CASE 04 · SELF-GOVERNANCE
A decade of building and abandoning independent ventures shows that governance is not only something organisations need. It is something every decision-maker needs — especially the one who is the only person in the room.
A decade of building independent ventures shows governance is something every decision-maker needs, especially the only person in the room.
The situation in brief.
Independent ventures
Early, self-funded
A single founder, no board
This case study is not about a client organisation. It concerns a professional with years of experience in European funding and project work who set out to build independent businesses: first a solo funding consultancy, then a photography and video studio, then marketing-agency work. None became the business originally pictured. Across roughly a decade, the experience offered an unusually direct view of what governance means when no organisation yet exists around the decision-maker.
The starting assumption was that building a business would be another professional challenge with a familiar shape: find an opportunity, build the offer, find clients, make it work. What followed was the longest period of experimentation in a working life.
The first venture tried to turn knowledge of public funding into a solo consultancy, and ran into the obvious problem that European projects are inherently collaborative and hard to deliver as a one-person offer. The next moved into photography and video, largely self-taught. A third moved towards marketing-agency work.
At the time each pivot was experienced as a search for the right commercial model. Looking back, strategic decisions were being made about a business before there was a sufficiently clear picture of what the founder actually wanted their working life to be — and that distinction took years to understand.
The instinct was always to treat the difficulty as a missing skill: do not know how to build a website, so learn it; do not understand this platform, so study it. That approach served well professionally, because technical problems have boundaries and competence closes the gap.
Eventually the difficulty was not technical. It was not knowing what to build, and no course teaches that.
The founder is simultaneously the person setting the strategy and the person emotionally invested in proving it right.
There is no board asking whether a venture continues because the evidence supports it or because the founder badly wants it to be true.
Under pressure people return to what has worked before: sell harder, add another service, try another channel. Sometimes right; sometimes effort spent travelling confidently in the wrong direction.
Governance is usually discussed as architecture — responsibilities, decision rights, controls, escalation. All of that is real. But every governance structure eventually meets a human being who has to make a decision, and human beings do not decide in laboratory conditions. They decide while tired, under financial pressure, with sunk costs behind them and reputations to protect. A governance system built for a perfectly rational decision-maker is governing someone who does not exist.
None of the ventures was secretly successful, and failure does not need romanticising to be useful. Money was lost, time was invested, some things simply did not work. But something survived each attempt beyond the venture itself: the European knowledge, the technical capability, the marketing understanding, and the ability to move between a decision-maker’s strategic question and its operational implementation.
Eventually clients started asking for exactly that combination, and the market supplied information about what was valuable that could not be worked out alone.
Governance does not wait for an organisation to exist. Before any of that, there is only the decision-maker: what they are trying to achieve, how much they are prepared to invest, what evidence would actually change their mind, and what would stop them making an important call simply because they are tired, frightened or too attached to the outcome to see it clearly.
Those are not questions of technical competence. They are questions of self-governance, and nobody masters them permanently. What experience gives is not immunity from pressure — it is a better chance of noticing, in the moment, whether a decision is responding to reality or to a reaction to it.
Leadership teams reading this case study often continue exploring related business challenges, industries and executive perspectives.
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