The Bit Nobody Posts About

Originally published on LinkedIn, 23 June 2026.

I haven't written one of these in over a month.

I've wanted to. I've sat down to. I've opened the laptop and closed it again more times than I'd like to admit. The truth is I've been in the weeds. The kind of weeds people don't see. The kind that don't make it onto a grid or a story or a podcast clip because there's nothing pretty about them.

So I'm going to write about them now. Because if I'm honest, I think some of you are in them too, and I'm tired of pretending we're all out here thriving on a Tuesday afternoon.

Our financial year starts in September. Around the same time, I started the process of buying out my business partner. Who was also our accountant. I know. Who in their right mind exits their FD and their partner in the same move. Apparently me!

With that came a new accounting practice. New accounting software. The small matter of rebuilding the financial bones of a business with multiple locations under one company. We keep a clean P&L for every site, because I want to know exactly how each one is performing and because one day, if we choose to sell, that clarity matters. Sensible on paper. In practice, a much bigger job than I'd ever pictured.

So six months passed where I genuinely didn't know where we were. The only metric I had was what was in the bank, and that's not a metric. That's a feeling. And it's a horrible one.

When the figures finally landed, they weren't good.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I think we skip over this part too often.

It felt like it was over. That was my first thought. Not "let me look more carefully", not "let me sleep on it." It was "this is it, I've done it, I've proper fucked it this time."

I cried. Properly. The ugly kind, where you sob and you can't catch your breath properly. I sat with worst case scenarios on a loop. I imagined telling my team. I imagined telling my daughters, my family. I imagined the version of this story where Mooeys becomes one of the statistics I've spent years promising it wouldn't. I imagined the faces of people who were so proud of me. I imagined the faces of those who always thought it was too risky. I imagined what I would end up doing, how I would have to go and get a "proper job."

And then came the bit I haven't really talked about until now. The shame.

Not embarrassment. Shame. Big, heavy, sit-on-your-chest shame. The fraud feeling. How can I lead a business if I can't even keep my own numbers in check. How can I stand up in rooms and talk about scaling and franchising and building properly when this is what's happening behind the curtain. I sat in that pit for way too long. Longer than I should have. I didn't want to talk about it because I didn't want to be a burden, and because saying it out loud felt like it would make it more real which leads to even more shame!

Until a very good friend looked at me and told me she was giving me no more time to sit there. To stop being so hard on myself and get out of the pit. (Thank you, Nicole. Forever grateful for your kindness.)

There aren't many people you can talk to openly about this stuff. When you're the founder, when you're the one everyone else is looking to, the list of people you can fall apart in front of gets really small. Another great friend told me she had absolute faith in me, and that this is completely figureoutable once I stop with the self sabotage. (Thanks Trace, your unwavering faith in me always blows me away.) I'm lucky mine also includes a husband who, when I was mid ugly cry telling him I'd ruined everything and I am so sorry that I have screwed up, said something like "yeah, you may have fucked up, but we will always be okay because we are too stubborn and resilient."

I gave myself another day of this pity party for one. And then I put on my big girl pants and got my act into gear.

I worked through the night. Line by line through the P&L because something wasn't right and I could feel it. Me and my favourite tool, by the way, who I'll happily name. Claude. I've trained it over months for exactly this kind of analysis and the two of us can go back and forth into the data for hours. At one point it actually told me to stop and get some sleep and come back to it tomorrow. I laughed out loud. The AI was tapping out before I was.

Between us, we found £25k of journalling errors. Mis-posted revenue. Missing revenue. Whole lines in the wrong place.

Not a surprise, in fairness. The new practice was still learning my business, still working out how my previous partner had posted things. It was expected, and it was fixed within 24 hours of me sharing my findings.

But here's the bit I want to be honest about. Even once the errors were cleaned up, the real figures still told me a story I needed to hear. The panic wasn't fully wrong. There was a problem underneath the admin problem.

We (me and Claude of course) analysed the whole business. Every service carried out across every salon in the last year. Every hour. Revenue per hour. The red flags hiding inside each salon's P&L. A whole pile of small issues that individually looked like nothing, but together looked like exactly what had been quietly eating away at our profits.

