Trust Yourself: Building a Business From Scratch When Everything Feels Uncertain - Abigail Fleming's Story

Reflective Rebels Podcast Season 2 Episode 6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKLhiy99YNk

There's a version of this you've probably told yourself. That the doubt will quiet down once the business is established. That the panic will lift once you've been at it a few years. That one day you'll walk into a room and feel like you belong there.

Abigail Fleming is four years into building Ben the Hoose, her interior design business in Kendal. Before that she spent fifteen years as a fashion designer in London, working on collections for some of the biggest names on the high street. Then she had her son, did the maths on nursery fees and twelve-hour days, and realised the old life wasn't going to bend around the new one. So she and her husband moved to Cumbria, she retrained from scratch, and she started again.

This conversation is about what it actually takes to keep going when nothing feels certain. What nobody tells you about career change and the daily panic that comes with building a business from scratch. The networking events where you're starting from zero. The question of whether you're brave or just stubborn, and whether there's even a difference. And the line Abigail lands on at the end, about trusting yourself to be who you are, turns out to be the whole point.

What we talked about

Career change and the moment the old life stops working

Abigail didn't wake up one morning and decide fashion wasn't for her. She loved her job. Fifteen years at the top of London's high street fashion scene, shopping trips to Paris and LA and Seoul, the Amelie dress for Topshop that spawned a hundred copies on the high street. What shifted wasn't the job. It was the maths. When her first company asked her to come back full time after Rafe was born, she worked out that she'd be leaving the house at seven in the morning and not getting home till seven at night. With a newborn. And that one entire wage would go on nursery fees.

Most career change stories get told as a big brave leap. Abigail's is quieter and more practical than that. It's the maths you do at the kitchen table when the sums stop adding up. The brave bit wasn't the leap. The brave bit was letting yourself see it.

Building a business nobody's heard of yet

Four years in, Abigail still goes to networking events in Kendal where nobody recognises her business name. She drops brochures at suppliers she already uses and hopes the logo sticks. She reaches out to building companies with a friendly hello in case they ever need a show home designer. She works with a business coach to figure out where growth might come from. None of this is glamorous. None of it makes a good LinkedIn post. All of it is the actual work of building something from scratch, and most of us never talk about it out loud.

If you're in the stage where you're doing the work and wondering why nothing feels like it's breaking through, Abigail's experience is worth sitting with. There's no breakthrough moment. There's just this week's friendly hellos, and then next week's.

"Panic will come on a daily basis"

The line that stopped me in the conversation is this one. "Panic will come on a daily basis." Said plainly, without drama, by someone four years into a business she loves and is good at. Most of us are taught to read panic as a sign something's gone wrong, or that we're not cut out for this, or that the real business owners don't feel this way. The panic isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's just weather. It's what turns up on the days when you take on a new project or a client asks a question you don't know the answer to or you walk into a room full of strangers.

What matters isn't whether you feel it. It's what you do next. Abigail's answer is that she does the thing anyway. And then she researches the bit she didn't know. And then she turns up tomorrow.

Trusting yourself is a verb, not a feeling

The closing beat of the episode is about dating, technically. Ben asks Abigail what she'd say to the version of herself who was about to go on that first date with her now husband, the one where she was convinced time was running out. Her answer is "just relax, trust yourself to just be who you are and be able to meet the person that loves you for being you." Said about love. Lands on every brave thing she's done since.

Trusting yourself isn't a feeling you arrive at after enough therapy and enough success. It's something you do while the panic is still happening. It's the decision to move forward before the fear has given you permission. It's what Abigail has been doing, quietly, for four years.

Quotable moments

"I don't want to waste my time." Abigail on the first date with her now husband, being clear from the start about what she wanted.

"Panic will come on a daily basis." Four years into running her own business, on what nobody tells you about going it alone.

"I can do anything attitude, until you land that job and you're like, gosh, how am I going to do it?" On the gap between confidence and reality the moment a big project lands.

"Just trust yourself to be who you are and be able to meet the person that loves you for being you." The line Abigail would give her younger self. Said about dating, lands somewhere much bigger.

About Abigail

Abigail Fleming is the founder of Ben the Hoose, an interior design studio based in Kendal working with residential and commercial clients across Cumbria and Lancashire. Her work specialises in colour psychology, designing rooms around the specific colour personality of the people who'll live in them.

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