I’ve been meaning to write this since the end of March. It’s now the end of April, and I think the reason it’s taken this long isn’t time. It’s that I wasn’t sure how honest to be.

Because the first few months of this year have been a lot. And the version of it I’d normally share, the wins, the client names, the numbers, that’s the easy version to write.

The harder version includes the doubt, the cost, what it’s actually like trying to build something meaningful while also trying to be a good partner and a good dad and a good friend.

But it also includes how much I love doing this, which I think gets lost sometimes in documenting the journey honestly.

So I want to share it all - the highs, the lows, what I’m learning, what I’m still figuring out as I grow New Season.

My hope is that sharing the unfiltered version encourages someone else to go for it, and to know that behind every polished highlight reel there’s a kitchen table covered in doubt and cold coffee.

I’ve been working with a business coach called Tom Pinchard for the last six months and honestly it’s been completely transformative. I was drawn to Tom because of who he is. He sold his creative agency back in 2018 after working with brands like Red Bull and Unilever. He’s also a dad, an investor, an incredibly warm guy, and a DJ working out of House of KOKO in Camden. He’s someone who’s lived the founder journey, come out the other side, and now coaches from that experience.

I perhaps naively went in expecting to chat business. Clarity on structure. Retainer fees, revenue targets, the mechanics of growing a studio. And we did get to all of that, but in many ways it felt more like therapy than business coaching. And I loved it.

We explored my values, what’s really important to me, what my perfect day looks like five years from now, what I want life to look like for my family, what my self-limiting beliefs are.

I won’t say too much about where that exercise led me, because it’s still forming. But mountains and ocean featured heavily. So did being closer to nature, and so did a version of life that looks quite different from the hustle and bustle of East London.

I’m not good at slowing down. In fact I’m absolutely awful at it. And what Tom identified, quite quickly, was this tension between wanting to sprint, to win new business, to be successful, and actually needing to understand the foundations and motivation underneath all of that. Being clear on how I want to show up, what success looks like, and recognising that with a family and with life, I can’t always run New Season at the pace I want to.

And then there was the self-worth stuff, which I really wasn’t expecting. Tom started asking about people-pleasing, about self-limiting beliefs, about how those things might be showing up in my work. And the honest answer is, they were showing up everywhere. In the over-servicing, in the undercharging, in the difficulty setting boundaries. I’m still working on it, but even just naming those patterns started to change how I show up in the business. Turns out the personal work and the business work are the same work.

The other thing Tom did was slow me down enough to be proud. To actually stop and be grateful for the work I’ve done to date, to look up and recognise that what I’m building is good, it’s meaningful, and that in many ways, it’s already successful. That was probably just as important as everything else.

Off the back of all that coaching came a decision I’d been avoiding.

I had to let someone go. Someone who’d been there pretty much since the start. Committed, reliable, kind, good energy every day. But at this stage of the business, I found I was unable to invest the time and energy needed to allow them to grow, and realised what I needed was someone operating at a much more senior level. It wasn’t fair on them. They deserved someone who could give them proper support, and I needed someone who could take things off my plate and allow me to focus on growing the business. And keeping them on because I felt guilty about the alternative was exactly the kind of pattern Tom had been helping me see.

I didn’t sleep for two nights before I made the call. It was by far the hardest thing I’ve had to do since I started New Season. But I’m glad it was difficult, because I think the day it stops being difficult is the day you’ve become a different kind of business owner than the one I want to be. And I’m stoked they’ve gone on to land a great job, where they’ll absolutely crush it without having to listen to me bang on about another athlete climate comms campaign.

This is the bit I always struggle with.

I have family and friends I haven’t replied to in weeks. Months, honestly. WhatsApp messages sitting there, little grey ticks, from people I love who I’d drop everything for, but can’t seem to find ten minutes to reply to. I tell myself I’ll reply tomorrow, and then tomorrow becomes another evening of pitches and proposals, another early morning and another day where I haven’t opened the app.

And Becs carries a lot of this too. She’s incredibly supportive, she genuinely sees this as something we’re building together, and I’m lucky to have that. But it still has a price sometimes. The evenings I’m on my laptop, the fact that she now knows more about the inner workings of running a communications agency than she ever signed up for. She’s got a demanding job of her own and yet somehow still has the patience to let me talk through whatever’s on my mind at 9pm on a Tuesday. I try not to take that for granted.