Then I had to do the bit I'd been dreading. I sat my immediate management team down and told them the truth.

This happened on my watch. I'm the founder. It was my job to stay close to the numbers and I didn't. You can only measure the data you have, I know that, but I could have pushed harder for the data I needed. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. (Sister Act. One of the best films, one of the best lines, I will die on that hill.)

I was terrified telling them. I won't pretend otherwise. There's a particular fear in admitting to the people who trust you that you took your eye off the ball and screwed up. But that's exactly how I had shared it with them. I managed to do it without crying, although it was touch and go. But they saw the human in me. The person who really cares about all of it.

What came of it was nothing short of extraordinary. They weren't stressed, they weren't worried. One told me off for beating myself up, another told me that we've got this. That's who they are. They took shared ownership of where we go next. We rewrote how we report, how we update, how we manage. I never want to feel that level of panic again, and the only way I know to make sure I don't is to build a system that makes it impossible to be that blind a second time. I explained that I need to be less in operations and more in CEO mode so this doesn't happen again. They came up with initiatives, ideas and now they have the accurate data, they can run their salons better with the facts. We were all running things with 20% of the information and that has to change, and it will change how we run these salons going forward.

Then came the bigger meeting. Franchise partners. Salon managers. The full room.

I showed them everything that I had uncovered about the services dragging our businesses down, the 30% problem of services we offer that aren't actually making hardly any money and the payroll margin problem we are all facing in this current climate.

It was hard telling salon owners that if we don't get ahead of this, then we won't have any salons. I'd thought about softening it. I didn't.

What happened in that room was one of the most powerful things I've experienced as a founder. Quick, small, decisions made together. Long term decisions made together. Opportunities I'd never have spotted on my own, surfaced by the people who actually do the work.

It's almost always when you're fully in the shit that the growth shows up. It just doesn't feel like growth at the time. It feels like exhaustion and fear and "what if I've ruined this." It feels like grief, almost, for the version of the business you thought you had. And then on the other side of it there's a clearer business, a tighter team, and a founder who knows things she didn't know a month ago.

I will not let this business become a statistic. We will protect it like a bear cub. We will walk ahead of the next ridiculous government decision rather than chasing our tails after it, the way most of us have been doing for years now.

I'm not going to dress that up. I'm exhausted from making massive decisions and from the late nights. I've made more big calls in the last two months than I have in years and my brain and my body know it. My nervous system feels it.

So I'm doing something I don't normally let myself do.

I'm slowing down. Not stopping. Slowing.

I'm stepping back from the big events. I'm muting the parts of social media that scream at me to go at 100 miles an hour or get left behind. I'm taking small steps that move us toward the same place, at a pace that doesn't break me.

There's a brilliant James Sinclair video I watched recently where he makes the point that the decisions you make today, the changes you put in now, you start to see the results of in six months. Not next week. Not next month. Six months.

That landed for me, hard. Because right now I don't need to run. I need to walk in the right direction at whatever pace feels right.

So this isn't about big goals or 10x in 12 weeks or any of the things the algorithm keeps shoving in my face. It's about small steps. Tackling the challenges in the business one at a time. Doing the work properly rather than throwing money or energy at problems in the hope something sticks.

I'm giving myself permission to walk for a while.

And I'm giving you permission too. Especially if you're in your own shit storm. Especially if it's been a heavy month, a heavy quarter, a heavy year. You don't have to sprint your way out of it. The colossal goals are still there. They're not going anywhere. You just have to know when it's time to run and when it's time to walk.

If you're sitting in a pit right now, you're not a fraud. You're a founder having a hard month. Find your Nicole. Find your person mid ugly cry. Find the friend who'll tell you to get up. And then put your big girl pants on and figure this shizzle out.

I'll be walking for the next week. Maybe the next month. We'll see.

The small changes are going to add up. In six months I'll see the benefit, and it'll be a benefit I built on purpose. Not one I scrambled my way into out of fear.

If you're in the weeds too, this is your reminder. The weeds are usually where the next bit of growth is hiding. You don't have to sprint through them. You just have to keep walking.

Lots of love, Amy x