’t what the business wanted

In 2023 I gave myself three months.

Six at a push.

I had just been made redundant. The income I had built my life around - gone. And I had a business that existed on paper, in my head, in the work I knew I could do - but wasn't yet producing what I needed it to produce.

Three months. Six at a push. Then I would have to make a different decision.

I didn't make a different decision.

But not because the plan worked…..

Sometime in early 2025 I sat down and wrote a business plan. I decided I should stop winging it and do it properly, the way it had always been done.

Not a rough outline. Not a vision board. A proper plan - executive summary, current state analysis, financial projections broken into quarters, revenue targets by service line, expense forecasts, team structure, marketing strategy.

An insurer reviewed it. She told me it was the most in-depth business plan she had ever seen.

I felt quietly proud that I had been able to write something so impressive, a skill I would actually come in useful along with the hundred of other skills I had developed since setting up my business.

But then I watched almost none of it happen.

Not because the business failed. Because the business had other ideas.

The plan said £240,000 annual revenue. It said I needed a team - a business development person, a VA, a junior compliance specialist, a marketing strategist. It said conversion rates needed improvement. Lead generation needed structure. Paid ads needed exploring.

It was detailed. It was logical. It was exactly the kind of plan that looks right on paper.

My business looked at it and went in a completely different direction, one that the business world doesn’t always recognise, because here is the thing.

my business doesn't follow plans.

She initiates. I follow her.

I didn't fully understand that when I wrote the plan. I was still trying to make her fit a model - the funnel, the team, the structured lead generation campaign. The conditioned version of what a business is supposed to look like from the outside, especially in the online space, where eyes on you, constant social media and funnels have created a whole new industry.

However what actually happened was something else.

No team. No paid ads. No template sales funnel. No conversion rate strategy. No monitoring of metrics.

Instead - referrals. A compliance professional who moved to a new company and came back, carrying the work with her into a new room and asking to introduce me to her new leadership. A Skool community built from scratch. Three books written. A framework that didn't exist in the plan because it hadn't arrived yet. An ecosystem assembled around a frequency rather than a strategy.

I went from halving my income after redundancy to VAT registered.

No plan drove that. No funnel. No team.

The business drove herself, when I finally decided to listen.

In 2024 I asked for help.

It didn't come from where I expected. It never does.

It came through the business itself.

Not through a mentor telling me what to do next. Not through a strategy session or a rebrand or a new offer. Through learning to read what the business was actually holding - what she was trying to become, where the energy was flowing and where it had stalled, what she was building underneath the surface while I was still looking at the metrics wondering why nothing was moving.

That reading changed everything.

Because the plan had a section called Current State Analysis.

It listed strengths, challenges, opportunities, threats. Professional. Thorough. Completely correct about the facts.

But there were questions it never asked.

What is your business actually holding right now - not in the metrics, in the field?

Where has the energy stalled and where is it flowing?

What has dimmed that used to be lit?

What is the business trying to tell you that the spreadsheet cannot capture?

Those are the questions I eventually sat down with.

Not in a planning session. In a reflection.

I ran my own business through a sovereign self-audit - and what came back stopped me.

Energy - she feels alive. 5 out of 5.

Value - 2 out of 5. No feedback. Not sure if any of it is landing.

Money - 2 out of 5. Regular income. An unpaid invoice sitting there pulling energy backward every time I think about it.

Overall flow - four words.

I sense a lack of trust.

 And then the question that matters most.

What is your business trying to tell you?

What came back was this.

I have stopped putting the magic into my work. Like light infusing it.

No quarterly projection shows you that.

No business plan asks you that.

That's what the mirror is for.

This is how I know my business is not a conventional business.

Not because I read it in a framework. Because I watched her ignore every plan I made using my head and build something more coherent than anything I could have designed - and then I learned to read the intelligence behind it.

The Founding Reflection was the beginning of that reading.

Part two is what the year that followed actually built.

The Founding Reflection is a sovereign business self-audit. It lives inside The Library on Skool. $55.

It is the thing to do before the next plan.