We did manage to take a week in Biarritz together at the end of March, a day trip to San Sebastian, the beach, and it reminded me why I’m building all of this in the first place. More of that.

Somewhat ironically, in light of the above paragraph, I’ve started something I probably should have done years ago, which is taking myself away every three months. Just me, somewhere with mountains and not much phone signal. My mates have been giving me grief about calling it a retreat. I’m not even mad about it.

This time it was a little village in Snowdonia. Two days of trail running through the kind of landscape that makes your challenges feel appropriately small. Lungs burning on a climb, cold air, nothing but ridge lines and sky and my own breathing. My mind works best when my body’s moving, and somewhere around hour two I stopped thinking about client deadlines and started thinking about what I’m actually building.

And the downtime in the little bed and breakfast I spent writing poetry. I started a course last year and it’s quietly become one of my favourite creative outlets. Because poetry forces you to care about every single word, and in a world where AI can produce a thousand competent words in thirty seconds, the thing that still feels distinctly human is the ability to choose just a handful that carry real meaning that I still don’t think any computer is capable of replicating. Just yet.

I came back from Snowdonia with more ideas than I’d had in months.

In amongst learning a lot about myself, and about growing a business, it’s been nice to reflect on what our clients have achieved over the first three months of the year:

- 17 Sport were named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the Social Good category. Over the last three months, the total media reach for 17 Sport hit 96.5 million.

- Hugo Inglis won the IOC Climate Action Award, the highest recognition an athlete can receive for climate work.

- High Impact Athletes were awarded the Sports Startup of the Year award at the ISC Summit.

- The HYROX Race for Impact initiative crossed the $3 million mark, with over 18,000 athletes raising money for some of the world’s most impactful charities.

- The Magenta Project published their 2x25 Review — 2,500 respondents, 68 countries, and the finding that 48 percent of women feel they have to change their behaviour to be accepted at yacht clubs.

- The World Sailing and MarineShift360 lifecycle assessment project went live, bringing environmental data into how the sport measures its impact at an Olympic level.

- Across the first three months of the year, clients featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Campaign, City AM, TIME, The Drum, BusinessGreen, Sports Business Journal, CBC Sports, The Athletic, Global Sustainable Sport, Sail-World, Female Athlete Project and many more.

- I’ve been supporting Isabella Bertold, a professional cyclist and one of Canada’s most decorated sailors, to build the profile around something exciting she’s launching. Early days, but it’s already generating media interest and sits in a completely different space from the rest of my work.

Looking back, I’m proud. Tom would be pleased I can say that out loud.

It’s been a great few months. But the backdrop against which all of this is happening isn’t getting any easier. There’s war, there’s a retreat from climate ambition globally, there’s a political mood that makes the work I do feel, some days, like pushing water uphill.

But I still believe there’s enormous upside in the sport-for-good movement. I still believe communication is how you get people to care about things they didn’t know they cared about, and that sport, with its unique reach and trust, is a perfect messenger for that.

I’ve been finalising a piece of original research, a survey of over 500 UK sports fans about sustainability and the sports they love. Some of the findings surprised me, and I’m looking forward to sharing them.

The next few months are going to be big. A few exciting projects, looking to hire a senior role, expanding my offering through creative and production, and a few more retainers that mean I can breathe, just for a moment.

I’m excited. I love my job. Which feels important to say, because sometimes the honest version of the founder story forgets to include the bit where you’re actually having a great time.

The balance between ambition and patience. That’s the real lesson from these three months. Going fast is the easy part. Going at the right speed, with the right people, while staying connected to the people you love and the places that keep you grounded, that’s the actual work.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes these first few months. Hired wrong, priced wrong, said yes to things I should have said no to, said no to things I should have said yes to. But somewhere between the coaching and the B&B in Wales and the sleepless nights, I stopped expecting myself to get everything right and started focusing on learning from it and just getting better. And that shift, honestly, has changed a lot. Not just in the business, but in how I carry myself through it.

Still figuring it out. But I think the figuring out is the bit worth sharing.

If any of this resonated, or if you’re building something and want to compare notes over a coffee, I’d love to hear from you.

James