The diary is fine.
A few meetings. A supplier call. Payroll on Thursday. Nothing on it you can’t handle.
It’s you that isn’t.
Maybe you sit in the car before you go in. Engine off. Keys still in your hand. Already tired, and the day hasn’t started.
If that’s you, this is for you.
It’s what I wish someone had laid out for me during thirteen years of running my father’s business.
Three parts. What the weight is actually made of. Why it’s so hard to act on. And what crossing really means.
Read it in one go, or a part at a time. Either works.
Part one: It isn’t only the workload
You’ve tried the obvious things.
A week away. Earlier nights. Saying no to one more thing.
They help for a few days. Then it’s back.
And you’re not doing more than last year. If anything, you’re better at it. The business runs. People trust you. On paper, you’re coping well.
That’s what makes it so confusing.
If I’m this tired, and the work isn’t hard, I must be doing something wrong.
So you do what capable people do. You try harder. You get more organised. You read another book about energy.
None of it touches the thing.
For years, my working week had no shape at all. Every day was the same day.
Jamie fixes the problem day.
Then, during a run of coaching sessions, I listened back to a recording of myself talking about work. It was a strange experience. The man talking didn’t sound like the man listening.
And from the outside, it was obvious. He was trapped.
It took me years to see it.
The work was only part of the weight.
I said as much to two business advisers once, on a hard day. I know what I’m doing with the job. That’s the easy bit. It’s the family bit. That’s the messy bit.
For me, much of the rest sat in the gap between three things that had stopped lining up: responsibility, authority and family loyalty.
You can be fully responsible for an outcome and still not be the one who decides it. You can run the business day to day and still need a signature that isn’t yours. You can be the person everyone comes to first, and still be the son.
In a family business, some of the most important rules may never be written down. Old family roles carry on at work. Expectations go unspoken. Nobody quite says who decides what. And underneath it all sit history and loyalty.
In my case, some of the rules sounded like this. We don’t pay outsiders. It’s his money. He built it. I never agreed with them. I lived by them anyway.
Some of what I carried was mine. I chose it, and I was good at it.
The heaviness didn’t mean all of it was wrong. It meant the pieces no longer fitted together cleanly.
The work wasn’t what exhausted me. The loyalty was.
I learned that the hard way.
We’d just come through the pandemic. The business had held. Staff paid. Patients seen. Doors open, when plenty of practices hadn’t managed it.
And I was told it was my fault.
Not privately. In a room, in front of other people. By my father.
I felt it where I always feel it. Left side of my chest, in the muscle.
My mind went straight to my heart. I rubbed at it. It got worse. And the worse it got, the more certain I was that something inside me was under attack.
I accepted it.
I took the blame for a business that had survived. Not because I believed it. Because I was afraid.
Afraid of losing him. Afraid of losing the income. Afraid of losing the only working life I’d known.
This is the part I find hardest to say.
I wasn’t powerless. I had real responsibility and real authority over how the practice ran. What I didn’t have was the final say. And I often didn’t name what I needed.
For me, it happened mostly in small surrenders that seemed reasonable at the time.
I let a decision go because it wasn’t worth the row.
I softened what I knew so it would land more gently.
I stopped saying certain things in meetings because I already knew how they would end.
Each one made sense on its own. Together, they were a slow leak.
If any of that sounds familiar, the next question isn’t how do I fix it?
It’s where am I?
I use a simple map I call the Crossing Compass. Five stages. Each one has something you’d notice, a question worth sitting with, and a possible next move.
Carrying. The responsibility is mostly unquestioned. You just do it.
What am I carrying because the role needs it, and what am I carrying because that’s how it’s always been?
Next move: write both lists. Don’t judge them yet.
Coping. It all works, because you keep bridging the gaps. The late message. The quiet fix. Smoothing things over between people before anyone notices.
What only keeps working because I keep covering it?
Next move: spot one gap you bridge every single week.
Conflicted. You can see the mismatch now. Nothing has been said out loud.
Which decision, or which conversation, do I keep rehearsing in my head?
Next move: name it. Even if only to yourself, on paper.
Crossing. Something that was implicit becomes explicit.
What is mine to decide, what needs renegotiating, and what happens next?
Next move: one honest conversation about one of those three.
Creating. The new arrangement is clear enough to live and lead inside. Whether you stayed, changed your role, or left.
What do I need to keep clear, so we don’t drift back into the old way?
Next move: make the new arrangement explicit somewhere it can be referred back to.
If this piece is resonating, you may recognise yourself most strongly in Coping or Conflicted.
That’s an honest place to stand. Nobody needs to rush to Creating. What helps is being straight with yourself about where you are today.
And if you’re in Conflicted, you’ll have noticed something strange.
