Ten Ways Running a Business Prepared Me for Motherhood

Motherhood has a reputation for knocking your life sideways. People talk about the exhaustion, the relentlessness, the way everything changes overnight.

And of course, there have been moments that have tested me over the past 8 months. But if I’m honest, the overwhelming feeling I’ve had since Sasha arrived last July has been something quite different: I’ve loved it.

There have been tired days and chaotic moments, and plenty of things I’ve had to learn on the fly. But I haven’t felt overwhelmed by motherhood in the way I expected to. Instead, I’ve often found myself feeling surprisingly capable.

The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realised how much running my business has prepared me for this. I have basically already birthed a pretty demanding 6-year-old: The Fabled Thread.

If I’m honest, building a business has been one of the most brutal learning curves of my life. There were years of figuring everything out the hard way. Long nights, mistakes, moments of real uncertainty, and plenty of times where I felt completely out of my depth but had to keep going anyway.

Creating something from nothing is not a gentle process. It requires immense stamina, self-belief and resilience in ways that are difficult to explain until you’ve lived through it. Until you have other people's livelihoods on the line due to decisions you are making, you’ll never quite get it.

Business constantly tests you. But when you’re in the middle of it, each challenge feels like a standalone moment you simply have to get through. You deal with the problem, survive it, and carry on. Only later do you realise that those experiences were shaping you.

And when Sasha arrived last July, I realised just how much.

Before I get into this, I want to say something important.

I’m very aware that my experience of motherhood so far has been a fortunate one. Sasha is healthy, happy and thriving, I have had a really good recovery, and I know that many parents face challenges far more difficult than anything I’ve experienced in these first eight months.

This piece isn’t meant to suggest that motherhood is easy (quite the opposite!), or that there’s a formula for navigating it well. And it certainly isn’t meant as a story about “doing it right”.

It’s simply a reflection on something that surprised me - the ways running a business seemed to prepare me for becoming a mother. The resilience, the problem-solving, the requirement to just keep going, the ability to adapt when things don’t go to plan. I feel so grateful now for all the trials and tribulations I have been through with The Fabled Thread – it’s not that I would want to relive them – but they were invaluable.

So with that in mind, here are some of the lessons running a business taught me that have made the adjustment to motherhood feel manageable.

One of the first lessons business teaches you is that control is largely an illusion.

You can plan. You can build strategies. You can design beautiful products and write thoughtful emails. You can do everything possible to encourage someone to visit your website and buy something. But you cannot physically get their bank card, take them to the checkout and force them to order a kit.

You make plans, you execute them as well as you can, and then at some point you accept that the outcome isn’t yours to command.

Motherhood feels remarkably similar.

Before Sasha arrived, I had all sorts of ideas about routines and how our days might unfold. But babies don’t read plans. There is suddenly a third person involved in every decision, and they have their own very strong opinions about how things should go.

Accepting that early has made everything feel lighter. Just as with business, I make a plan, try my best, and accept that things will inevitably unfold in their own way.

Running a business means being surrounded by advice. Everyone has an opinion about something - pricing, marketing, product launches, growth strategies. Often, those opinions completely contradict one another. In the early days, I listened to everything.

Eventually, I realised something important: no one understands my business the way I do. I know my customer. I know what designs resonate with them. I know when something feels right, and when it doesn’t. I know what we can handle.

So eventually, every decision comes back to instinct.

When it comes to having a child, there is endless advice available about how to raise a baby. Books, online forums, social media, friends, strangers - everyone seems to have a strong view about the right way to do things.

But Sasha is her own person, and I know her better than anyone on earth. I know if she seems like herself or not. I know that instinct matters here too. Just as with business, I listen, I learn, and then I trust what feels right for us.

Business moves in seasons. There are periods where everything seems to work. Orders are flowing in, social media posts land well, ideas come easily, and you feel like you’ve found some sort of magic formula.

And then something shifts. Sales slow. A campaign doesn’t land. Your creativity feels like a wasteland. The momentum changes.

Early on, those changes felt incredibly unsettling. In the post-covid years, it was really challenging to believe things would ever go back. But over time, you realise that nothing in business is permanent - not the highs and not the lows.

Babies work in exactly the same way.

