24/08/2026
Thereâs a strange kind of loneliness that can come with running a business.
You can spend your whole day talking to customers, suppliers, employees and other business owners and still feel like thereâs nobody you can really talk to about the business itself.
The difficult customer. The month that wasnât as good as you expected. The member of staff youâre worried about. The big opportunity you desperately want to say yes to but arenât completely sure you should. The fact that everyone assumes things are going brilliantly because, from the outside, they probably are.
If that sounds familiar, youâre in very good company. A YouGov survey for the British Business Bank found that 44% of smaller business owners had felt lonely or isolated while running their business. Among microbusiness owners, that rose to 56%.
It makes sense when you think about it. Ultimately, somebody has to make the call.
When you work for someone else, there is usually another person above, beside or around you to sense-check things with. When you own the business, you can have a brilliant team and still find that the decisions nobody else wants to make eventually land with you.
That matters for more than just how you feel. Research involving SME owner-managers has found a relationship between work pressures, occupational loneliness and burnout, while other research into entrepreneurs has found social support can positively affect wellbeing.
So what can you actually do with that information?
Give yourself somewhere to think out loud.
That might be another business owner who understands the responsibility, a mentor, someone in your professional network or an adviser you trust. Not somebody who will simply tell you everything will be fine, but somebody you can put the messy version of the problem in front of and work through it properly.
It also helps to stop carrying every decision around in your head.
Get the numbers in front of you. Write down the options. Work out what has to be true for each one to work. Separate the problem you genuinely need to solve from the ten problems your brain has attached to it while you were driving home.
Sometimes you donât need somebody to make the decision for you. You just need enough information, perspective and challenge to make the decision feel less lonely.
If running your business has felt a bit lonely recently and you could do with someone to talk things through with, we might be a good fit for you.
We know our way around the accounting side, obviously. But weâre also people you can pick up the phone to, talk through the messy bits with, bounce an idea off or ask, âAm I thinking about this the right way?â
You donât always need another report or another meeting. Sometimes you just need someone who understands business, understands the numbers and is genuinely on your side.
Running a business will probably always involve making difficult calls.
It doesnât mean you have to make every one of them entirely on your own.
