I didn't quit my job to build a business. I built three, while I kept it.

This is the long version of how I got here, and why I now spend my time helping people like you do the same thing, without the leap of faith everyone tells you that you need.

If you're reading this, I'm guessing you already know the feeling. You've got a job. Probably a decent one, the kind that pays the mortgage, that your parents are quietly proud of, that you'd be mad to just walk away from. And somewhere underneath that stability, there's a second thing running: an idea, a skill you know is worth money, a business you keep sketching out on the notes app on your phone at 11pm and then never opening again.You're not lazy. You're not lacking ambition. You are, in fact, probably one of the more capable people in your building. What you're lacking is time, and if I'm honest about what I hear from almost everyone I talk to, permission. Permission to build something of your own without first blowing up the life you've already worked hard for.That's the problem this whole site, this whole programme, and this whole page exists to solve. So before I tell you about me, I want to tell you about the story we've all been sold, because I think it's the real villain here, not you, not your job, not your circumstances.

The lie of "all in"

Open any business book, scroll any founder's LinkedIn, watch any interview with someone who "made it," and you'll hear some version of the same story: they quit their job, burned the boats, slept on a friend's sofa, bet everything on one idea, and came out the other side rich and free. It's a good story. It's dramatic. It sells books and gets views. It is also, for almost everyone with a mortgage, a family, or a pension they'd like to keep contributing to, completely useless advice.Hustle culture has convinced an entire generation of genuinely capable people that the only legitimate way to build a business is to go all in on day one. No safety net, no plan B, no steady income while you figure out if anyone will actually pay for what you're building. And because that story is everywhere, the quieter, more sensible path (build it alongside your job, prove it works, then decide) barely gets talked about at all. So people wait. They wait for the "right time" to go all in, which never comes, because going all in on an untested idea is a genuinely terrible decision, and some part of them knows it.Here's what I believe, and it's the whole foundation of how I coach: you shouldn't have to gamble everything to build something of your own. A steady job and a growing business aren't opposites. They can run at the same time, for as long as you need them to, until the business earns the right to stand on its own. That's not a compromise. That's just the sane way to do this.

Eighteen years, three businesses, one job I kept

I've been in tech for eighteen years now, and for most of that time I've had a foot in both worlds, building companies of my own while also holding down full-time roles inside other people's. It wasn't a plan I wrote down on a whiteboard one day. It's just how things unfolded, one decision at a time, and looking back, it turned out to be the thing that actually worked.It started in India, where I founded a software development company from nothing. No investors, no safety net beyond my own savings, just a laptop, a handful of early clients, and a lot of long nights. I grew that company to fifteen people working under me full time. Real payroll, real clients, real deadlines, real pressure. I remember the first month I had to make payroll for fifteen people out of money I hadn't fully collected yet, lying awake doing the maths over and over, because there's a very specific kind of stress that only shows up once other people's rent depends on decisions you made. I learned more in those years about how a business actually survives, cash flow, hiring, delivering under pressure, the gap between a good idea and a paying customer, than any course or book had ever taught me.Then I moved to the UK. New country, new rules, and I went back to being a student to complete my Masters, starting over in a lot of ways, which is its own kind of humbling after you've run a company. I went from signing off on other people's salaries to queuing for a student ID card, and there's a lesson in that alone: building something once doesn't mean you get to skip the hard parts next time. You still have to start again, from wherever you actually are.From there I moved into the corporate world, working across several multinational companies, learning how business gets done at a completely different scale. Bigger systems, bigger teams, bigger stakes, and a steady paycheck that, for the first time in years, I didn't have to personally guarantee. I won't pretend that transition wasn't a relief. After years of being personally on the hook for fifteen salaries, there was something genuinely restful about a job where the company's cash flow wasn't my problem to solve at 2am.I could have stopped there. A lot of people do, and there's no shame in it. A good corporate career is a genuinely good life, and I'm not here to talk anyone out of one. But the founder in me never actually went away. It just went quiet for a while, running in the background, the way I suspect yours might be right now, underneath whatever job title is on your email signature. So alongside the job, I started building again, not because I needed the money, but because that itch to build something of my own had never actually gone anywhere. It had just been waiting for me to stop pretending it wasn't there.

