The Book

If your life keeps interrupting your business, most advice will tell you that you’re the problem. This book is the opposite of that.

The Constrained Founder is for people building under constraint. You’ve probably been handed a hundred tools for productivity and time management, but what if there’s no slack left to optimise? What if the hours are already spoken for and you’re already fully stretched, like a coiled spring? You finish the day thinking, I’m not where I want to be. This is for parents, carers, side-hustlers, introverts, neurodivergent people, people dealing with health stuff, and anyone who’s tired of being told a business only counts if you sacrifice the rest of your life to it. It’s also for anyone who’s realised the advice they’re being given isn’t universal, it’s just loud.

Open your phone and it’s the same script on repeat. You need to post every day. Get on video. Build your personal brand. Same message, different packaging.

This book does not give you a step-by-step plan. That’s not what it’s for. It’s here to do something more basic and, for most people, more necessary.

Here’s what it aims to change:

• It gives you permission to stop treating normal life as proof you are failing.
• It puts language around the gap between mainstream advice and a real, interruption-filled week, so you stop blaming yourself for it.
• It pulls apart the “mindset, discipline, consistency” story when it’s being used as polite blame.
• It helps you feel valid again, so you can think properly instead of making decisions from guilt and panic.
• It changes what “success” means when you’re building under constraint, so you can build something that fits your life instead of trying to escape it.

I wrote it because I got tired of watching the same thing happen. Good people, decent ideas, and plans that collapse the moment Tuesday arrives. I’ve been building businesses for forty years, I’ve got six kids in a blended family, and my brain has never once done what it was told. The book exists because I needed this written down properly, and it didn’t exist anywhere else.