Building a Small Practice (On Purpose)

In 2025, I left my corporate finance role. Throughout the year, I’d been working on my creative practice in spare moments—usually 45 minutes each morning before training, then heading to work.

This worked well. I finished and released my first print publication and revived this newsletter. I was also shooting for local brands and helping a friend with his creative studio—sometimes offering advice on operations and business development, but more often simply being a sounding board for the challenges of startup life.

When my corporate role ended, I felt my next decision would be pivotal. Not because it couldn’t be reversed (thank you, Tim Ferriss’ fear setting), but because it would be a real signal of intent.

The world is unstable. The economy is volatile. Uncertainty feels at an all-time high. In the past, I’ve reached for certainty—at the onset of the pandemic, I left a hospitality startup and returned to the safe pastures of accountancy (my evergreen Plan B). Several years later, I’m at an impasse again. Do I continue down the corporate route, or do I try something vastly riskier and have another go?

The fact you’re reading this reveals what I decided. It’s not a decision I take lightly, and I’m doing my utmost to de-risk this second venture into self-employment.

While I have aspirations of growth (we can explore that another time), I’ve been thinking about things differently this time around.

AW Office is small right now—partly because it’s a very young business, but also because I want to understand what kind of work actually sustains creative energy over time, both financially and mentally.

I’ve been giving significant thought to how I want my days to look, what type of work I want to do, and who I want to do it with. As Seth Godin says, “choose your clients, choose your future.”

Looking back over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern in the work I enjoy most:

• clients and collaborators who value critical thought as well as creative

• work that rewards patience, judgment, and execution

My preference for longstanding, meaningful partnerships with a select number of clients makes sense—both commercially and in terms of allowing for my best work.

This means saying no to much of the usual startup fodder: small, transactional jobs that require disproportionate explanation or justification. I intend to focus my energy on people who already understand the value of what I offer, rather than trying to convince the world. The critical few versus the trivial many.

There’s a temptation, especially early on, to hide the fact that you’re still building. But in my experience, the most interesting work happens in that space—when decisions are close to the ground and the feedback loop is short.

AW Office will evolve—that much I can guarantee.

For now, I’m interested in building something durable: a practice that can think clearly, work calmly, and collaborate deeply, without needing to be loud about it.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing about building a small creative practice with purpose—how I’m structuring the work, the trade-offs I’m making, and what I’m learning as it unfolds.

More soon.