By 2014 I was on a liquid-only diet.
Not a choice. A necessity. Years of Crohn’s disease, decades of symptoms I’d pushed through, managed, minimised — and eventually the bill came due. Strictures had formed. The inflammation had done its work quietly, patiently, while I’d done mine. Painkillers had kept me functional. Kept me working. Kept me from having to stop and deal with what my body had been trying to tell me for a very long time.
We’d started Key Digital three years earlier. The business was growing. There was always a reason to keep going.
There’s always a reason to keep going.
The surgery was a bowel resection. I spent two days in ICU afterwards. Catherine was there. We both thought — and we’ve talked about this since, in the way you only talk about things once they’re safely in the past — that I might not come home.
I did come home.
And somewhere in the recovery, something shifted. Not a dramatic conversion. Not a moment of clarity on a hospital bed. More of a quiet recalibration. An acknowledgement that I had spent years treating my body as something to be overridden rather than maintained. That I had applied discipline and rigour and long-game thinking to the business and almost none of it to myself.
I started running not long after. Tentatively at first — you don’t bounce back from major abdominal surgery — and then with increasing commitment. And what I found, over months and then years, was that the running didn’t just make me physically stronger. It made me a better operator. Clearer thinking. More patient. Better at absorbing pressure without it accumulating somewhere it would eventually cause damage.
I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought I was just going for a run.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about entrepreneurial health, having learned it the hard way.
The body keeps score. It doesn’t send invoices. It doesn’t schedule meetings to discuss your arrears. It just accumulates the debt quietly, in the background, while you focus on everything else — until the debt becomes a demand and the demand becomes a crisis.
Most founders I’ve known are meticulous about risk in the business. They’d never ignore a structural problem in their finances or their operations for years at a stretch. They’d never take painkillers for a recurring system failure and just keep running the machine.
But they’ll do exactly that to themselves.
Because the business feels urgent and the body doesn’t. Until it does.
You are the asset. The one that can’t be replaced, can’t be insured against, and has no redundancy built in. The business can survive a bad quarter. It can survive losing a client or a key member of staff. There are versions of most business problems that you can recover from.
There is only one version of you.
