Why Wales Changed Our Future Business Plans | Week 6

Founder Journey

About this week's journey

Week 6 of the Founder Journey starts three days after Chris and Helen return from Wales, but the bigger story is not what happened in the businesses while they were away. It is what happened in their heads. A few days surrounded by countryside, animals and quiet has made them question a future they had treated as fairly settled. Chris had long imagined eventually moving to Orlando, Florida, but experiencing Wales properly for the first time has opened up a different possibility: finding a way to build more peace, space and time into life much sooner.

Back at work, the week itself has been relatively steady. Their production team kept things running while they were away, which meant Chris and Helen could step out without constant calls from the office. They have also swapped their large diesel van for a new electric one as more work in London made the old vehicle increasingly impractical. Even a £300 mistake ordering vinyl stickers instead of magnetic signage becomes a small business lesson. Chris's response is simply to fix it, reorder and move on rather than waste more energy being annoyed about money that has already been spent.

The tension of running three businesses is still present. Two Krakens has had encouraging podcast studio enquiries, including recommendations from previous users, and Helen wants to keep building awareness of the studio and encourage more business owners to create their own podcasts and content. At the same time, Chris and Helen are revisiting another idea that has been sitting in the background for years. Chris built Thread A Pixel's CRM because the systems available at the time did not fit how the company worked. The team has continually shaped it through small improvements, and they are now reconsidering whether that system could be offered to other branded workwear businesses rather than kept purely as an internal advantage.

A recent interview with Kieran Clark from Kokoro Performance also feeds into the week. Chris and Helen are struck by the similarities between elite athletic performance and entrepreneurship, particularly the idea of marginal gains. Tiny improvements in sleep, habits, recovery and working methods can compound, while small negatives are worth identifying and removing. That lands personally too. Both admit that business has repeatedly taken priority over their own health, and they are starting to see that performance cannot be separated from how they look after themselves.

The lasting question from the week is less about Wales as a destination and more about what the trip represented. Chris and Helen have spoken before about enjoying the journey, but they recognise they have not always built their lives around that principle. Week 6 captures them at the start of a rethink: how much time should each business receive, what opportunities are worth pursuing, how can their health improve, and how can they create more of the calm they found in Wales before some distant idea of retirement?