At the coalface: standing on the shoulders of giants.
For all of us, it can be lonely at times running our own businesses.
That sentence might surprise people who have never done it. From the outside, running a business looks like freedom; control over your time, your direction, your decisions. And it is those things. But it is also something less frequently discussed: the experience of being, in many important respects, entirely on your own.
Where do you go to chew the fat over a challenge you might be facing? Where do you turn for support, advice, and guidance from someone who genuinely understands what it feels like to carry the weight of a business?
The loneliness nobody talks about #
A Harvard Business Review study found that 50% of CEOs report experiencing loneliness in their role. For solo founders and small business owners without executive teams around them, the rate is considerably higher. Research published by QuickBooks found that more than 75% of small business owners report feeling stressed but are reluctant to discuss their concerns with employees. Tellingly, they are willing to open up to other business owners.
That distinction matters. There are things you can say to a fellow business owner that you simply cannot say to an employee, a supplier, or even a close friend who has never run their own enterprise. The particular combination of responsibility, uncertainty, and isolation that comes with being the one who ultimately makes the decisions; that is something only another business owner truly recognises.
Academic research has gone further, finding that entrepreneurial loneliness is not just an emotional experience but a practical one with measurable business consequences. Lonely business owners are more likely to make risk-averse decisions that limit growth, experience decision paralysis on important matters, and miss the collaborative opportunities that peer relationships naturally generate. Loneliness, it turns out, is not just uncomfortable. It is costly.
What a good peer group provides #
The antidote is not networking in the transactional sense; exchanging business cards at an event with people you will never see again. It is something quieter and more durable: a small group of fellow business owners who meet regularly, who know your situation, and who offer the kind of honest, experience-grounded perspective that no consultant or business book can replicate.
I meet regularly with fellow members of a local business breakfast club. The venue is secondary. The day is secondary. What matters is the consistency of showing up, the trust that builds over months and years of shared conversation, and the quality of the thinking that emerges when people who face similar challenges talk honestly with each other.
What a good peer group provides is not what most people expect. It is rarely dramatic advice or transformative insight in any single meeting. It is something more cumulative: perspective when you are stuck, accountability that doesn’t feel oppressive, validation when you doubt yourself, and the simple but profound reassurance that you are not alone in what you are navigating.
Research consistently confirms this. Just two to three hours of genuine social connection per day has been shown to halve stress levels and significantly improve wellbeing. The key word is genuine: connection with people who understand your context, not the superficial interaction of a large industry event where everyone is simultaneously performing and evaluating.
Newton’s reminder #
When Sir Isaac Newton wrote “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” he was not simply being modest about his own intellect. He was articulating something fundamental about how knowledge and by extension, professional capability, actually develops.
Collective learning. The human capacity to share experience, preserve hard-won insight, and build upon what others have already discovered. Newton himself drew on the work of Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. Every significant advance he made was possible because he did not have to start from scratch.
The same principle applies in business, at a more everyday scale. When a fellow business owner tells you how they navigated a difficult client conversation, restructured their pricing, or found a way through a cashflow challenge you are currently facing — they are giving you something genuinely valuable. Not theory, but lived experience. The shoulders of someone who has been where you are.
Finding your people #
The format matters less than the consistency and the quality of the relationships. Some people find their peer group through a formal breakfast club or business network. Others, like someone I know well, build something smaller and more informal; a handful of fellow professionals who meet occasionally for coffee, with no agenda beyond honest conversation about what is working and what is not.
She is deeply introverted, uncomfortable at large networking events, and spent years avoiding the relationship-building side of business entirely. But she found herself feeling isolated, second-guessing decisions, and losing motivation during difficult periods. Eventually she reached out to five people whose work she respected and who faced similar challenges, and suggested occasional meetings. Four said yes. That small group, meeting a few times a year with occasional messages in between, transformed how she experienced her work.
No grand network. No constant socialising. Just genuine community, sized appropriately, focused on mutual support rather than strategic advantage.
The question worth asking is not whether you need this kind of connection. The research is unambiguous that you do. The question is whether you have found, or built, the right environment for it.
Thank you to all my networking colleagues. The conversations matter more than you might know.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
