About me
I’m Jonathan Symons-Phillips, usually JP. I’ve been starting, building, fixing and shaping businesses for nearly 40 years, from kitchen-table ventures to bigger companies with teams, budgets and structure behind them. What I have seen over and over again is that good ideas do not usually fail because the person behind them is lazy or incapable. They fail because the business was built as if life would politely stay out of the way.
I started my first business at 13, selling candle holders at school. Since then I've started businesses, worked inside other people's, helped build them, helped fix them - it's basically all I've done. And over nearly 40 years of that, I've watched the same thing happen again and again: someone with a good idea and a full life tries to build a business as if it's a separate project running alongside everything else. It never lasts. The businesses that make it are the ones built around real life. The ones demanding you ignore everything else - they always fall apart, it's just a question of when.
I've worked inside corporates, agencies, start-ups and consultancies, so I've seen how businesses operate when they've got teams and budgets and structure behind them. But I've also been the person sitting at a kitchen table with an idea and a spreadsheet, trying to work out if this thing could actually become something. Those are two completely different worlds, and most business advice assumes nothing else is competing for your time, your energy, or your attention.
In 2007 my youngest son had infant reflux. I was sleep-deprived, stressed, and just trying to find something that would help him. There was nothing suitable in the UK, so I imported a wedge from abroad. It worked, and then other parents started asking where they could get one - they were in the same boat, exhausted and desperate for something that actually helped. I created a UK version, and it grew into a proper business. Eventually it became the largest global provider of infant reflux devices, supplying the NHS and other institutions. I didn't start with a business plan or a chunk of funding. I started by solving my own problem, and it turned out other people had the same one. The whole thing was built in the gaps - between feeds, during naps, a few emails at a time. That's how you build something when your life is already full.
I’m best at helping people work out what they are really offering, why it matters, and how to explain it in a way other people understand.
Here's what I think is probably going on for you: you've read plenty of business advice already. You might even know exactly what you should be doing. But you start something, life gets in the way, you lose momentum, and then you feel like you've failed again. And after enough rounds of that, you start to wonder if maybe you're just not the sort of person who can make this work.
You are. The problem isn't you. The problem is that most of what you've been told to do was written by people who've never had to build anything while simultaneously holding the rest of their life together.
If that sounds familiar, start with the book. If you want help applying it to your own situation now, go to Thinking Partner.