Making Difficult Decisions as a Business Owner - What Running 20,450km Taught Me About Hard Choices

Day 2045. I am 20,450 kilometres into a barefoot-style running streak that will not end until I have covered 40,075km a lap of the world on foot and raised £1 million for children's causes including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need. Every single day I run. Every single day I record. And every single day something comes up that is worth talking about honestly.

Today it was something I have been sitting with for a while. Making genuinely difficult decisions as a business owner.

I want to be clear from the start. This is not a motivational post about tough choices building character. This is a real reflection from someone who has had to make decisions that I knew were right for the business but that I found genuinely hard to live with emotionally. If you run a business, manage a team, or are thinking about starting something of your own, this might resonate.

The hardest decision most business owners will ever make is letting someone go.

Not cancelling a software subscription. Not switching suppliers. Not even losing a client. Letting a person go. A person who has a mortgage, a family, a routine built around the job you are about to take from them. That is a decision that carries real weight, and I do not think anyone who has done it properly ever finds it easy.

I have heard people say there are no nice people in business. I used to push back on that hard. I still do, to a degree. You absolutely can be a decent human being and run a successful business. But I think what that phrase is really pointing at is this: there will be moments where doing the right thing for the business and doing the comfortable thing for yourself are not the same decision. And in those moments, you have to make the harder call.

When you are the founder, the MD, the person whose name is on the business, your primary responsibility is to the long-term health of that business. That is not a cold or ruthless position. It is actually the most responsible one, especially if you have a team. Because if you allow the business to suffer by avoiding difficult decisions, you are not protecting one person. You are potentially putting everyone at risk.

I have been in situations where the decision to let someone go was not about discipline. It was not because someone had done something wrong. It was because the finances of the business demanded it. That is perhaps the hardest version of this decision, because the person involved has done nothing to bring it on themselves. They simply find themselves on the wrong side of a business reality that is entirely outside their control.

There is no way to make that easy. You cannot soften the blow enough to remove the consequence for that person. What you can do is make sure the decision is made for the right reasons, communicated with honesty and respect, and handled with as much care as the situation allows. That is the standard I hold myself to, even when I fall short of it.

What running has taught me about this is something I keep coming back to. When I am 10 kilometres into a cold morning run, eyes watering in the wind, thinking about a difficult conversation I need to have or a decision I have been putting off, there is nowhere to hide. You cannot delegate the miles. You cannot outsource the discomfort. You just have to move through it. Business is exactly the same. The decision does not become easier by being delayed. It usually becomes harder.

The discipline of this streak, now 2045 consecutive days, has given me a kind of clarity about what it means to do things consistently even when they are uncomfortable. That is not a metaphor I am forcing onto the experience. It is something I have genuinely observed in myself. Showing up every day when you do not feel like it, when the weather is poor, when life is complicated, trains something in you. It trains the ability to act despite the emotional noise rather than waiting for the noise to stop.

That matters enormously in business. The business owners who make sustainable decisions are not the ones who feel no emotion. They are the ones who feel all of it and still make the call that the situation requires.

I want to say something clearly here. Removing emotion from a decision does not mean not caring about the people involved. It means not allowing how you feel in the moment to override what you know to be true about the longer-term reality. You can care deeply about someone and still recognise that the right decision for the business, and ultimately for the rest of the team, requires you to act in a way that is painful for that individual. Those two things can exist at the same time.

I am still working through some of this myself. I am not writing this from a place of having it all figured out. Day 2045 of this streak, 19,625km still to go, and there is always more to learn. That is honest.

The £1 million fundraising target for children's causes keeps me anchored to why all of this matters. The reason I run every day, the reason I document it, the reason I have conversations like this one out loud rather than just in my own head, is because the more people this reaches, the more we can raise, and the more children's lives we can support. It is a straightforward equation that requires a long-term commitment. That is exactly the same commitment that building a sustainable business demands.

If you are a business owner sitting with a decision you know you need to make but have been avoiding, I am not going to tell you it will feel fine. It probably will not. But I will say this: the decision made for the right reasons, with honesty and care, is always more sustainable than the one made to avoid discomfort.

That is where I am today. Day 2045. Still running. Still building. Still learning.