You might have a stretch of good sleep and think you’ve cracked it, only for everything to change the following week. Equally, the difficult phases that feel endless at the time often pass surprisingly quickly.

Understanding that nothing lasts forever makes the bad days feel far less intimidating.

Businesses take time. There are ideas that sit for months before they become products. Projects that take years to fully unfold or may actually just have to sit on the back burner for some unknown future moment when they can happen again. Growth happens gradually rather than overnight, but over time, you forget how long you’ve been waiting.

You learn to hold an idea of the future while still showing up for the work in front of you. That patience has been incredibly useful in motherhood.

Weaning has been a perfect example of this. There have been long stretches where Sasha is entirely uninterested in anything I put in front of her. Entire meals have been enthusiastically redistributed across the floor. She just doesn’t want to eat, but I keep trying.

I know children eventually eat, and as long as I just keep trying, it will eventually click.

And beyond Sasha, there are aspects of life from before which I missed in the first 6 months of motherhood – the ability to sit down to eat a meal being one. But suddenly we have found ourselves with whole evenings to cook and eat together again, whilst Sasha has taken to her early bedtime. Patience is key in knowing that there will be time for me again.

Just as in business, sometimes progress doesn’t look obvious at first. Sometimes you simply keep showing up.

In the early days of The Fabled Thread, I did everything.

I could find myself writing an Instagram caption, replying to customer emails, packing orders, organising suppliers, recording a video and rushing to the post office all in the space of an hour.

Time often came in short bursts. So I learnt quickly that fifteen minutes can be surprisingly powerful.

That skill has translated beautifully into motherhood.

Working time now often appears in small fragments - during a nap, or a quiet half hour when she is happily playing. Because I’m used to working like that, those pockets of time feel useful rather than frustrating. Now I have three days each week when she is at nursery, I can cram in so much.

Years of running a small business taught me that meaningful progress can happen in very small windows.

Every business has tasks that aren’t exactly thrilling. VAT returns. Admin. Inbox clearing. Ordering stock. They still have to be done. Over time, I learnt to make those tasks more pleasant – getting myself a lovely pastry treat every VAT day. If the job itself wasn’t exciting, the surrounding experience could still be enjoyable.

That mindset helped enormously when Sasha had quite severe reflux in the early months.

Night feeds meant holding her upright for long stretches afterwards - sometimes an hour or more, to avoid the risk of everything coming back up again and having to start from scratch again. Rather than feeding her in bed, I would get up, move to another room, make a hot drink, and do a little sewing while she rested in her carrier. I saved my favourite audiobooks for the middle of the night. I genuinely started looking forward to it - as odd as that sounds.

It wasn’t easy, but it didn’t have to feel miserable either.

Sometimes the trick is simply finding a way to make the unavoidable parts of life a little gentler.

Business has a way of testing you.

Before The Fabled Thread even launched, the web development company I had hired went bust a week before launch. They had taken my money, and it turned out they hadn’t actually built a functioning website at all. At the time, it felt catastrophic.

But situations like that force you to pause, breathe and decide how you want to respond. You pick yourself up, solve the problem and carry on. I learnt how to build my own website, I worked a week solidly and still launched on time.

Moments like that quietly build resilience. You don’t dwell on what has happened, because you don’t have a choice – you just have to move forward.

They give you the reassuring knowledge that when something goes wrong - and eventually something always does - you will find a way through it. You even start to weirdly value negative experiences because you know that they will strengthen you.

That same resilience has been incredibly helpful in motherhood.

When a day feels chaotic or exhausting, I find myself remembering that I’ve survived much harder moments than this.

In the early years of running the business, I struggled to switch off.

Work followed me everywhere. If something went wrong, it sat in my mind all evening. If an email arrived late at night, I answered it. Your business is always with you, and every moment of the day is potentially up for grabs for work. So finding ways to switch off is hard.

Over time, particularly as the team grew, I learnt to separate things more deliberately. I can control how I interact with the business and when I am not working. The problems (generally!) stay at my desk rather than coming home with me.

That skill has become incredibly useful now Sasha has started nursery.

There is something emotionally strange about leaving your baby somewhere and then heading off to work. But I realised quickly that if I’m choosing to spend those hours working, I need to do that properly.

Spending the time half-working and half-worrying helps no one.

