Never Give Up? Six Lessons on Starting Over in Business

Anyone who’s ever founded a business will know just how hard it is to know when it’s the right time to change tack. For some of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs, starting over was the best thing they could have done. 

Gosha Szablowska, Deputy General Director at Leeds-based opera company, Opera North, learned that lesson at an early age. She opened her first company in pyrotechnics at 23, and the experience of running a business in a male-dominated field proved invaluable, laying the groundwork for her to challenge the gender barriers she faced at the start of her career and going on to become the Polish National Opera and Ballet’s first female Technical Director years later.

Speaking at Employment Hero’s women in business leadership event with Yorkshire County Cricket Club at Headingley Cricket Ground in Leeds, she said: “Sometimes do give up, assess, pivot, change, force yourself to change and discover that from forcing yourself to change actually wonders will happen in your life.”

Keep Going or Pivot

Business owners have good reason to weigh up their options. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the official statistics body, the five-year survival rate for UK businesses born in 2019 is 38.4%, the share of VAT- and/or PAYE-registered enterprises from that year that survived into 2024.

When a business moves more slowly than hoped, she said, it is “that Yorkshire grit that comes in really useful”.

Her “I’m glad for doing all of it because you have to learn” line is also usable, but it contains “actually” and “make your own mistakes”. I left it out because both read badly in a quot

Corinna Nicol, founder of business community, Connect Women in Biz, another panelist at the women in business event, found that a career pivot was the move she needed to make. a primary school teacher for more than 12 years, she left teaching in 2017, trained as a baby massage teacher and went on to found The Little Hub, a community group for local parents.

Running a business is not easy, she said, but “I would never go back to working for somebody else”.

When business moved more slowly than hoped, she said, it was “that Yorkshire grit” that kept her going, adding: “It’s necessary to make mistakes, and like we’ve said before, failure is necessary, it’s part of the learning journey. And in my opinion, there is no such thing as failure.”

Fi Morris, a trained physiotherapist, recently retired Lancashire cricketer and co-founder of skincare company, KoSkn, also knows what it’s like to change course a few times. Initially playing senior cricket part-time before turning pro in 2020, she told the Beyond the Boundary audience she lost her first professional contract after three years and decided to move to Manchester, a decision she called “honestly the best thing I’ve ever done in my life”, adding that “a massive change of environment really helped.”

From then on, she spent four seasons at Lancashire, retired at 32 “on [her] own terms” and set about building KoSkn, a sports sunscreen brand due to launch in January 2027, after realising there was “a bit of a gap in the market” for sports skincare.

Building What You Can’t Find, Starting Small

For women, who face considerable barriers in business, that task can be particularly difficult. The Government’s Department for Business and Trade found in its Longitudinal Small Business Survey that around 14% of SME employers were women-led in 2024, down from 15% in 2023, 18% in 2022 and 19% in 2021. The survey covers businesses with one to 249 employees, and women-led means controlled by a single woman or run by a management team with a majority of women.

Corinna’s move from teaching into business also led to Connect Women in Biz, and she described what lay behind it: “I created what I needed, but I also knew that other women needed it. I wasn’t the only one.”

The network began as “a bit of a side hustle”, with “one meetup a month in a lovely bar in Wakefield” and “a handful of women”.

Resilience Beyond One Identity

Trying something new can be less of a worry if you have a second career to fall back on, which is the position Hannah Rainey, who plays cricket for Scotland and Yorkshire and is a qualified vet, describes. “I don’t think anyone wears just one hat,” she said, adding that “having sort of different facets to my personality and what defines me probably makes me more resilient and not less.”

Holding a second career “gives me a bit more freedom to fail I guess because I know that I’ve got a career to fall back on”, though “juggling two careers definitely creates its own pressure in different ways.”

Protecting Your Energy

That said, running a business can still mean founders can feel spread thin, and for many people those reserves are already under strain: Recent research on the impact of self-employment from Bayes Business School at City St George’s, University of London, found that people who moved into self-employment reported, on average, 24% higher stress levels “than those working for an organisation over a six-year period, even after controlling for genetic and rearing effects”.

Jo Salter MBE, the UK’s first female fast-jet pilot, and another speaker at the event, described how she copes with that kind of pressure now: “One of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve got older is to just let the stress go, to really find a release for it because otherwise we can’t hold it in our body.”

Corinna came to the same conclusion after what she called “a very, very difficult few years”. She realised she no longer had the capacity to run her business the way she used to, with a lot of face-to-face, one-to-one work that “took up a lot of my emotional energy”, and had to ask teachers she had trained to run classes to keep it going.

“It was in a way the best thing that happened to me, because it really made me reassess my life and how I was spending my energy,” she said. “It made me realise that my energy is my most precious resource.” She then shifted her focus towards Connect Women in Biz, which she said “fills me with energy”.

Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

A change of environment helped Fi, but Corinna advises taking big changes gradually, telling founders not to throw themselves in at the deep end, and urging them to “ease yourself in and stretch that comfort zone in incremental amounts”.

Plenty of UK workers are choosing not to step at all. In Employment Hero’s Annual Jobs Report in 2025, based on a YouGov survey of 3,635 workers, 55% said they prioritise job security over career ambition, and 51% said they were unlikely to leave their current role.

Jo Salter argued that staying put is not the safe option. Asked what she would tell her 16-year-old self, she said to take things “step by step” and to “learn to be comfortable in discomfort”. “If you are sitting and operating in your comfort zone, know that it’s shrinking and you’re becoming less capable.” She described the nervous feeling in the stomach as a muscle being stretched rather than something holding you back, and said that the hardest thing in life is to “get over ourselves.”

Getting People in Your Corner and Backing Yourself Sooner

Changing course, or embarking on an entirely new one to begin with, is much easier when you have support. Honor Black, knows that more than most. Aged just 19 and fed up with playing in boys’ kit, she started the cricket kit brand Maiden Cricket with her sister in 2024 while still at school. When asked about what gave her the confidence to move forward, she points to the support of her family, who “stood by my side, introduced me to people, helped me get into different rooms, or just give me a pick me up when I was kind of like, ‘I don’t think this is gonna work’.”

Building that kind of circle is also the general ethos of Corinna’s network, which she describes as “a room full of friends that haven’t met yet”.

Asked what they would do if they were starting their journeys from scratch, both women answered that they wouldn’t have hesitated to back themselves sooner. Honor said that if “I’d been a bit more headstrong from the start”, she might have made an impact earlier. Corinna, who coaches women in business to recognise their self-value, said: “This is something that I wish I’d been able to do for myself a lot sooner in my journey.”