What running a business taught me about markets

June 2026

I spent years at Baillie Gifford modelling how businesses work from the outside. Then I built one, and learned more about markets in two years than the modelling ever taught me. You feel the mechanisms instead of guessing at them.

Money

Funding a small business is a different game entirely from allocating a fund's money. You find out what cost of capital means when it's your own savings and a bank loan on the line. A model never makes you feel that.

Take our SEIS application. We went for advance assurance and put real work in, most of it on one HMRC distinction: leasing assets out is an excluded activity, selling an experience isn't, and we had to prove we were the second kind. A round of queries came back. Somewhere in the middle of it we worked out that equity carried the higher long-term cost, decided we'd rather back ourselves and fund the growth with debt, and moved on. The rejection landed afterwards anyway. By then it barely mattered, which is its own kind of lesson.

The one that stuck harder is dull and total: cash is everything. Profit on paper isn't money in the bank, and a growing business can run out of cash precisely because it's growing. You read a balance sheet very differently once you've come close to that yourself.

Scaling

Going from one site to several is where the economics get fun. Most of your costs don't fall just because a site is small, so sub-scale locations bleed money and operators walk away. I got round that by handing the people running each site real ownership of it and cutting out a layer of middle management. Small sites started to pay. That's operating leverage with the cover off, and you'll spot it in a company's accounts far quicker once you've had to build it by hand.

Automation

AI is the same lesson, faster. I built the systems that run the back office and automated my own job out of existence. A fixed cost base shrinking while output holds is exactly what the market is trying to price into companies right now. I've watched the small version happen from the inside, so I can usually tell which of those claims are real and which are slideware.

The payoff for investing

And all of it loops back into how I read a business. Unit economics, working capital, what management can actually control against what the market just hands them, why a handful of firms scale and most never do. These used to be concepts. Now they're things I've felt in my own bank account. There's nothing like running and growing a company for sharpening how you see stocks and the wider economy.

I've been through the highs and the knock-backs of building, so I know what they cost and what they're worth. I do both now, invest and operate, and each one keeps making me better at the other.

I advise on markets and capital allocation, and on putting AI to work in business. me@yussefrobinson.uk