You can see all of this clearly. You could explain it to a friend.
And you’re still there.
Which brings us to the question nobody asks out loud.
If you can see it, why can’t you just leave?
Part two: Why you can’t just leave
People will tell you to leave.
Friends. Your partner, eventually. The numbers, if you’re honest with them.
And you’ll nod. You might even have a date in your head.
Then Monday comes, and you go in.
Afterwards you feel stupid. A capable adult who can see the problem and still walks back into it.
What is wrong with me?
Possibly nothing.
There’s an idea in economics called the sunk cost fallacy. You keep putting money into something because of what you’ve already spent, not because of what it will return.
In a family business, money may be only one of the costs.
Loyalty. History. Belonging. Relationships that were there long before the business, and will still be there after it. Any one of them can make a rational decision very hard to act on.
For me, most of what I’d sunk was love.
Years of it. Showing up. Covering. Absorbing the pressure so somebody else didn’t have to. Being the steady one.
And underneath all of it, waiting. For words that never quite came.
I knew he valued me. He just never said it out loud. So I kept working as though the next success might be the one he’d finally name.
That kind of investment doesn’t answer to a spreadsheet, however clear the numbers are.
I once described it in a voice note. I’ve invested way more than I could have imagined. Too deep to back out now. I’m all in.
Then an image I’ve never been able to shake.
I’m the passenger, strapped in, while somebody else drives. I press my foot to the floor for the brake.
There’s nothing there. The pedals are on the other side.
For me, part of it started long before the business.
Somewhere early, I learned that approval followed performance. So I became whatever was needed. The reliable one. The one who fixed it before anyone noticed it was broken.
At the time, it felt like survival. Then I walked into the family business carrying the same rule with me, now with a salary attached.
With my dad in the room, I’d shrink. Quieter voice. Smaller body. I became the boy again, waiting to be told he’d been good.
The demands came the same way every time. Fix this. Now. And every time, I did.
I started doubting my own account of things. Had I really done my best? Was I only ever looking out for myself? This, from the person everyone came to first. The reliable one. Especially for him.
The saddest conversation of those years took less than a minute.
I went to my dad and told him the truth. I was crying every day. The business felt like a car crash in slow motion, and it was crushing me. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep carrying it.
I wasn’t speaking to the founder. I was speaking to my dad. A son asking his father to take some of the weight.
He smiled. And he said, keep chipping away at it.
He was still the boss in name. He didn’t take any of it off me. And the dad I needed in that moment was nowhere to be found.
So I kept chipping away.
Your reasons will be your own. But if any of this feels familiar, the decision in front of you may have stopped being only a business decision.
So what can you do with this, before you’ve decided anything?
Get specific. Take one decision that matters, one that’s live right now, and ask four questions.
What am I responsible for here?
What can I actually decide without asking?
Who can overrule me?
How much of the difficulty comes from the decision itself, and how much from it being family?
This is what that looked like for me.
In the summer of 2023, the practice ran out of money. We’d started missing direct debits. Suppliers were waiting on invoices. I reckoned we needed around £100,000 to get through to January.
What was I responsible for? The finances. The cash flow. Finding a way through. That was my job.
What could I decide without asking? Quite a lot. I spoke to the bank and to brokers. I collected quotes. I built the case.
Who could overrule me? My dad. As I put it at the time: I can’t take it on my own without him signing it off, because we’re both directors. The security would be his building. And when I brought him the quotes, he didn’t engage with them.
How much was the decision, and how much was family? The decision itself was hard but clear. Borrow, or keep falling behind. Most of the weight sat around it. The quotes sitting unanswered. My need for an answer. Years of history in every unanswered message.
None of that made the arrangement wrong in itself. He was a director. The building was his.
But my responsibility and the final decision were no longer in the same place. And I’d been carrying the gap between them as though it were mine alone to close.
That gap is what the four questions make visible.
Run them on your own decision. If the answers line up, you’ve ruled out one possible source of the weight. If they don’t, you’ve found something worth looking at.
You can understand every word of this and still be standing at the same door.
Understanding why you stay doesn’t move your feet.
Something else does.
Part three: What crossing actually means
In this position, there can be a moment like this.
You can see that something has to change. You’ve half decided. You may even have said it out loud, once, to someone you trust.
And then you don’t move.
I call it the threshold. Knowing and doing are a single step apart, and that step feels impossible.
Every time you get close, a voice turns you back.
Not yet. Not like this. Think what it would do to him.
It sounds like caution. It sounds like loyalty, even wisdom.
For me, it had felt like safety for years. It also sounded like waiting. Waiting for the next row, the next unfair demand, so that I’d finally have a reason to go. Instead of saying what I already knew.
