So, what are you going to do now?

…is the most common question I’ve been asked since I exited Fundipedia last year.

Shortly after the sale in May 2025, I lied to everyone about how I was doing. The nature of the lie depended on who was asking. Regardless, people from my professional ecosystem usually responded with, “You’ll soon be back at it, Simon. You can’t step away for too long.”

My ego desperately wanted them to be right. A couple of friends disagreed...

One friend told me it would take a month for each year I’d spent in a high pressure environment for my cortisol to reset to a normal baseline after leaving a high intensity role.

Another of my wisest friends said, “You’re fucking insane and I’ll slap you if you think about starting anything new without taking at least one, maybe two years off for the sake of your mental and physical health."

My ego won. I ignored their advice, spending September to December 2025 bouncing between meetings in London and on Zoom and Teams, juiced up on caffeine and anxiety with people from my old ecosystem. I told myself it was fine. In hindsight, I was running scared.

I even joked with my wife, Lianne, that I’d never been busier. I can't recall her response. I was still in fight or flight mode.

It all came to a head just before Christmas, over my seventh coffee that morning, during a catch up with somebody we’ll call Kate. She was telling me about her fintech’s client implementations and deep, project level challenges. My monkey brain switched straight back into CEO mode, desperately searching for solutions to client delays, worrying about potential client unhappiness, and trying to walk the tightrope of a fair outcome that made sense for her business and its clients. I was trying to save her business because the silence of my own life was deafening.

My vision started to tunnel, I got a pain in my stomach and the busy background hum and chatter in the large London ExCeL hallway we were sat in started to fade and there it was - the early onset of a panic attack. Brilliant.

I took off to the nearest bathroom, splashed my face with water and had a word with myself in the mirror. "This is not your business. You cannot fix these issues. Let’s get out of here.". I made my excuses and drove home.

My wife was surprised to see me home early but was not at all surprised to hear about the panic attack. One, I have a history of them. Two, she’d seen me operating at full volume for many years, and there was nothing she could say to turn it down. I had to fall over myself again. Always.

Christmas came. Not my favourite time of year, which probably didn’t help. We escaped to the Cotswolds and stayed by a lake for a few days. I turned off my laptop, ignored my phone, and jogged/walked around the beautiful winter scenery.

After a few days there I said to Lianne that I think I need some time off in 2026. She said I know, glad you now do too.

The truth is, I’ve spent twenty years being a CEO and zero years being a person I actually like. I bent my personality to be the CEO so hard and for so long. I used to joke that I was like 50 Cent: I was going to get rich or die trying. It wasn’t really a joke. I would rather have died than walked away from the business because I couldn’t ensure the pain and stress anymore.

I built two eight-figure assets from a garden shed, but in that bathroom mirror at London Excel, I realised my engine was well and truly stuck on and it would take 20 months to undo 20 years of damage to my mental and physical health.

So, I’m doing something totally different in 2026. I’m building an MK Series kit car with my hands, I’m rejoining a band as a drummer, and I’m finally writing the book I wish I’d had when I set up my business in that garden shed.

This blog and the book will document the raw and ugly truth of bootstrapping from the garden shed to the exit. The addictions. The breakdowns. And the tactical systems that kept the business alive while I was falling apart.

I am writing Exit Without Permission for the founder who refuses to choose between a massive exit and a healthy mind. No VCs. No permission. Just the truth.

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