What I've built, while still clocking in

I want to be specific here, because vague claims of "success" are exactly the kind of thing that got us into this hustle-culture mess in the first place. So here's the actual record, built while I held down full-time employment the entire time.

Card WalletA loyalty card app that grew to 55,000 users, storing over half a million loyalty cards. Built to solve a problem I had myself, a wallet full of plastic cards I never wanted to carry, and it turned out hundreds of thousands of other people had the exact same problem.

EranolA video editing automation product now used by more than 1,000 customers. Built at the intersection of two things I know well, software and the tedious, repeatable work that people will happily pay to never do again.

The Founders PodcastOver 200 conversations with millionaire founders and counting, now with paid sponsors backing the show. Every single one of those conversations has taught me something about how real businesses actually get built, and confirmed, again and again, that the "quit your job and pray" story is the exception, not the rule.

None of these started as a leap into the unknown. Every one of them started small, on the side, tested against real people who were willing to actually pay for it, while a salary kept the lights on and the pressure off. That's not a lesser way to build a business. Having done it three times now, I'd argue it's the smarter way.Card Wallet taught me that a business doesn't need a grand mission statement to work. It needs a real, specific annoyance that enough people share, and a simple way to make that annoyance go away. I built the first version in the evenings after work, tested it on friends and colleagues who all carried the same overstuffed wallet I did, and only kept going once people who weren't obligated to be nice to me started asking when the next feature was coming.Eranol came from a different kind of frustration, watching skilled people burn hours on video editing work that a machine could do just as well, if someone bothered to build it properly. That one took longer to find its shape. I rebuilt the core workflow three times before customers started paying without me having to talk them into it, which is the real signal that something has clicked, not when you can sell it, but when you barely have to.And the podcast started as something close to a hobby, a reason to ask people smarter than me how they'd actually done what they did, instead of the tidy version they tell on stage. Two hundred conversations later, it's become the closest thing I have to a research lab, a running study of what actually separates the people who build something real from the people who talk about building something real.

Why I coach now

Somewhere around conversation one hundred on the podcast, a pattern became impossible to ignore. Founder after founder, regardless of industry, told a version of the same story I'd lived myself. They started before they felt ready, they tested small, and they built proof before they built risk. And almost every one of them said some version of the same regret, that they wished someone had shown them that path earlier, instead of letting them assume the only real path was the reckless one.I know what it's like to sit in a job that pays well and still feel that quiet, persistent pull toward something that's actually yours. I know what it's like to be talented and employed and still feel invisible, like your ambition has nowhere to go except a notes app. I've felt stuck and frustrated in exactly the way you might feel right now, watching another year of "someday" slide by. That's not a theory I read about. I've built three separate businesses out of that exact feeling, without ever handing in my notice to do it.So I started coaching, because I kept meeting brilliant, capable, hard-working people who had everything they needed except a clear, honest process, and a bit of accountability from someone who's actually done it, more than once, under the same constraints they're working under. Eighteen years in tech. Three businesses built from a day job. Two hundred founders interviewed and cross-examined about what actually worked. That's the experience I bring into every coaching conversation.I'm not a coach who read a few books on entrepreneurship and decided to start selling advice. I'm someone who built a fifteen-person company from a spare room, restarted as a student in a new country, climbed back through corporate roles, and then quietly built two more businesses and a media platform in the hours around a day job, because I couldn't not. If you're wired the same way, I probably understand what you're dealing with better than most people you could pay for advice.

The GROW Method

Everything I do with clients runs through a process I call the GROW Method. It's not complicated, and that's deliberate. The problem was never that building a business is complicated. The problem is that most advice skips straight to tactics before anyone's done the honest thinking underneath them. GROW forces that thinking first.

GoalGet brutally clear on what you actually want, and what "enough" looks like for you. Not someone else's version of success, yours. Most people skip this step and spend months chasing a business that, if it worked, wouldn't even get them what they were really after.

RealityAn honest audit of where you actually stand today: your time, your skills, your resources. No fantasy planning. We work with the real number of hours you have, not the number you wish you had.

OptionsWe shortlist and test two or three real directions against actual demand: real conversations, real signals from real people, not opinion, not guesswork, and not whatever sounds impressive at a dinner party.

