Why I Started The Honest Economy, And Why It Exists For You

There are things you grow up not knowing you don't know.

I grew up in London, in a household that was getting by. Not struggling in the way people mean when they talk about real hardship — the lights stayed on, food was on the table. But there were no holidays. No luxuries. No breathing room. Money was something that arrived, got allocated to the essentials, and disappeared before the month was out. Nobody sat me down and explained why it was happening. Nobody told me why I couldn’t go on holiday. Nobody told me why I wasn’t allowed to buy certain items.

It was just how things were for me in my childhood years.

What I understand now, with a decade of professional finance experience and knowledge behind me, is that most of it wasn't inevitable. It wasn't bad luck or bad character. It was the absence of financial intelligence. The kind of understanding you need to understand what is happening in the economy, whether it be interest rates or the cost of everyday goods, and have it translated it into decisions that actually make financial sense.

That knowledge existed. It just didn't exist in our house or in the conversations happening around me.

The world is constantly changing now and finding financial information and help is more accessible than ever. Everyone will have some form of guidance whether it be an individual, families or even businesses.

But there’s a real gap that doesn’t exist for smaller businesses. Whether it be local shops in the town or a micro sized business with no more than £500K revenue. They are highly exposed to risks in the economy, geopolitics and policies more the bigger players. I’ve seen plenty small businesses collapse in short amounts of time due to external changes and bad financial management.

This is the reason why this newsletter exists. To be the CFO for the smaller businesses that need them more than the bigger businesses.

I studied mathematics and economics at university. The theories that confused most of my peers felt intuitive to me. Not because I was exceptional, but because I could see how they connected to real life in ways that the textbooks theories always obscure. I found I could explain them in plain English. Strip out the jargon. Surface the practicality. The ability to take something complex and make it land clearly for someone encountering it for the first time turned out to be something I enjoyed doing.

It carried through into my career in Financial Planning and Analysis. FP&A sits at the intersection of numbers and decisions, it's the discipline of using financial and economic data to understand what is likely to happen next and make a safe choice over it. The ability to understand scenarios, forecast what may happen financially and effectively alter the strategy over the short and long term is the finance business partner that I have become.

Over ten years, across businesses of all sizes, I learned to think beyond the operational and the tactical. To look at where a business was heading, not just where it had been. To identify the financial pressure points before they became crises. This was my ability to connect the macroeconomics in global markets, the changes in government policy all the way to the micro reality of a specific company's financial health.

That perspective, I came to realise, is extraordinarily rare outside large organisations. And the businesses that need it most are almost always the ones that have the least access to it.

The moment that made this personal, beyond my own background and beyond my career, was watching someone I love face a situation I recognised immediately.

My wife’s family ran a business. They were excellent operationally and tactically. The work, the clients, the relationships, they were all there. The credentials and expertise they had to keep run the operations was exceptional.

But what they didn’t have was someone helping her see the finances strategically. Not the financial control, not the bookkeeping, not the tax advisory but the strategic finance of stabilising and growing a business. The pricing decisions were leaving money on the table. The cost structure was quietly compressing margins. Then the change in economy and governmental policies took those compressed margins and effectively wiped them out, turning it into a business you were paying personally to keep alive.

There was no strategic plan. There were no risk frameworks. There were no business performance metrics. Without that visibility, decisions get made instinctually rather than intelligently. Eventually the business was sold but not because it had failed, but because the financial health had become too heavy to carry without the right support.

I knew what that support would have looked like. If I had spent years providing it for corporations making multi-million pound decisions, then at the conceptual level, I knew exactly what to do. But for someone running a small business with a lean team and no finance director? There was almost nobody providing it. There still isn't.

I’ve worked across companies of different sizes, from large to small to micro. Certain patterns repeat themselves regularly whenever FP&A thinking is absent.

Pricing that isn't ambitious enough. Businesses that undercharge not because their work isn't worth more, but because they've never thought that a slight increase in revenue can lead to stronger margins. Revenue stays on the table, month after month, without anyone realising it and is always the opening to a healthy financial standing.

Costs that aren't controlled tightly enough. Not through negligence but through a lack of visibility. Every line of the P&L is not always understood by those who run the operations. Supplier costs creep up. Subscriptions accumulate. Overheads expand quietly. The result is a business that looks healthy at the top line but the leakage is heavy around poor cost control leading to constrained margins.

Metrics that aren't fully understood. Every industry always has numbers that matter. These are the numbers that tell you whether your business is actually functioning efficiently, independent of whether revenue is up or down this month. Without understanding them you can't forecast accurately, you can't plan confidently and you certainly can't see a problem coming until it's already arrived.

Combining this together, margins will begin to thin at every line of the P&L. Not necessarily failing but never truly stable. One bad quarter, one late-paying client, one interest rate rise away from a very difficult story.

The tragedy is that none of it is complicated. It just requires someone to explain it properly so financial strategy can be executed effectively.

Small businesses are not a niche. In the UK there are over five million of them. They are an essential fabric of the economy and of local communities. The food stores, the local restaurants, the agencies, the trades businesses, the consultancies and all the product and service providers that keep things functioning at the ground level.

When they thrive, communities thrive. When they fail, the damage is felt locally, personally, and immediately. More time, effort, money and risk is involved with building again after failure.

And yet they are almost entirely underserved when it comes to genuine financial intelligence and guidance. Large businesses have finance directors, FP&A teams, economic advisors, and access to institutional-quality analysis of the economic environment they operate in. Small businesses tend to just have an accountant who does the bookkeeping and tax returns. Not much else.

The gap between those two realities is a market failure. Small businesses can’t afford CFO level salaries and CFOs aren’t prepared to sacrifice time and effort for a relatively lesser pay. The cycle continues to rinse and repeat.

The Honest Economy delivers newsletters of financial intelligence, economic and policy analyses that aims to make immediate differences to how effectively you can run your business.

Sometimes that means breaking down what's happening in the economy and translating it directly into what it means for your costs, your pricing, and your margins. Sometimes it means explaining a piece of business finance that your formal education never covered with things like how to read your P&L properly, how to build a cash flow forecast and how to understand what your margins are actually telling you. Sometimes it can also mean decoding a regulatory or policy change before it catches your business off guard.

Always in plain English. Always connected to the practical reality of running a small business with a lean team and no dedicated finance team behind you.

Always honest about what the data says, about what the risks are, and about what you can actually do about them.

It exists because I grew up in a household where financial intelligence was absent, watching a business from my loved ones struggle without the strategic financial support it deserved, and because I’ve spent ten years accumulating the understanding that could have changed both of those outcomes.

You are running a business. You deserve to understand the financial environment you are operating in.

That is what this is for.

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