An adviser put it to me plainly once. The worst place to be is in limbo, not knowing.
Part of what keeps you at the threshold is a picture of what crossing means.
A resignation letter. A row. Walking out and never speaking again.
No wonder you stay put.
Crossing is quieter than that. It means getting explicit about three things.
What is yours to decide.
What needs renegotiating.
And what you choose to do next.
Sometimes the answer to the first is uncomfortable. Sometimes the decision genuinely isn’t yours alone. The asset may be his. His signature may be required. Crossing means seeing that clearly, rather than pretending either way.
What comes after is open. A changed role. Clearer authority. A difficult conversation. A negotiated handover. Or leaving.
A crossing doesn’t automatically mean leaving. It means something can no longer stay implicit.
The first time I felt it, I didn’t leave anything.
It was a meeting with our financial advisers. The numbers were bad. I’d dreaded that call for days.
My father didn’t join it. He sat just out of sight, and listened.
In the past, I’d have done what I always did. Taken it on. My fault. My problem. I’ll fix it.
That day I’d spent time beforehand getting quiet. I listened. I accepted the numbers. And I didn’t pick up the blame.
Afterwards, for the first time I could remember, the weight was shared. He’d heard the reasons for himself. The team stepped in.
Nothing about my job title changed that day. But something that had been implicit for years had been said out loud.
The second took nearly two years.
By January 2025, I could see the pattern clearly. I’d had moments where I loved the work. Leading the team. Getting people to open up in meetings. Being calm when things were hard.
But as I told my coach that month, ultimately, it always comes back to: I don’t have that final say.
I’d been keeping my feet in two worlds. What I wanted, and what my dad wanted. And I’d been coming up with ideas for years, talking them through with her, talking them through with him. Nothing ever changed.
So I did three things.
I wrote my resignation letter. Not to hand in. Just to make it real, even if I never gave it to him.
I proposed a weekly financial report, so the financial picture would no longer sit only with me.
And I got clear on the conversation I needed to have. Two possible agreements. Either we worked on a plan together that could save the business. Or we agreed I would leave, properly, with the right people and systems in place so the practice had its best chance without me.
What was no longer working for me was carrying on without making either path explicit.
That was my crossing. Not the leaving. The moment it stopped being implicit.
I’d love to tell you it went smoothly. It didn’t.
Within weeks it was over, and not in the orderly way I’d planned. I was out of the business, and before long out of the home that went with it.
During those last years, my body had been struggling. A back injury that wouldn’t settle. Headaches most days. Chest pain. Shingles. High blood pressure. A week at the coast where I felt human again, then ill within days of getting back.
I can’t tell you which pressure caused what. I can tell you what I noticed. The anxiety, the anger, and the low days that were more than low days didn’t lift while I was still working for my dad. They only began to lift once I wasn’t.
It took about a year for my body to settle. A year of waking up braced for something that wasn’t coming. Of reaching for responsibilities that were no longer mine.
This is the part that still stops me.
On paper, those were good years. I took the practice from £600,000 to £1.2 million. It could easily have looked like I was thriving.
Some time after I left, my wife said something I’ll never forget.
“I finally got my husband back.”
I hadn’t realised I’d been gone.
Success and fit are different things. You can be very good at a role that is quietly costing you a great deal.
So where do you start?
Not with a plan. Not with a resignation. With one question, and a walk.
Take one walk this week, on your own, without your phone in your hand. And carry this with you:
What in my situation can no longer stay implicit?
It might be who decides. It might be what you’re paid for. It might be what happens when he steps back, or whether you’re staying at all.
When you get home, write it down. Then run it through the four questions from Part two. What am I responsible for here? What can I decide without asking? Who can overrule me? How much of this is the decision, and how much is family?
You don’t need to act on the answers yet. Just get honest with them.
Then look back at the Compass in Part one. Where are you today? Carrying, Coping, Conflicted?
Wherever it is, you’re allowed to be there.
Before you go
Let’s go back to that car park.
Engine off. Keys in your hand. The diary is fine.
You know now where the tiredness may be coming from. Not only the work. The gap between what you’re responsible for, what you can decide, and what you owe the people you love.
And you know that crossing is a decision, not a door slammed behind you.
If you ran the decision test and the answers didn’t line up, that may be the conversation worth having.
Saying it out loud, to someone who has stood where you’re standing, can be easier than saying it alone in the car.
That’s what Signal Fire is for. One hour of focused and discreet conversation with me. We look at where you are, what you’re carrying, and what’s genuinely yours to decide.
If the hour doesn’t earn its place, you get your money back.
And if you’re not ready for that, keep this piece. Come back to it. The Compass will still be here.
Best wishes
Jamie