WorkThe graft that turns a tested idea into your first paying customer. I don't treat this as a separate, later step. The win is the work. This is where most programmes stop coaching and leave you on your own. This is where mine starts paying off.

I built GROW this way because I watched the opposite approach fail people over and over, both in my own history and across two hundred interviews. People skip Goal and end up building something impressive that doesn't actually get them what they wanted. They skip Reality and plan around a version of their week that doesn't exist. They skip Options and marry the first idea they had instead of testing it against a couple of alternatives. And most of all, they treat Work as something that happens after the planning is done, instead of understanding that the planning was only ever there to make the work survivable.When you work with me, we move through Goal and Reality quickly, usually inside the first couple of sessions, because clarity doesn't need to take months. Options is where most of the early weeks go, narrowing down what you could build to what you should build, based on actual signals from actual people rather than how excited you feel about an idea at eleven at night. And Work is where I stay closest to you, because that's the stage where momentum is easiest to lose and easiest to protect, if someone's actually paying attention.

What happens if you don't start

I won't pretend there's some dramatic cliff edge waiting for you if you close this tab and do nothing. There isn't. Your job is still there tomorrow. Nothing collapses. And honestly, that's exactly what makes this so easy to keep putting off.The real cost isn't a single bad moment. It's the slow, quiet accumulation of "I'll start when things settle down," said again every year, for years, until the idea just becomes a thing you used to talk about. You stay comfortable. You stay secure. And you stay a little bit restless, in a way that doesn't go away on its own, because the part of you that wants to build something real doesn't just quietly disappear because you ignored it for another twelve months.I've talked to enough people, on the podcast, in coaching calls, in my own head at various points over eighteen years, to know that regret rarely shows up as one big moment. It shows up as a hundred small ones, each one small enough to excuse, until they've quietly added up to a decade.I've sat across from people in their forties and fifties who tell me, almost in passing, about the version of this they almost started twenty years ago. They're not devastated by it. They've built fine lives regardless. But there's always a particular look when they talk about it, somewhere between wistful and irritated at themselves, and I'd genuinely rather you never have to make that face about this decade.

What it looks like on the other side

Here's what I actually want for you, and what this whole programme is built to produce: three months from now, your job is still there. Your life hasn't been upended. Nothing about your day-to-day stability has been put at risk. But you have a real, paying customer for something you built yourself, proof, in your bank account and not just in your head, that this wasn't just a nine-to-five daydream.Honestly, the identity shift matters more than the money at first. You stop being someone who talks about "maybe one day" at dinner parties, and quietly become someone who's actually building. The income becomes real over time, that part compounds, the way it did for me three separate times, but the moment that actually changes how you see yourself happens the day your first customer pays. That's the day you stop being just an employee with an idea, and start being a builder with evidence.From there, the shape of things is up to you. Some people take what they've built and let it run quietly alongside their job for years, a second income and a second identity that costs them a few evenings a week. Others use that first paying customer as the proof they needed to go further, scaling the thing they built until it can genuinely replace the salary, on their own timeline, once the risk has actually been tested out of the decision. I've watched both paths play out, for other people and for myself, and neither one is the "right" answer. The only wrong answer is never finding out which one you'd have chosen.That's the whole point of the GROW Method, and it's the reason I built this coaching programme the way I did: around a job you keep, a business you test properly, and a version of "starting" that doesn't require you to burn anything down first.

If you're still deciding

I get it if you're not ready to book a call yet. That was true for a lot of the founders I've interviewed too, right up until it wasn't. If you want to see how I actually think before you commit to a conversation, the blog is the honest place to start. It's the same thinking that goes into every coaching call, just written down, for free, with nothing to apply for.But if you already know the feeling I described at the start of this page, the notes app full of half-finished ideas, the job you're not trying to leave but the ambition you can't quite switch off, then you probably don't need more reading. You need a plan, a bit of pressure to actually follow it, and someone who's done this more than once telling you honestly whether what you're sitting on is worth building.

You don't need to quit anything to start.

Apply for a place and we'll get on a call to talk through where you are, what "enough" looks like for you, and whether the GROW Method is the right next step.

Apply for a place Not ready for a call? Read the blog first

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