Our Story

Most business advice pretends real life doesn't exist

Another brilliant founder is on the edge of quitting – not because her idea's wrong, but because she's trying to follow business advice written for people who don't live in the real world.

I'm not building The Misfit Engine in some polished boardroom with whiteboards and unlimited coffee. I'm at my dining-room table at 6:47 am because it's the only quiet hour I can guarantee. The Wi-Fi's gone wonky again and I can't get the internet to work properly, which means I'm staring at a spinning wheel instead of the research I need to finish. In about twenty minutes, one of the kids will come downstairs asking if I can give them a lift somewhere, or whether I've seen their charger, or if there's any food that doesn't require actual cooking.

This is how real work gets done. In the gaps between everything else that demands your attention.

Watching the same pattern destroy good founders

After nearly forty years working with organisations like the BBC, IBM, and Ordnance Survey, starting my own marketing agency and launching multiple startups, I've watched founders struggle with the same broken advice over and over again. I know what works and what doesn't, which makes it even more frustrating when I see good people destroying themselves trying to follow frameworks that were never built for actual humans.

I see this same pattern playing out constantly. Just yesterday I was meeting with a founder I've been working with for months. She's brilliant, her idea is solid, but she's exhausted. The business coach she hired before me leans back and says, “You need to be posting content every single day. Define your niche precisely. Build your funnel. Network at evening events.”

I can see the panic in her eyes. She's got two young kids, she's working part-time to pay the bills, and her brain works best in focused blocks when she can get them. I'm thinking, this is madness. Why are we still pretending this approach works?

I watch my client's face. She's trying so hard to make herself fit into this framework, and I can see it's killing her confidence piece by piece.

She thinks she's the problem because she can't keep up with someone else's definition of how business gets done.

It's the system, not the founders

This is when I realise I've been watching the same pattern destroy good founders for three decades. They get brilliant ideas. They seek out business advice. They get handed frameworks designed for people with infinite time and energy. They burn out. They quit. They blame themselves for not being strong enough or committed enough.

But it's not them. It's the system.

Right in the middle of this meeting, my phone buzzes. It's one of the kids asking if I can pick them up from a party later because their friend who was supposed to give them a lift has just cancelled. I text back quickly and put the phone away, but it perfectly illustrates the point. Real life doesn't stop because you're trying to build a business.

When I get home, there's water everywhere because the kitchen sink's started leaking and I need to crawl under there with a wrench to figure out what's gone wrong. This is my evening of “networking at industry events” apparently.

The founders who make it aren't the ones who follow the textbook advice. They're the people who work with their brain patterns instead of against them. The parents who build around real-life chaos. The founders managing chronic conditions who know that consistency doesn't mean intensity – it means sustainability.

They don't succeed because they manage to become different people. They succeed because they stop trying to fit into someone else's blueprint and start building something that works with who they actually are.

Building something that works with real constraints

So I start developing something different. Not another course that tells people what they should be doing, but a system that meets them where they are and helps them build from there. Something that still works when you've had three hours of sleep, when your brain isn't cooperating, when you've missed two weeks because life happened and you need to restart without shame.

The Misfit Engine gets built through months of serious work, constant iteration, and starting over more times than I care to count. But it gets built despite the interruptions, not in some mythical distraction-free zone that doesn't exist for most of us.

When I finally had something ready to test, I went to my army of beta testers – all overwhelmed founders who desperately needed this kind of system. Most of them didn't even start testing because they said there was too much overwhelm and they couldn't get going.

We'd built a system for overwhelmed people and tested it with overwhelmed people who were too overwhelmed to test it.

That's when I knew the system couldn't just be clever – it had to be kind.

So we stripped it back even further. Instead of delivering everything at once, we adapted it to work one step at a time without looking too far ahead. Before you know it, you're on your journey racking up steps toward your destination, but you never feel overwhelmed by the distance still to travel.

What we actually built together

The Misfit Engine isn't polished corporate consulting. It's not motivational speaking. It's practical tools shaped by real founders dealing with real constraints.

We watched people struggle to follow the rules – not because they weren't trying, but because the rules didn't fit the way their lives worked. So every framework got stress-tested by people juggling actual responsibilities. Every step got simplified because beta testers said “this is still too much for my Tuesday.” The system had to bend around real human capacity, not the other way around.

Most importantly, it's built around a simple truth I've learned from working with hundreds of founders over three decades: you don't need to become someone else to build something meaningful. You just need tools that work with who you already are, rather than against who you think you should become.

If that sounds familiar, you're exactly why this exists. You're not broken. You're not behind. You're not asking for too much.

You're just trying to build something that fits your actual life, and most business advice was never written with that reality in mind. You don't need another guru telling you to want it more or work harder.

You need a system that doesn't fall apart the moment you do.

That's what this is.