Every business swears it's different

Back in 2006, I decided to leave my supermarket career path and become a florist at my neighbour's owned kiosk.

I had never touched a bouquet in my life.

The plan was sensible. An experienced employee would train me for a few months until I knew what I was doing.

Two months in, she burned out.

Signed off sick for a full year.

What was left was me, who knew nothing, the owner, and a couple of part-timers.

So I learned everything, fast, under pressure, because there was no other option. I got quicker and sharper than I had any right to be that early. But the lesson that stuck had nothing to do with flowers.

I watched, up close, how fragile a business becomes when it quietly leans on one irreplaceable person. Pull that person out and the whole thing wobbles.
I didn't have a name for it then.

Years later I would find out it has a hundred names, in a hundred industries, and it is the same problem every time.

After the flower shop, I kept walking into different worlds.

An agency first (where I famously got my first online advertising steps in) but then eventually a startup, where everything urgent lived in someone's head and nothing was written down, the whole company balanced on a few people holding too much at once.

Springest, which ran without managers at all, a genuine self-management operating system, and taught me how carefully you have to guard a brand's message while you build it, because one "awesome" off-brand move can quietly undo months of patient work.

Then Sanoma, on the interior magzine and brand vtwonen, which was the most interesting puzzle of all.

I came in on the e-commerce side of a brand that was also a magazine, a TV show, and an editorial machine. Three islands. The offline editors, the online editors, and us, e-commerce. Offline and online were old friends. E-commerce was the outsider, the one that moved too fast and broke things.

Most of my e-commerce teammates were younger, and genuinely frustrated with the slower methods around them. That friction was real. But I found I got a lot further by sitting down with the offline and online editors and just asking questions. What is this brand actually about. What are we protecting. What does it mean when we say it out loud.

Once we understood that together, the messaging got sharper, and everyone found it easier to talk to each other. The online side even caught a bit of the e-commerce bug and got more curious, more data-driven. Offline stayed offline, and that was fine too.

Then came years of running my own ecommerce agency, which is really just a machine for collecting patterns. Dozens of brands. Dozens of founders. Dozens of "our situation is a bit different" conversations.

And now I am embedded inside a fashion brand, close to the operation, watching the same stories play out one more time.

Somewhere across all of that, the differences stopped impressing me.

Nobody announced it. It crept up on me. The longer I did this, the more the walls people hit turned out to be the same walls, just repainted.

The fashion brand is sure its bottleneck is the drop calendar.

The startup swore it was hiring.

The media company was convinced it was audience.

Strip the vocabulary away and it is the same shape underneath.

They are pushing four levers at once, all of them a little, none of them enough, and nobody can tell which one is actually stuck.

Two patterns show up more than any others.

The first is the one the flower shop taught me. A business quietly built on a single irreplaceable person, or tool, or partner, that nobody wants to look at until the day it breaks. The strongest-looking part of the operation is often the most fragile, precisely because everyone leans on it and no one questions it.

The second I saw most clearly in the agency years. Brands turn inward and reach for whatever works right now. They take the course, they try the tactic, they chase the thing that spiked last week.

All of it fine, up to a point. But there is a ceiling to what pure busyness buys you, and the only way past it is the slower, more uncomfortable work of sitting still long enough to answer the real questions.

What do I actually want this brand to be.
How do I want to solve for this market.
Where does my energy really come from.

Most people never pause long enough to ask. The tactics become a way of staying too busy to.

Here is the thing about believing your problem is unique. It feels safe. If it is genuinely one of a kind, then nobody has solved it, so it is completely fair that you have not either. Unique gives you permission to stay stuck.

But almost every wall you are staring at, someone in a completely different industry already walked through. They just called it something else and never left the notes where you would find them.

Finding those notes is basically my job now.

I walk into a business, and because I have seen your wall standing in four other buildings, I can usually spot the lever that is truly jammed faster than the people who live with it every day.

Not because I am smarter than them. Because I am not attached to the story that it is special, so I get to ask the obvious questions out loud.

I use AI and a few good tools to install the fix once we have found it, but the tools are the engine room, not the point. The point is naming the real constraint so the whole team can stop pushing on the other three.

People sometimes ask why I take on the businesses I take on, or why I bother writing any of this down. It is not the sector, and it was never the money.

It is a feeling in the room. I can tell within one conversation whether someone genuinely believes their thing deserves more.

More eyeballs, more users, a real community around it. Not the get-rich-quick, find-the-shortcut type. The founder who is a little obsessed, in the good way.

Those are the rooms I want to be in. And those are the ones I want to bring you into.

So if you are sitting on a problem you are certain is uniquely, painfully yours, I have some slightly annoying good news.

It probably is not.

And that is the best thing you will hear all week, because unique has no playbook and common has plenty.

The trick was never finding a cleverer problem. It is finding someone who has seen yours before, in a different building, wearing a different suit.

That is what I want to do here. Take you into the rooms I get to sit in, and hand you the pattern before you have to learn it the hard way.-

• Raoul