So when I’m working, I work. And when I’m with her, I’m present. Don’t get me wrong, I still check her latest nap time, or menu options, or nappy change on the nursery app every few hours, but I don’t feel any mum guilt about her days at nursery.

It might sound slightly clinical written down, but I think it’s actually a kindness to both of us. Mum guilt doesn’t help anyone!

Running a business teaches you very quickly that perfection is simply not possible.

If you waited until everything was flawless before launching a product, sending an email, or putting something out into the world, nothing would ever happen. At some point, you have to say: this is good enough.

Over time, I’ve learnt that aiming for 80% is often far healthier than chasing 100%. Some things deserve your full attention, but most things simply need to exist. That mindset has carried over into motherhood in ways I didn’t fully expect.

There are so many areas where it would be easy to feel as though you’re falling short. The house isn’t tidy. The fridge occasionally looks like someone has quietly looted it overnight. Laundry appears faster than it disappears.

And then there are the more personal things - the body that hasn’t quite returned to where it was before, the moments where you realise you haven’t properly brushed your hair before midday, the vague sense that somewhere out there other people are doing all of this far more gracefully.

But running a business slowly cured me of the habit of constantly berating myself. When you’re responsible for something as unpredictable as a business, you simply can’t afford to spend all your time criticising yourself for what isn’t perfect. You’d never move forward. Instead, you learn to focus on what matters and let the rest settle where it will.

So if the house is slightly chaotic, that’s fine. If dinner is simple, that’s fine. If my stomach hasn’t miraculously flattened eight months after growing a human being, that’s also fine.

Motherhood, like business, isn’t about getting everything exactly right. It’s about showing up and doing your best with what you have that day.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson business teaches you is capability.

Over the years, I’ve had to learn things I never imagined I would - building the website, intricacies of e-commerce marketing, negotiating with suppliers, solving problems I didn’t even know existed before. Running a business forces you to become resourceful. You have to pick up the phone and be shameless.

And after a while, you start to trust that most things can be figured out. That mindset has been incredibly helpful in motherhood, particularly in the early days when everything feels new.

How do you move from breastfeeding to a bottle? How do you get a baby to sleep?
How do you take a pram down an escalator? How can we go out for lunch?

At first, everything feels intimidating. But the business gave me a quiet confidence that I will work it out.

It’s probably why I felt comfortable leaving the house alone with Sasha within the first week. Or flying solo with her at 5 weeks. Or taking her to Oxford when she was 10 weeks old, so I could teach a workshop.

Not because it was effortless - but because I’d already spent years discovering how capable I am of figuring things out. What's the worst that can happen?

Running a business shapes you in ways you don’t always notice at the time. When you’re in the middle of it, you think you’re simply doing your job - solving problems, getting through the next hurdle, figuring things out as you go. But slowly, almost without realising it, those experiences begin to change you.

Because building something from nothing is not a gentle process.

Running your own business is, in many ways, a daily test of stamina, self-belief and resilience. You are constantly stepping into the unknown. You make decisions without having all the answers. You have other people dependent on you for their futures too. You carry responsibility that is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it themselves.

There have been plenty of moments over the years where I’ve felt afraid, anxious, insecure or completely unsure of what I was doing. But looking back now, I’m grateful for all of them. Every one of those moments was preparing me for something else.

And while I know that many people describe motherhood as the hardest (albeit very rewarding!) thing they’ve ever done, that hasn’t entirely been my experience so far. For me personally, building a business has been the harder journey. Not because motherhood isn’t intense - it absolutely is. It’s emotionally and physically consuming in its own way. But I don’t feel as though it knocked me sideways in the way I once expected.

Instead, I’ve found myself drawing on all the things the business had already taught me - resilience, adaptability, patience, and the confidence that I will figure things out. If anything, running a business has taught me something that motherhood seems to deepen even further: a sense of hope.

Because when you build something from nothing, you are constantly working towards the possibility that things might grow into something meaningful. You can see something that no one else can. And when you raise a child, that same feeling exists in a completely different form - the joy of watching someone slowly become themselves. The intense pride that comes with that.

So while the two experiences are obviously very different, I can see now how closely they’re connected. All those moments that once felt like tests were building me.

And it turns out they were preparing me for the next big adventure of my life: becoming Sasha’s mum.